A PRAYER:  FOR EMILY ARNDT

Forgive us when we grieve, and not rejoice;
Forgive us when we doubt and cannot praise;
Sometimes it's hard to understand your ways
And harder when we do not hear your voice.

Those who believe it say you sent your son
To speak a language we could understand,
To touch the people with a living hand,
And with his human suffering make us one.

His was a human death: Pilate's decree;
Mob violence; working of the Roman law;
Soldiers that followed orders; some that saw,
And mocked, a pretense of divinity.

This death is different: human care and skill
Did all it could to comfort and assuage
The pain it could not cure, and ease the passage
Of a brave spirit no disease could kill.

We--thinking of her suffering--might well see
A thing untimely, cruel, wanton, purely
Evil itself, at best a proof that surely
There can exist no living deity.

Nature, indifferent to our reproof,
Keeps silent witness to our miseries;
Blind atoms gather into congeries
And then disperse, indifferent and aloof.

But we protest, and call this useless pain,
And grieve because whatever lives must perish,
And thus forget that too much that we cherish
Comes from a source that claims it back again.

Therefore it's certain that we could do worse
Than give thanks for the one we came to know--
It seemed too briefly--make a gracious show
Of gratitude to our starry universe

That brings not only bodies into being
Assembled out of particles far-flung
From dying stars, by processes unsung
By psalmists, and by no providence all-seeing

But full of power to make a sentient creature
That knows the world in which it comes to be,
Bears witness to its own mortality,
Transcending thus the claims of its own nature.

That spirit, like a mist upon a lake,
Will seem to vanish with the rising sun,
Gone with the stars that fade into the dawn,
As with our dreams when we are full awake,

Yet it endures, not as a memory,
But as a presence, known, intense, more real
Than the transient flesh that made it possible
And in its dying set the spirit free.

But now perhaps these words presume too much;
Silence may be the greatest eloquence,
Waiting communion past what we can sense,
As in a dark room we know a voice, a touch.