POETRY

The Marrow of Forgiveness

The snow begins to fall soft as grace

I hide from God and my family in a downtown back alley clogged with darkness and mist. Icicles hang like bats off a metal fire escape. The chill of madness bites to the bone.

Staggering, I scrape my hands and face against brick and ice, dancing cheek to cheek with death.

I curl behind liquor store boxes, shroud my body in a blanket. Eyes closed, free-falling into the Abyss.

Nothing has changed for fifteen years. I’ve tried to hack my way through my addiction to sanity with the dull blade of self-will.

I clutch a bottle of whiskey, my sultry mistress, unable to break free, even when the pleasure corrodes to doom.

In and out of treatment centers, white-knuckling a few months sober, always returning to the street and the promise of oblivion.

I cry out to God: I had to flee home, abandon my wife and kids. They’re cursed, shattered fragments of my sins.

God’s silence flays my pride and denial with the sharp knife of desperation. I had been dead all these years, powerless, entombed, rotting in a self-made grave.

God’s silence heals my deformed cry into a Spirit-filled lament and confession. God, I am slaughtering my wife and children on the altar of my addiction.

God’s silence breaks my knees. I want to live not die. I can’t keep kicking against the goads. Blind me to the world, but let me see only you. Raise me from the dead like Lazarus. Fill my hollow chest with a beating heart.

God’s silence transforms into the lingering music after a record has stopped, the endless awe after a miracle, the certainty of time pointing back to the timeless answer: the cry of the God-man hanging on a tree, raised between two thieves, It is finished.

God’s silence gently unwinds my grave cloths. I stagger from the alley. The metro rocks and sways as I flee the alleys, neon lights and drug corners and head home. Before, I had only heard of God, now I know him, experiencing him as the rhythm of my heart, the dance of my soul, the freedom of sanity.

It takes a year for the hardened concrete of anger and mistrust to soften into hope in my wife and children’s eyes.

I convalesce on Bible verses and prayer. My pen pours out Psalms of gratitude. There are times I cry out, how long, oh Lord, how long, before I become a man of integrity?

Christmas day. My children ask me to say a blessing. A second chance. I stammer through words of thankfulness.

I look around the table, take in the turkey and dressing, the cranberry sauce, the squash casserole, the pecan pie, and, most of all, the gleam in my children’s eyes, bright as a Christmas star, shimmering above the manger of my heart.

The wonder of it all: I have a seat at the feast. Outside, the snow begins to fall, silently, soft as grace.