Shepherd
Shepherd
Stu McGregor
The soft return in the corner of the angel’s lips
arced to voice the holiest of things
—words soaked in eternal wells of the divine
This angel was to speak sweetness
into humanity’s hubrid violence:
shouting at and shouting to,
and shouting to shout louder
Our noise—our unbearable noise—
a chorus of so much pain, is silent in the heavens—
muted by the vacuum of space
between them and our world
a particle lost in endless expanse.
And on this planet, in our tiny window of time,
we might talk of God with words —
words as small as “Universe”
as if that makes it clearer
a palatable infinity
we feign to comprehend.
You might say there was no angel speaking that night.
And you might be right,
yet when I hear the words of promise,
whispered across that void
landing gently in my ear,
I feel the tectonic plates of humanness move.
It might be a dream or a hallucination,
but to hear the wholly ‘other’,
sends a shiver down my spine
leaving me exposed down to my dry bones
As in this light I am truly seen
and if that light be mediated through language
in the words of a mere messenger,
and if that still shakes the threshold of my being,
may I never bear witness to the fullness of divinity
Instead, here in the presence of seraphim and cherubim,
I glimpse the hem of this garment
filling the temple above me
and on my stumble-hardened knees
I am still compelled to reach out
and touch it
because my soul is hemorrhaging love
and I hear a voice, a gentle voice,
splitting through the crowd like an axe
“Who was that? Who reached out to me?”
Amidst the commotion of all the competing voices around me,
I open my mouth to speak—and find I am mute
not because I can’t say anything worthy,
but because I have nothing worth saying
At the tower of my Babel
there’s one voice that speaks eternally,
Using words unheard since before they formed “let there be light”
words that don’t sound, so much as gaze,
that don’t echo, so much as fill,
That don’t make any sense
but make sense of me.
Some will ask me to abandon these mysteries,
to let them drop to the floor as portends of entropy.
To allow the void to just be and let be
and to accept all words are just noisy breaths.
But I burn to listen to the words that night
this incarnation that sparks love in me,
that gives me something to hold onto—
for love’s sake,
still,
I hear the angel speak.
Stu McGregor
Poet & Minister
Photography by Cole Keister