Meditations in Fast Times: 33. I was all things to all people

Note to Readers: “Meditations in Fast Times” is a devotional writing experiment for the Season of Lent. Each day during the season, I am writing a poem as a meditation on, taking as my inspiration and intertextual basis, T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”, as well as incorporating the daily office, current events, and other readings—some the same as those Eliot used while composing his seminal work and others.

                33.

I was all things to all people,
and the results are worthless.

The wisdom age and experience
reputedly should reveal
are merely self-deceptions,
vain peerings into the darkness
with eyes that are blind,
or rather, eyes never intended for seeing.

This generation preached itself,
offering empty ideas
and false prophets,
selling belief in things,
rather than teaching respect toward bodies;
our reward is a path to the mire.

However badly things have turned out,
we are not forsaken, now or ever,
in the sight of Divine Life
—an agreement can yet be struck;
by way of a humble confession,
a forsaking of guile and craft
for truth and honesty.

This is the way to freedom:
as badly as we have failed,
as poorly as we have behaved,
as ugly as we have made ourselves,
we are yet unfinished works,
and every bit of us
—every cell, every thought—
contains all the beauty of Life Itself,
if we would embrace that notion
as a truth and an inevitability.

© 2014 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen