Idle Worship

Father, my eighteen years have
not brought me any closer to you. I still search
the corridors for you like clockwork, finding only words
left behind by men long dead; your scriptures
are as hollow to me as a cave
or the giant bones of prehistoric birds.
Humbled and uncertain, I bow before Christ’s picture.
It is beautiful but not real. I do not belong in this church.

Perhaps if I were more devout, if every night
I counted and prayed on the Rosary beads,
then you would reveal yourself. Perhaps if my doubts
were not so great, if my faith were as strong as a kiss...
I wait for you to come, as in a vision, that you might
cast out my uncertainties just as Jesus cast disease out
of the lepers and made them whole again. But this
is not love. This is only greed.

Perhaps there is some fraction of my soul missing
and that is why I cannot find you. Father, have I lost
you forever? Perhaps, I say again and kneel in the pews,
letting my fingers run across the smooth grain,
wishing for your strength and virtue. The boiler’s hissing
momentarily disrupts my secret mass, but you
are still foremost in my mind. Your son’s pained
figure hangs motionless over the altar on an ivory cross.

Forget that I am imperfect. Forget
that man was born of an evil soul. I will feign relief
when the priest pardons my sins. I will swallow
my guilt three times daily like an enema. I will give
praise to things I neither understand nor accept.
Forgive me, Father, for I only pretend to follow.
That is the only way I know how to live,
letting my need outweigh belief.

January 20, 1990
Background art created by Bill Pisarri*

*This poem did not originally have artwork accompanying it, but I wanted something for the background. This particular piece, to me, embodies the opening up of possibilities with the destruction of an old order, as in the creative disorder of a dynamic system depicted in chaos theory. Hence, the cracking of a fragile egg, the expanding of the Universe. My other choice for this poem was an artistic rendering of an infant nailed to a cross; however, I decided that that specific work of art did not suit this subject matter in spite of the reference to a pained figure hanging on a cross. The infant crucifixion illustration had in fact been created to go with another author’s poem, which was about being born into a life of degradation and created quite a stir when it was published in our high school literary magazine. Although I would like to see that drawing used as a background, I did not feel that this was an appropriate place for it.