Chasing God through the underbrush

Unbeliever:

Do you even remember the last time you felt weightless?

The last time you felt your spirit lifted by The Lord?

Wasn’t it back in 2010

When you went chasing God

Through evergreen oaks

And Mediterranean scrub

With your dead brother’s quill in your pocket?

No map, no directions

And all the road signs were in Italian

But you pressed on

A wanderer

Lost

But not quite aimless

Guided

Or maybe driven

By some deeper instinct:

A hunger for altitude

So

You fled the ancient city

The city of Francis’s many births and deaths

And climbed the road that led eastward and upward

From Assisi

You found a carcass on the way to Carceri

You mourned him, your dead little brother

Friar Porcupine

You plucked one of his quills

A memento mori to hold in your pocket

Then you tore your way up the mountainside

All for altitude?

Or were you in fact driven by some deeper need?

A hunger for solitude

Past The Hermitage of the Prisons

Where legends tell of a great Franciscan victory

Back in the 1300s:

A troublesome demon tormented Brother Rufino with cruel visions

The demon appeared as Christ on The Cross

The demon told poor Rufino he was predestined for hell

The demon told striving Rufino that no amount of good could EVER make any difference

Rufino lost his hope

And Francis, that venerable saint

He told Rufino:

“Next time the demon appears, don’t believe his lies. Just tell him ‘open your mouth wide, and I will fill it— for I’m feeling a sense of fecal urgency and your mouth is a suitable pit for this big, ripe, imminent shit.’”

And the demon

In his haste

To avoid suffering a taste

(in his high and wild terror)

He fled straight down into the earth,

Away from the threat of Friar Rufino’s irritable bowel

He fled

Leaving the scar of his passage in the limestone floor beneath the Friar’s feet

But, unbeliever

What were you running from in 2010

When you fled past the site

Where Francis told Rufino:

To tell the Devil to eat shit?

Certainly not altitude

Maybe not solitude either

I think you wanted to see whatever lies hidden behind the veneer of the self

A depth of prayer that cannot make sense of intercession

Not loneliness

But emptiness

A death of sorts

The death of importance

Were you indeed trying to kill your ego?

Or was that a happy accident

When you climbed deeper into Subasio’s lush, green, winter wilderness?

Your

Heartbeat

Pumped

Alive

And

Steady

Not so, for Dead Brother Porcupine

Nor for Dead Brothers Francis and Rufino

And why should you be more alive than they?

But you were

The sun danced through glossy oak leaves

And the light dazzled your soul

And you didn’t feel any more important than the leaves or the carcasses or the creatures

But you were alive

And as of now

You still are

But can you even remember the last time you felt weightless?

When belief came easy?

And inner silence let you hear the wind, as the wordless voice of God

When you could feel the mountain beneath your feet, your rock and your home

Out here in the cosmos?

what a comfort

To simply be

Well, you can be once more

You do not need to travel all the way to Italy

You do not need to travel at all

And you do not need to be anything other than you already are

To go among the creatures and the carcasses

And the saints

And simply be