It’s Good Friday, almost midnight

            The women have left the hanging hill

                        Broken, with his body,

A lifetime, more than a death

                        away from healing tears

            (A long, terrible death, but it’s over now)

            This is worse~ his absence

                        The light of the world has gone out now;

Life itself, in this great love

            Gone from them.

Oh, how much each loved him! Mary his mother,

            Martha and Mary of Magdala

I’ve never…

            A love such as that

Costing not less than everything

I remember it now

            Love for the Beloved who is gone

            Into the darkness

                        Into the Father

Into the All

            Where?  Does it matter?

I believe in the Resurrection

            I believe in the reappearance, the Return,

                        I believe, I believe, I

Want to believe…

Of course it was more than that, but

            Mary loved and feared the way

His face would draw in, and close

            And the light cloud in his great eyes

Shadow across the sunlit pool of Bethesda

            The sun of his searching-out, soul-drawing eyes

It was pain, sometimes anger,

        Over the priests and the money-changers and the treatment

                        Of widows, of slaves, and the desolate of the earth.

Then he would smile again, and

                        The whole world would turn.

            Mary beheld the still centre

Unbreathing, she saw the glory of the One

What was it like, to be enclosed in those arms?

   ~ I forget …

Held in those eyes?

   ~I remember!

Do you?  Remember it too?

            You will know it again, and finally

Dry your age-long tears,

            Let the untold joy of his reappearance

                        Fill your heart

His Love will transform us

            The One love will be your love,

Our Love will be One

Soon He will stand before us

            Radiant as the Sun.

He is returning,

            Now

                        To all of humanity

To his own.