As If…

As if Love would ever care
What we look like behind the masks?
As if Love would stop loving
If it saw how deep
Our rabbit-warrens go?
As if Love would just evaporate 
After one confession too many?
As if there were a final straw
That would break its beaten back?
As if it would send us away forever
If it was unrequited, unaccepted.
As if it needed an incantation to count. 
As if it could be missed like a train
Forgotten like an unpaid bill
Or stopped in its tracks
By something as huge as rejection,
Or something as small as death?

Perhaps some selfish approximations
Of love may be like that.

But Love with a Capital L?
The dragon-slaying diaper-changing fear-dispersing kind of Love
That checks under the bed for monsters
Endures re-cracked nipples
And trains us to fly
Even if that means
We choose to fly away?

The Love that takes a bullet but never fires any
The Love that gives itself but never takes
The Love that chooses to forget what we could never not remember 
And always protects, always hopes, always perseveres
Even if that means that kind of Love 
Must let itself be crucified?

As if.

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I wrote this for Good Friday a few years ago. Even at that time it was to some extent a protest against against evangelicalism (“as if it needed an incantation to count”… “as if it would send us away forever”), but it was also about parenthood (“checks under the bed for monsters”, “endures re-cracked nipples”).

I’m honestly not sure how I feel about this poem today, as I enter my first Easter as not just an ex-evangelical but in all but the very widest sense, an ex-Christian. I don’t know.

There is no God; and Jesus is his prophet.