by Kathryn Mulderink
God chose us in him before the world began to be holy and blameless in his sight. -Eph. 1
This iron bench that bears me now, it was not built by me;
And these skybound branches accidentally stippling my place in liquid gold and green
Secretly climbed from this black earth unwitnessed long ago;
And the hill on which we rest was left by some sunbright claw of glacial ice
Whose birth and journey we can only estimate in vaguest continuums,
But I am here beyond a doubt.
These clouds, all cumulo-nimbus from some Italian fresco,
Softening the sharp cry of birds between us,
Formed of resurrected molecules of elements that predate all we know for certain;
And the silent clock of the sun that keeps me sane and tells me when to pray
And when to work,
Suffusing this sphere with intimations of its fire;
And the other stars that sing spattered silver to my outpoured night,
Ringing through each heartbeat of rest or pain, and
The chunk of predictably pulling moon with its borrowed light –
These I do not know, have never touched, though they touch me and
Being familiar, I consider them mine.
I have heard about the wildly racing planets in their elliptical orbits
Out in the suffocating expanse of unreachable dark,
Expanding surely, if imperceptibly, from some hypothesized center,
And the millions of suns beyond, illuminating lifelessness where no eye gathers light;
And all the fire and ice and dust we chart in lightspeed,
And elemental ores formed to meaning by forces unknowable,
Forces which left unidentifiable fingerprints
In the art of their disordered order.
All this is,
Whether I see or not.
But before all this was,
You are.
And You are giving.
You, desiring to give in ways we cannot fathom even now, after the fact,
You willed to look effortlessly upon an endless option
And from among all the infinite possibilities of humanness
Which Your absolute Power could conceive
To be the recipient of Your Goodness, to approach Your Holiness and Truth,
And to reflect a ray of Your love, a glint of Your incomprehensible beauty,
You, before all this was,
You chose me.
Therefore I am.
And therefore I am Yours.
And therefore I am unending.
Because what You create cannot be destroyed, only transformed,
All things becoming one in Your Son finally, no matter how hard we run.