Out Of Egypt
A Song of Grief and Hope for Mary and Joseph The world can be terrible.
It can steal everything: Safety. Livelyhoods. Breath. Hope. Sometimes there is Nothing left to do But flee. To run to A place that seems A fraction better. And try to make a life Stone by stone. Word by word. Day by day. And still the day comes When the child you Held tight against Your chest. The one You saved against All odds. Will hang Bloody and beaten Dying in front Of your tear-washed eyes And you will think You cannot feel a more excruciating pain than this. But you will be wrong. Because in the dark days after His death you fall into an Emptiness that swallows you whole. You wonder if you should Have stayed in Egypt. If you might have Been better off not listening To those damn angels. Even Wishing for a fraction of a second the wish you will never forgive yourself for: That he had never been born. Then he might have been spared This horrific pain. And you Might have been spared this Grief that cuts your heart So deeply you wonder how It keeps on beating. You want to run, Run away from this terrible Story that claimed you And your son. Run from The fathomless sorrow of it. You dream of going back to Egypt. The place where for a moment You were a family: happy and new. But you remember the old stories About people who were safe And enslaved there. And how They were called out into a wide wilderness. And how all the fear and death Led to dancing and new life. You cry out, not in holy prayer,
but in anguish and anger: “My God, My God, What kind of promised land Could there be in a tomb?” And in the distance you can Almost hear the sound of Stone scraping against Earth,
of light slicing open the darkness. And you remember how his tiny warm body felt Full of possibility, as you carried him, Squirming and crying, out of Egypt, Into the very land where graves open and the dead rise.
