Fleshment

God came to me as a sign—more than letters—also, the veritable oak,
nailed as a single digit into the ground. I sit in church and what means to me
are rope-swags on white curtains, all the places where the up-lights peer
like eyes into a moving sheerness. And your tone, Pastor, when technology fails,
when the young girl with the same break in her back as you,
can’t produce the right YouTube video. We hold God in our bodies, in our voices.
We walk around taking Him with us: We are Church. We are Container.
Even still, we have not opened the lid in years. I have not given thought to my own
bones, to the worship that rots in the stories of men—as a woman, as a poet,
as a mother, as a Native American—I have failed to reveal myself even to my own
children. What if Jesus had not shown us the holes in his hands? What if forgetting
that He wanted to be one of us distorts our truth unrecognizably? There is grace
hidden in Protestant quietude, but there is also something lost. God came to me
this morning as a prayer. Help me to celebrate and to mourn this undressing
of myself before God. God came to me as a poem, so I wrote Him
all over my insides.