Just Another Manic Ash Wednesday

I could use some mercy today. 

I want to believe in the kind of love

Your people have been promising me

My whole life is real:

A love that looks past all the things

I hate about myself and all the ways

I fail to change into something better.

A love that pulls me close and holds me tight

While I weep and weep and weep.

My list of what counted as a transgression

Used to be simple:

Anything that failed to show love to God

Or those created in that same image. 

But the world is cracked and broken

And your people are bitter and fighting

About the gays and the guns and sex 

And violence and socio-economics. 

The stones are flying so fast 

I have no idea who threw the first one, 

But almost everyone seems to think

Themselves righteous enough to throw another. 

That old-time religion wants me washed in the blood.

To turn away from the sins of drinkin' and dancin'

And to make sure that it's only women I'm romancin'. 

To be washed in the red and to vote that way, too. 

To save all the babies and then abandon them 

To the horrors of corporate darwinism and unceasing war.

To turn my faith into a simple list of dos and don'ts

And refuse to accept the world's salvation 

Until it's been homogenized into something more palatable.

The new progressive anthem is to baptize it all

Until the faith that claimed the power to move mountains

Is just a personal social program.

One of the options amongst a million others,

Just as valid as astrology or vague new age mysticism,

While the true act of worship is casting a ballot

Against the bigots and gun-toting fascists

Offering grace that's a dime a dozen, carrying 

Band-aids to bind up wounds that need a tourniquet.  

But I believe iniquity is real; 

How could I not, when it's all I see in myself?

And I'm scrubbing as hard as I can 'til my hands are raw

But the cleaner I'm using isn't up to the job. 

My sins remain. 

My sins might be all that I am. 

Is it innate in our human nature?

An inescapable brute fact of our existence?

Or is there something inside me that causes resistance

And keeps me wallowing in the way that I am?

Do I stay broken because I'm scared to be clean and whole?

If you desire truth in my inner most being, 

Know that the truth is I feel so lost

I might never find my way back from the places I wander.

I feel like there's a precipice around every corner, 

And I'm destined to jump with no idea where I'll land. 

I want you to guide my footsteps as I look for a path,

But I worry I've forgotten how to listen for your voice.

I want to be washed whiter than snow,

But I'm worried my soul is stained a hopeless muddy brown.

Because I do not hope to turn again

Because I do not hope

Because I do not hope to turn

I recoil from the idea of being made whole and clean.

I convince myself that my scars are the real me

And that to be healed would be a betrayal of my very self. 

I repent of my selfish indulgent laziness. 

I repent of giving up and giving in to every temptation.

I repent of being someone who has to be right

And refuses to ever be wrong.

I worry that I might repent so many things

And be saved so thoroughly from the me that refuses to die

That I cease to exist.