A broken tulip

All that I am, Lord,

I place into Your hands.

All that I do, Lord,

I place into Your hands.

Everything I work for

I place into Your hands.

Everything I hope for

I place into Your hands.

(Prayer of Oswald)

 

Father, Nzambe, Dieu, Mungu, my God…

I am here. I am come.

“Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God.” I say Believe in ASL and I point to my forehead and clasp my hands together, combining “thoughts” and “marriage”. Through faith, my thoughts marry yours in truth, and I believe: I am the child of the Word-breathing God. Your breath structured worlds, hung burning globes of gas, twisted a giraffe’s DNA. In the beginning You spoke, and you have never stopped speaking.

Your Word clothed himself in flesh, lived with us, was nailed to a tree for us. Your Word brought us truth; the embodied Word has set us free. Nzambe na ngai, You speak, and worlds exist. You speak, and souls are healed.

Your words are like fire, but I confess that I have often spurned them. I am one with a race of people who try to frame our own worlds, to be the Creator Himself. We scratch in dust, trace ashes, bleed ink into dead trees, cut into stone, and turn our words into a demand to control our own lives, into a demand that You abide by our breathy rhetoric.

Oh, Father, how we abuse our words. We send them across boundaries and they hijack sensibilities, causing indignation and prejudice to harden into ‘holy war’. Words justify our slaughter of masses; words are terrorists we send into the territory of friends’ hearts.

Kyrie Eleison.

These are the sins of my people. These are the sins of my heart.

Nzambe na biso, yokela biso mawa.

Father, I come to you as a self-victimizing girl with a heart full of bitterness and a tongue that is too quick to lay blame, too quick to lay hold of the sword of sarcasm, too quick to bring death and dig graves.

I come to you, asking for a new name. I have surrendered my words to lies and they have made this prison of a reality for my soul. Come with new words, Mungu wangu, and name me again. Make me again. Speak light into my heart.

I come to you, as your daughter. I bring you all my words. They will not speak life till you speak through them: they will not bring hope till I speak through you. With St. Patrick, I beg that Christ might be in the ear of all who hear me that Christ might be in the mouths of all who speak of me, and I add, may Christ be in the eyes of all who read me.

Christ, living Word, live in my heart. Christ, the Word through whom things come into existence, Christ the Word who holds all things together, I would exist in You and be held together by You. I am in you, and I celebrate that I am, as Harold Best says, “one with the unimagined Imaginer and the uncreated Creator, who was just as comfortable in the first glorious creational flash as he is in the ever-changing, never-repeated strange variations that we foolishly call repetitions.”

Christ, the Word, goes to the cross for the world. I bring all that I am, all I have to offer, and through Him, I pour it out on Him. It is my perfume, Father. You alone know what it truly is.

May my words be a portion of the reward of the suffering of Christ, this is my prayer. Breathe through me, Breath of God, and I will write as worship. Breathe through me, Breath of God, and I will write as obedience. Breathe through me, Breath of God, and I will fear no thing and hide from no truth.

Turn your face on me, O my God, to shine down on me. Turn my face to Him, O Spirit, and make me radiant, never ashamed again. In this new world of Word-breathed Light, bathe my soul in newness.

This is all my prayer. When all is done, may I realize I have done nothing more than what was required of me as a servant.

Amen.