Avoid ever eating with a woman
who is not your wife.
If forced by circumstances to eat with a woman,
tell your wife about it
every time.
True words of advice.
Following them, even to this day,
has not prevented the worst from happening.
When a woman listens to the seducing spirit,
not to infidelity herself,
but to doubt and accuse her innocent spouse,
finally driving him from her,
not noticing even how her family is destroyed
because she has loaded the blame on him,
can even the Lord break the bondage
of this deception?
What we only see
is not the whole picture.
The Lord's mercy, also,
sometimes looks like destruction,
except to those who,
enmeshed in the accidents that fill time,
know that even there, the Lord is with them,
and that there are no losses except those that free.
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Growing up in the oceanless, midwestern prairie,
when I finally saw the ocean—
Where was it?
It must have been Oregon or California
when I was about twenty-one
and traveled
from my new home in Canada for the first time—
I was awed.
I am in awe of the majesty of the sea.
It draws me into it like the Divine Nature,
being at once the womb of my conception,
the nurturing mother of my life, and yes,
even in the sometime future, my watery grave.
Like water evaporated from it
to fall as rain on the land and rejoin it finally
through creeks, streams, and rivers,
I feel my life to be iconified
in the migrations of the sea’s waves.
When I go to the coast,
I walk out into the ocean barefooted
and offer my veneration
by bowing and touching it,
because all water is holy,
now that the Lord Himself enters the waves
by His life-purifying baptism.
All mythologies ancient and modern,
of west and east,
meet in my memory with the Spirit
who hovered over the waters
from which dry land and life appeared.
I see before me Vishnu reclining
on the primeval many-headed cobra
Shesha floating in the sea of milk
dreaming of the world
and in dreaming preserving it,
no less than Jesus Christ lying asleep
with His head on the cushion
in the boat on the storm-tossed Galilean lake,
while His disciples feared for their lives,
until He awoke and stilled the waves,
waking even our infant mythology
into the dawn of the day of truth.
Yes, and John Klímakos,
ladder-bending John,
showing us its rungs by love’s candlelight
in the night of this world.
Faithful reading too
wakes desire in us to ascend with the Lord,
not just watch Him disappear in the clouds.
Let the angels wake the others from slumber
who gaze heavenwards,
but let us follow those pierced feet
as they disappear upwards into unattainable light.
Unattainable, yes,
but only to those who walk for fear of flight.
John, help us to keep from falling from that ladder,
as we ascend not by our own efforts,
but in His arms strong to carry and to save,
so that we may join you in that world
where the sea is no more,
and where we see no temple, nor sun, nor moon,
for the Lord God and the Lamb,
are our temple
and light.
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