Sometimes…Always

(Note: A return, yet from another perspective, to the central theme of my previous post, Sometimes…, January 11, 2018)

Whene’er I gaze forlornly on what I sometimes behold as (sometimes believe is) a god-forsaken world –

where (among manifold, historically, demonstrably repeatable woes, these few, a spare two…)
• elected leaders of bankrupted governmental economies freely trade in the currencies of duplicity and mendacity for personal purposes unprincipled, thus employing their might less (at times, not at all!) to serve the common good and more (alway?) to command;
• tyrants’ machinations and munitions make new generations of refugees who, in the cruel face of fear’s paradox, flee from their homes for their lives to foreign lands, there forced to inhabit squalid encampments of disease and death –

and when
• my faith is faint, and
• my hope, a harbinger of nothing, and
• my sense of love’s presence, still an ideal and
• the words of prayer echo in an all-encircling chamber of silence; the only sound, my mind’s turn of the Scripture pages to devour the stories, hungering to remember tales when God acted for good –

sometimes I ask, I cry out: How far away is God (and, truly, if far away, then, I fear, is God!)?

Then, in reply, sometimes I hear mine own voice, saying, “As distant as my doubt. As concealed by the dark cloud of the nightmare of my despair (God, are You there? Anywhere?)!”

Then, blessedly, sometimes I hear the vox Deus: “Yea, though far you are from Me, I always am near you.

I breathe through the wind that breezes through the trees and
roll in ev’ry river’s run, ev’ry tide’s ebb and flow and
fall in every intricate flake of this day’s improbable South Carolina snow and
chant in the South Carolina wren’s trill…

and nearer still I abide with you always:
in the blood coursing through your veins, alike and of the same as all your kin, humankind,
in the face you behold in your sisters and brothers, family, friend, stranger, and in the mirror,
in your thoughts,
in your dreams,
in your yearning to pray…

So, stay
your fears,
for always I am near…
always here.”