This poem was inspired by Dorothy L. Sayers’s Letters to a Diminished Church: Passionate Arguments for the Relevance of Christian Doctrine.
No longer dangerous or untamed.
We’ve filed your claws
and trimmed your mane,
domesticating you to a household cat
that purrs and stretches across our lap.
You walk the line,
watching with a splitting headache
as we split the kingdom of heaven
into democrat and republican:
one, a dumb donkey
and the other, an egoistic elephant.
Under special ops
you lingered undetected
by your parents in the Temple
like a Jewish ninja
before your bar mitzvah.
At your coming of age
the elders touted you as sage.
Your social media page
became all the rage.
If you don’t believe me ask Siri.
You defriended our politics of identity
on your Facebook account,
canceling our brand of Woke superstition
as you performed critical theory’s circumcision.
The world spins and spins,
yarn after yarn,
a lie of planetary proportion,
a distortion,
discarding penal substitutionary atonement,
a tree rooted in salvation
by imputing sacrificial payment
into a swirling sea of delinquency.
Now dried up twigs of good deeds
detached from the source that feeds
while we imitate
your exemplary model of atonement.
Your parables are shrouded in paradox:
the first shall be last
and the last shall be first
leaves no room
for lukewarm Goldilocks.
The safe and secure,
the porridge of predictability
is what we really want.
The Sermon on the Mount
equates true happiness to suffering.
Counterculture turns the world on its head
but we’d rather live in the matrix instead.
We trend YouTube conspiracy theories–
a quixotic epistemology for the restless–
and reach for the low hanging fruit
of subjective happiness,
loitering around a garden
of bumper sticker ethics,
pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps,
congratulating each other with victory laps,
oblivious to the déjà vu of Groundhog Day
selected for insecure saps
and power-hungry chaps.
With great irony,
we gain neither happiness
nor eternal security—
when we start with happiness
we relegate salvation to obscurity.
The secret to abundant life—
seek first the kingdom.
But we’ve domesticated your dominion
to mere signs and symbols.
In the quantum realm,
only you know how many martyred saints
dance on the head of a pin
or fill a subatomic thimble.
The eucharist we take symbolic.
The “real presence” of the holy elements
we treat hyperbolic.
Synoptic gospels
(first century writings)
we trade for gnostic gospels
(third century relics);
fertilizer for fiction
not worth a Sunday button
or two farthings.
Miracles like the parting of the Red Sea
demythologized to a moral plea.
We fear the Grand Architect
is dead, or worse,
a diabolic Rasputin—
a moral monster—
with a sinful stomach
susceptible to “leaky gut”
caused by too much gluten.
The Da Vinci Code
we read, enthusiastically,
but the Omega Code—
no story fabricated or cajoled—
collects dust like Elf on the Shelf.
Born to pauper parents
you felt more comfortable
with the homeless and degenerates—
whose dirt we dread
to get under our manicured fingernails,
dregs we avoid with abhorrence,
whose breakfast
is a pack of menthol cigarettes.
The earth became your bed
with rocks for a pillow
and a pillow for bread.
Most miserable,
most whimsical,
most insatiable
of all individuals,
how quickly we forget,
laying down palm branches
to casting stones a week later,
breaking stained glass windows
to our mansions,
crucifying our Creator.
Your revolution is too great a price
and scars, an unnecessary sacrifice.
You don’t really know what you want.
And what you know you really want
we call insane.
So we file your claws and trim your mane,
domesticating you to a household cat
that purrs and stretches across our lap.
You’re no longer dangerous or untamed.
You’re no longer the Lion of Judah
but a black cat
we dread to cross our path.