The shape we give to love in killing it

A poem for Lent, about symbols that don't shock us any more

Not a window in my church; I need to get some pictures of them. This is a very nice photo by Thomas Dewey on Unsplash

The small Episcopalian church where I belong has a nave rich in stained glass — a quirky, not-quite-matching, glowingly reverent collection of windows, most dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. No surprise that several windows have invited me to write poems about them over time, and a few years ago I set out intentionally to “finish the set” so I could print up a little chapbook of stained-glass poems for my fellow churchgoers.

One window was hard to write about. It wasn’t the one I expected.

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STAINED GLASS WINDOW
Cross with Lilies


I want to say that it is like a sword of light
sliding straight and strong from a flowered sheath,

or that it is like some bright angular seed pod
rising from the blossoms that bore it

and ready to sow new life on the earth – but really
it is like nothing except itself: that shape,

even refined in glowing ruby glass,
is its own and no other, a shape of execution.

How have we grown used to it? How do we dare
to sculpt its edges and frame it with lilies,

then glance around for some more stirring picture?
When did Love’s murder turn to a cliché?

Rinsed in the spring-gold radiance 
that surrounds it, do we no longer notice

the blood-bright stain at the center? Forgiveness
is true, beauty and the blossom of new life

are real, and in their midst -- a sword that reaps,
a seed that sows again -– this other thing,

this wound through which the light pours jewel-red,
blood-red, this shape we give to Love in killing it,

a shape grown too familiar to catch our eyes.
We look away, forgiven, moving on.

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[You can listen to an audio version of the poem using the little widget above the photograph.]

I mean, in terms of Christian decoration, how predictable is this image? A stylized cross — this one in red glass — rising from a bed of white lilies against a warm gold background.

I didn’t want to write about it. I was bored by it. It had nothing new to say to me.

Then I thought: The cross bores you? The cross has nothing new to say?

No, that wasn’t it. I started thinking about the difference between the cross as an Event — Jesus’s execution as a criminal dissident by the Roman Empire, one of thousands they executed in first-century Palestine alone — and the cross as a Symbol. Made holy. Made ubiquitous. Made pretty.

Then I had a poem to write.