Let’s go to a place infected with truth
And resist with all our hearts
Seeing my face reflected in the glass of the speeding bus, alarmed by the wrinkles and the severe stare. Alarmed to see how my smiling cheeks have now turned sombre, lonely, sad in just a moment. Thoughts zig-zagging their way through my mind mostly concerned with truth. The notion holding the power to manoeuvre a fraction of a second against me and cast a veil of sorrow onto my happy state. Life and death hanging onto a moment. Love and loss hanging onto a moment. Truth and lies, the beliefs of one man, the pain of another. The void and the fullness, the loneliness and the fulfilment. The moment is king in the land of eternity.
I’m frightened and faithless. I ceased to believe in my future. I used to have faith, but faith has parted from me. Instead she has left sadness and fear. I no longer dream or chase hope with unshakable certainty. I have come to understand that the truth may be bloodier, dirtier than initially portrayed. I have found how gruesome the toil for the wishes so sacred can be. Complacency had gnawed at my heart, but now out of fear and fright I have come to accept the sadness that inevitably descends. Tried to embrace that moment, that precise moment when everything changes. When it becomes apparent that everything must and will take new form. That faith can no longer hold together the house of hope, a construction prone to consistent questioning, harsh words of caution. I am desperately trying to find a way out, to save myself from drowning by clutching a piece of floating wood. An old, crumbling, soaked trunk. Without faith, all’s bleak.
I am afraid.
To sacrifice the most precious can lead back into the fruitful kingdom of the heavenly maker? In the hope of making Truth my guide and Faith my companion, I am attempting to rid my soul of its burden. Of its useless weight, in excess, the lifeless and useless hopes and dreams. My soul’s dragging itself like a shadow behind me. Broken almost by the weight it is carrying in vain. I give them up so reluctantly. But I must, with faith escaping and sadness weaving its warm and comforting arms around every fibre of my body; I must try to rid the shackles. If I repent, I might hear an answer from the heavens above. If I offer what is unthinkably difficult to part with, I might get a reward. Like Abraham, with a heavy heart and deadly doubt, I take my one possession toward the place where all sacrifices are made. I question my own sincerity, but I give you up. For forty days and forty nights I breathe never for you. I seek never your wishes. I want nothing that’s yours. Nothing that’s you. This is my lent, purging my soul of you.
I have walked too far for you
I have waited too long for you
I have lied too many times for you
And I have followed your love ‘till there never really was at all
