Issue 14: “Irresistible Blessing”

"Poetry is a nightingale that sits in the darkness and sings"
-Percy Bysshe Shelley

Our mission at the Matthew 25 Initiative is to equip and sustain Anglicans serving alongside the vulnerable. The work of justice and mercy is often difficult work. Holding beauty and naming pain and hope is what M25i does well. Walter Brueggeman writes, "A poem utters the unutterable and thinks the unthinkable." Join us in this new series, "For the Soul."

We live in the mystery of witnessing and holding intense suffering in the darkest places of the world, while also believing that the story of God soaks it all with "persistent hope" and "fierce love." We get to be a part of that, in our own lives while at the same time we live the gospel tangibly and visibly for the vulnerable, marginalized, and under-resourced. 

Irresistible Blessing
by Jan Richardson

This blessing
has been walking
for a long time, traveling with no map, no signpost, no guide.
It has been aching
with a heart unbelievably broken and unimaginably lost and immeasurably tired.
This blessing
does not have it all together. This blessing
sometimes wakes up anxious and afraid.
This blessing
had to be quiet,
had to let itself sit
in stillness and sorrow,
had to let itself stop and rest to allow for joy
to become imaginable
again
and grace
to become believable
again
and the presence of love
to become inescapable again


This blessing knows
you carry your own sorrow, your own grief.
It knows the weariness
that visits you,
the questions
that attend your road.
It knows, too,
how you keep turning yourself toward mystery,
how you keep turning yourself toward hope,
how you keep turning yourself toward this world
with the beautiful stubbornness by which a way
is made.
And so this blessing is glad to finally cross your path.
This blessing
has been waiting for you.
This blessing
has been watching for you.
This blessing
has been wanting
to see your face,
to speak your name, to offer thanks.
This blessing
meets you
with glad welcome. This blessing
meets you
with persistent hope. This blessing
meets you
with fierce love
that is ancient
and present.

This blessing
comes to you
with heart impossibly open and irresistibly drawn
and infinitely grateful
for the blessing
that you bear,
for the blessing
that you are.

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.

2 Corinthians 12:9