Crazy Stable

When the Anchoress asks, "Why do you stay Catholic," depressing Pew studies be damned...you attempt to formulate an answer.

Detail, unidentified painting, St. Peter's, the VaticanAnd when you can't manage anything coherent, you make a poem.

Why do I stay Catholic?

Well, why do I stay in my body?

It is simply who I am, for all its scars, fat, and iniquities,

and is the only one I’ve ever known.

Apart from it, I would be—

Incorporeal.

My cross would have no corpus—

More tasteful, perhaps, but so empty and alone.

So I want to stay in the body.  

I want to smell my God, touch Him,

Eat and drink Him,

Feast my eyes on His face and

my ears on his voice

in all the faces and voices of the earth.

I want a body that lives in time,

in its thick inexorable stream.

I want to feel its flow, those twenty centuries,

straight back through Rome to the Jordan,

time-lapse to the beautiful young man

who stood up, drenched, before his cousin John.

I want a body bathed in that stream,

polluted since, diverted since,

no stranger to drought and flood.

But never run completely dry,

never cut off completely from the source—

Unbroken stream of souls,

Drowner of devils, font of life,

that carries down the DNA of God.

Hands, Shroud of Turin