A Voice in the Desert

I.  The Valley of Dry Bones

Man, seperate from God, is an immoral, lifeless blend of cells and impulses, 
constantly enslaved to his own will, 
rejecting the hand that made him.

Who among men, 
shown this valley, 
this life without God, 
could walk away and not be changed? 

Who among men, 
having been made aware of the Risen One, 
would continue in old days and ways? 
One God animates bone and sinew and soul, 
nothing can be taken for granted, 
His way, is the way of life, 
old life becomes new, 
no longer bones, scattered and lying on the valley floor.

II. Places of Bone and Ash

How do we explain these places of bone and ash? 
These places with high brick chimneys, 
whose smoke never stopped billowing into the sky, 
along with these piles of shoes and discarded suitcases there are ovens filled with piles of bones and ash. 

How do we remember these places of bone and ash?
Where men with piercing blue eyes and perfectly polished boots stared into gaunt and starving faces and in seconds granted them life or death? 
Also the ones with their heads shaved and their arms marked, reduced to the status of property, 
and still the chimneys never stopped.

Where is my mother? 
Where is my father? 

(they all, eventually, looked to the chimneys, they are in those places of bone and ash.) 

How do we live with the legacy of these places of bone and ash?
Those wooden barracks with shelf like beds, holding skeleton faces, 
starving flesh and wasted eyes.

(whole generations destroyed and wasted into smoke, bone and ash...) 

How do we reconcile those who saw the smoke and breathed their last breath, inhaling poison, with the culture of a modern nation?
Whose people created art and music and whose children laughed and played and grew to see another day,
and whose fathers and brothers stoked the fires that sent some burning to the sky, 
obliterated.

There is so much left behind.
There are some men's pictures in scrapbooks, 
some in the clawed out scratches on walls inside gas chambers.

(memories of those who survived...and some in piles of bone and ash...) 

How can justice be brought to mass graves and these brick remains of chimneys that still rise to the ait like skeleton fingers, 
places where vultures perch, 
those watchers of death, 
cold eyes, 
impeccable dress of black feathers, wrinkled and grotesque heads. 

What remains of those chimneys reach up to the cold sky, 
silent and stagnant, 
visible and permanent, 
watchers over these places of bone and ash, 
remebered always, 
amid that constant, audible whisper, carried by the wind, saying..."Never Again." 

III. Lessons from the Dry Season 

What you fail to understand is that I have already walked through the desert that you are only beginning to tread upon. 
You, not even walking, more like crawling.
Me? I have already come out on the other side, but what do I know? 
I have seen and known the wonderful and the barren but why would you want to know that? 
Especailly since you know all already.

I have known the emptiness of wanting and not recieving.
I have heard the finality behind the divine, NO!
I have known the quiet loneliness of unanswered prayers!
I have given up the assumption of pleasures once valued.
I have been lost in the battles of "should be's" and the dilemma of ease for everyone but me. 
I have asked what strange and elusive silence this is and what pretense has God sent me? 
What is this lesson I an being forced to learn? 

So why do you pretend? 
Why all these whispered secrets, that we all know anyway? 
Pretending things are one way and then saying something else depending on who is around? 
This deception is unnecessary!

Excercise discretion! 
There are some things that others need not know, 
in this desert, you learn that lesson fast.
Have you known the answer, NO?
Have you known the absence of blessing? 
or, 
is this time all you have ever known of the barren desert and the sting of want? 
All this mixed in with everyone's comments, 
you have to learn to walk by changing where you look! 
There is a solution here, 
the only way is to choose what you think, 
to come to understand that there is more here than meets the eye, 
there is more than the sum of all these parts. 


T.S. Deary 
4/18 - 5/22/24