A Natural Grace

by Dee Wade

A cold darkness attends our early morning walk;
Winter slipped back in during the night,
enabled by spineless Spring.
The pre-dawn firmament illuminates
a wet embrace of snow over all unpaved surfaces:
rooftops, grass, every branch and every twig of every tree
as if it were spray-painted in place.

A pair of other walkers preferred the evening air
on the first day of the week, eons ago and oceans away,
though their exercise was strictly practical, pacing retreat
from Jerusalem to Emmaus.

How sad the two of them must have looked
when a stranger from another dimension came alongside
and stopped them still as stones in the road, asking fool questions
about current events back in the prophet-chilling city,
inciting again their bright red grief.

Women frequently astound—
but to be destabilized by rumors of resurrection—
now there’s a shock to worldly certainties,
as startling as to have the Scriptures cleaved wide open
by the Christ who read and bled himself into ancient words
that he was still writing as they walked.

Already their hearts must have been on fire,
for as they neared the village, he would go on (where?),
but they constrained him (how?), to stay with them,
which he did, the stranger becoming host,
leading table fellowship, bread breaking and sharing,
one death-tired, Risen One
recognized as such by weary fellow travelers,
only to vanish from their sight, gone.

Cleopas and partner vanished from the scene as well,
running back to the city of crucifixion as freed witnesses,
as practitioners of resurrection,
embracing suffering and glory,
the life of the spirit and the life of the flesh,
setting thanksgiving tables with seats saved for strangers,
just in case.

They recognized the Risen One in hungry faces everywhere,
and learned to feed others as he fed them,
no longer comfortable with the old arrangements of power
perpetuating disparity and violence,
the veneration of bland idolatries,
instead expecting Christ’s seasonal shift
to invade this world, not just the next.

By the time our walk ends, the sun has broken fully through,
and in the treetops, the snow seems electrified.
What the sun restores to warmth and life it first makes radiant.
The world we know has much resurrecting to be and to do,
and Christ waits to be perceived through the fog of ungracious disbelief.
But a change of dimensions is evident along many roads,
and this one leads to Emmaus, too.