O the dragons are gonna fly tonight
They’re circling low and inside tonight
It’s another round in the losing fight
Out along the great divide tonight
We are aging soldiers in an ancient war
Seeking out some half remembered shore
We drink our fill and still we thirst for more
Asking if there’s no heaven what is this hunger for?
Our path is worn our feet are poorly shod
We lift up our prayer against the odds
And fear the silence is the voice of God
And we cry Allelujah Allelujah
We cry Allelujah
We spent much of Friday evening at the home of friends, celebrating the fourth birthday of their daughter Eliza. Eliza had both this birthday and the last one in heaven, in the presence of the eternal God, her heavenly Father, because she went home to be with him just a month and a half shy of her third birthday. But we gathered nonetheless and ate cupcakes and cookies and did some singing together, reminding ourselves and each other of what we believe.
Do they celebrate birthdays in heaven?
Sorrow is constant and the joys are brief
The seasons come and bring no sweet relief
Time is a brutal but a careless thief
Who takes our lot but leaves behind the grief
It is the heart that kills us in the end
Just one more old broken bone that cannot mend
As it was now and ever shall be amen
And we cry Allelujah Allelujah
We cry Allelujah
What is it like, I wonder, to have your children all grown and gone away, to be grieving still the husband that you lost a few years ago and to be grieving also the ways in which your home had been unhappy, to be reminded by your now-distant children that their own efforts to get away from that sorrow means now to get away, also, for now, from you? To find yourself become– in your children’s efforts to get beyond their sadness– the sacrifice essential in the recovery of their lives?
This seems to me a grief more than doubled: to be robbed of contemporary joys that might have eased the pain of old losses. And the only hope remaining is the unseen, the unrealized. Hope is never anything less than that.
So there’ll be no guiding light for you and me
We are not sailors lost out on the sea
We were always headed toward eternity
Hoping for a glimpse of Galilee
And I am tired today of my redundancies, of the sins never seemingly defeated but only kept at bay. My capacity to love is a shallow cup, I fear, and I have only distant memories of ever really dipping into it. Perhaps, I think, if I saw some result, if maybe my efforts would end in some change, some growth, some improvement. But at the end of they day I must come to grips with the fact that I am facing insurmountable odds, and that the only success will come with my own further diminishment.
I do not like this.
Why can’t our battle be like the one at Jericho, where with a shout the walls topple, and the dust clears, and everything is made new? Why must it be me resolving again– instead– to be climbing out of the boat, and why me beginning to sink, and why that stronger arm pulling me out again? And again?
Why is death the only way to Life?
Like falling stars from the universe we are hurled
Down through the long loneliness of the world
Until we behold the pain become the pearl
Cryin´ Allelujah Allelujah
We cry Allelujah
And we cry Allelujah Allelujah
We cry Allelujah
lyrics “The Pearl,” Red Dirt Girl by Emmy Lou Harris
