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429 - Holy Saturday 4/2/88 |
Holy Saturday 4/2/88
Three hundred million light-years to the next county,
On the way maybe a five-billion solar mass black hole
(As Senator Dirksen used to say at budget time: "A billion here,
a billion there, and pretty soon it adds up to real money"),
In the neighborhood, city center of the Milky Way, enough vodka
(a molecule at a time, alas) to fill ten thousand earth-size
goblets:
Perfect Symmetry; The Search for the Beginning of Time is the
book that keeps me awake at 1a.m. this Saturday when
Christ lies in bonds of death
And our daughter, her pancreas shut down months ago like a white
dwarf star,
Vomits,
And I, against a united front-insulin devouring sugar, flu virus
casting it out-follow doctor's orders: a tablespoon of
Seven-Up every twenty minutes.
Light travels two hundred twenty-three million, five hundred
twenty thousand, eight hundred miles between doses.
And marriage: messages blocked like X-rays by the atmosphere.
Rockets launched: some, like Uhuru (freedom in Swahili), pick up
signals, some, like Challenger, explode.
How many light-years apart are we?
Could our light-years leap this leap year over the vast distance
to come full circle and connect again?
In a curved universe light goes on until it comes back, a cosmic
boomerang thrown by Einstein who would not believe God plays
dice.
Yesterday soldiers threw dice for a seamless coat, and Mary
raged and wept, and the sun was darkened five billion years
ahead of time.
And now it's time for another tablespoon of Seven-Up ("No
caffeine: Never had it, Never will").
Never, forever, now, then, tomorrow.
And miles to go before I sleep.
I could use an Easter.
Patrick G. Henry is Executive Director of
the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research, Collegeville, Minn. He is
the author, with Donald K. Swearer, of For the Sake of the World: The Spirit
of Buddhist and Christian Monasticism (1989). Commenting on his lines, Dr.
Henry says: "To connect diabetes and the collapse of stars may be straining
at a conceit, but it's a new way of doing the microcosm/macrocosm analogy."