To Escape this Fleshly Mortality | A Prayer

Our holy God,
It is here we find ourselves yet again.

Here – where words have run dry, where speech is quenched, where silence is most becoming of our beings.

Yes, here we are.

There is shame in our countenance. Bitterness in our look. Because we seek to meet You in the grandness of Your Spirit, and we cannot seem to escape this fleshly mortality.

For this we weep.

Sitting as still as we can contrive and peering into the blackness of our clenched eye lids, each tear does no more than remind us that we are, indeed, flesh.

Flesh that strains, flesh that yearns, flesh that craves and needs and aches.

We are flesh constrained and contained
built and torn
growing but never out-grown.

Physicians, our experts in flesh, poke and prod our human mass without care for her form, and with questions devoid of awe.

They strip us down to examine and laugh dismissively at our inclination to the dignity of modesty.

And so we cover…
our flesh
our secret
our weakness
our shame.

For this, too, we weep.

And here we have come for respite.

Here, with You grand God of the heavens, we seek salvation from this body of death.

…

What is this, Your answer?

What bizarre Salvation – a Man? A Son?

Salvation of Flesh and Mortality?

Flesh that strains, flesh that yearns, flesh that craves and needs and aches?

Salvation looking so much like ourselves, like the host of our shame.

In the place we have chosen silence, You sent a Word.

In the place we seek escape from body, Your Word became Flesh.

Your grand way of holiness is this: Your flesh reconciles us to our own,

And in Your final phrase, “It is finished” we are restored to phrase of the dawn, “It is good.”

…

So.

Here we are yet again.

We come with eyes peeking open, surveying the bodies You have crafted:

Flesh that strains, flesh that yearns, flesh that craves and needs and aches.

And we ask for the courage to believe You in Your incarnational way.

We ask to desire salvation through Your flesh rather than salvation from ours.

We ask for resurrection faith, that can see past the grave and decay and can see Your glorified flesh.

And we ask for hope to believe the like for ours.

Until all is redeemed…

even our dim thoughts of flesh,

we will pray in the name of the Holy Fleshy One,

Even Jesus.

Amen