I’m a Skinned Christian

Spiny Spiderflower crowding out Ottawa’s Notre-Dame Basilica (Fall, 2019)

I’ve read the old Hebrew poets for years, and oh, the stuff they say: beautiful, odious, comforting, confounding, sometimes you just have to pick a clause, up the ante, and see where it goes. Another point here, about the Psalms, is their insistence (with notable exceptions) of God made available through a kind of toiling righteousness. My own experience, however, aligns more closely with Christian Wiman’s:

…faith, like art, is most available when I cease to seek it, cease even to believe in it, perhaps, if by belief one means that busy attentiveness, that purposeful modern consciousness that ‘knows’ its object.


I’m a Skinned Christian

But I am a worm, and no man. – Psalm 22:6

I am a worm.
I’m any number of creepy little dirt burrowers,
moreover: I’m the slick glistening trail of a Leopard slug,
a pink puckered crease on a buzzard’s neck,
I’m a cottage curd fallen out of the fridge,
the russet deposit of wind-borne fungus,
I’m sticky steam sucked through a kitchen duct,
and grease-glazed dust on a Venetian blind,
I’m a drip driven off by a wiper blade,
like the passing thought of a venial mind.
And being the village idiot, 
I have posted my single thesis to the trapdoor
of the crypt under a virtual church in Witlessberg,
          stating:
          God beguiles me!
So I’m trashing your tracts,
dumping your perky worship tunes
and running off with my bewilderment (thank you very much).
For when I strive to believe my soul recedes,
when I rend my robe, bruise my knees,
righteous to recite your creedal decrees —
the heavens yawn, God shrugs.
But when I find myself at the end of myself
— as happens these many times —
and flop down on the brown bank of a dying river,
I see wind, with fingers of grace, lift dead grass;
I see the sun bring its twilight, without stain or shadow,
to halo the passing crests of water
and soften this clay-hearted shore —
and blood moves deeper,
          breath comes roomier, and life
          stirs faith and I stand and look about.

When I Heard the Poet Read

A couple days ago I had the honour of reading with three poets, each one outside the insular advantage of my own culture. And as much as I consider myself enlightened and aware, I still came away shaken. I was again brought face to face with my ignorance, particularly my early ‘Christian missional’ ignorance. And while in my head I believe I have some understanding, what still creeps in when I’m not vigilant, is a kind of naïve, subconscious expectation that people can, with effort of course, individually or collectively get over the trauma of childhood abuse, specifically, racially motivated childhood abuse. Of course there is no ‘getting over’. Trauma of this depth is transgenerational. There may be healing, there may be emotional integration (and there are beyond inspiring stories about this), but how it happens, what is looks like, can never be on ‘my’ terms. What I can do is help make sure the memory and legacy of our nation’s residential schools is not forgotten. 

I came away shaken, but grateful, and with a renewed understanding that everyday must be Orange Shirt Day.


When I Heard the Poet Read

When I heard the poet tell about how he was thankful for being hit with a green birch switch by a woman in a black robe and a white collar, because when he grew up it made him extra tough for life on the street, and how thankful he was for another robed woman who needed to step on his five-year-old hands while he was playing, because it helped him see how he would need to hide for the rest of his life, hide too, the things he liked to do, especially his freehand drawings and his writings, and when I heard him say how thankful he was that Jesus came to visit him at night and talk to him using the voice of Father X., who always wore a big crucifix, and how Father X. made him stand and take off his pajama bottoms and then touched him and lifted his own robe too, and all the while Jesus just kept on quietly talking, saying, “God is love and God is good and see how God shows his love,” and how grateful he was because this helped him learn about relationships and about intimacy — then I understood the old man I used to sometimes talk to on my way to my job at Hope Mission, who answered me saying, “I try to never sleep inside,” who sat in front of Starbucks on Jasper, who used to ask me for a dollar, who was the same man I saw when I used to go to noon Eucharist, who sat cross-legged beside the high heavy oak doors of St Peter’s Basilica holding a cardboard sign that said, “Jesus is a liar and a cheat and a snake,” who used to thank me for the change I sometimes put in his upturned Oilers cap, and who always used to say, just before I disappeared behind those big oak doors, “Have a nice day anyway.”

In/Verse Poetry Event

I had an English Composition teacher who treated the written word like it was a stuffy neighbourhood of high fences, large houses and locked doors. Only those who could follow a proper set of directions could gain entry. But I’m bad with directions. I don’t know, maybe this has something to do (many years later) with my knocking on the door and hanging out in the kitchen of (free verse) poetry.

But then, when I read some of the Bishops of poetry, who said, make every word count, I was a bit dismayed. I’ve got a lot words in my poems that pass the time of day, that sit in parks and people watch, nod and smile to passers by.

Not always, but mostly, I’ve tried to make things a bit more comfortable for people. Maybe even, while fetching my rough lumber and framing hammer, increase the supply of reality.


I haven’t met the other poets here, but I’ll wager that each one is a seeker, both of new forms as well as vision; on a quest, however impossible, for a kind of perfect fluency and power to exquisitely express their unique and particular consciousness.

She Loves So Deeply

She loves so deeply
it leaves her heart empty.
This is her great weakness.

She listens to peddlers and politicians,
and solicitors of religions,
who come to the big house.
She listens carefully, not to what they say,
but to who they are.

When she was very young,
her mother, who was frail and ill and dying,
left her, with a note, at the door of a prosperous couple
who live at the edge of town.
She became the ward of a gardener,
and the gardener’s partner.

When she was fifteen they gave her
a one-room cabin, east of the big house.
They wrapped it with a large ribbon.
It has a mullion window overlooking a small meadow.

When crocuses come in spring,
she goes to her hands and knees in the snow,
places her face to the bloom 
to see if there’s a fragrance.
This is her strength.
Deer graze at her door.

She doesn’t wear a hat, she has adapted
to every kind of weather.
She feels its changes.

She has been old all her life.
Her hands are slender, strong and clean.
When she sings, they rise up beside her, like herons.
When she walks, she sings.

For the sake of others,
she makes herself predictable.
She walks into town, at the same time,
by the same route,
so that people can avoid her, should they wish to.

The loud and obnoxious call her friend.
As do the silent and slow, the bent and the meek.
And many strays.
Her eyes hold a playful light only children see.

When she vanished, people said,
“That’s what comes of fools.”
To put an end to speculation, the council,
although they didn’t know her name,
issued a written statement pronouncing her unsound.

It’s been forty years now.
On the date, families and strays gather at the town gates.
They bring food to share and spend the day watching.
It’s this that keeps the town from dying.