After Feeding the Five Thousand
You gather up the fragments which remain that none be lost: the things we could have been (quite what, who knows, but something more than this— leftovers, scraps, discarded casually); the scattered memories in their tiny heaps, mere crumbs remaining from a life once whole; and all the little broken bits of dreams that started fresh but now are stale and old. The crowds are heaving, yet you see the crumbs and number them just as you do the stars. You have a world to save but you still pause to gather every fragment in your arms. To all your names, I add another one and give you worship, Jesus of the crumbs.
Friends, forgive my long absence! I’m hoping to be posting here more regularly this year than I managed last year.
This sonnet was born from a remark a someone made to me when we’d been talking about dementia and the terrible losses it brings. He said something to the effect that he thought there was something relevant to that in how Jesus commands the fragments to be gathered up after he feeds the five thousand. It’s a beautiful thought which I try to play with more widely here: that Jesus gathers up the broken people, the people of no account, our lost selves, our lost memories, our lost dreams. In the midst of all the great and glorious things he is doing—defeating sin and Satan, redeeming and restoring this world—he still cares about tiny, ordinary people and their sadnesses and losses and gathers them in. And in one sense, of course, gathering all of these fragments in his arms is precisely what it means to save the world anyway, isn’t it?