Writing Exercise on Our Spiritual Condition

Pastors and parents cherish
their seeds,
small churches and children
become mustard trees.
Slowly learning addition, with luck
multiplication.
My son stutters "truck",
clarion to
a once humble father.
Emphatic and
direct, he points out our
Craftsman windows,
extending tense thumb and
forefinger, with
inquisitive eyes peeping, scarcely
seeing over the top
of a sun-worn ottoman.
He longs
for approval of knowledge,
and I approve.
Depth and detail and the words
to describe,
love and life and freedom.
Please, water,
milk, daddy, no, please, go.
Please grow,
ideas like the branches where
the sparrows
will make their rest.
But do not grow
limbs of enormous size, difficult,
not dexterous.
Large group study rooms with
songs and steeples,
and comfortable padded backs,
where everyone
is seated and satiated
but nothing
is truly in Sabbath.
Do not grow
from diminutive state,
for the gospel
calls for nimble feet, not
concrete towers
built to stay secure within the sway
of the whole reality.
Multiple souls, unless you will act,
do not seat
yourselves in my company.
There is a depth
in which your immensity will flail.
So, souls and seats,
simply fail and fail and fail.