“Christ the King” A drip painting by: Ronald Raab, CSC 2017

A poem as question from Christ the King: “Am I expecting too much?”

Am I expecting too much that you would step into the unknown and search for me not in palaces and places of your own building up but in the way I call you into letting go and go down into a place where you can finally see other people for who they truly are across tables sharing watery oatmeal and old coffee or even at a countertop where you speak on the phone to another human being behind glass where he is wearing orange or even a place where a stranger who has crossed a desert of chemotherapy or on the hard soil of grief from the tragedy of losing a daughter who was traveling home for the holidays in a car wreck whose mouth is so dry that words of thanks can hardly make it through his parched lips but just needs a glass of water from you because there is so much standing in the way but if you listen really closely words will flow from the bottom of the glass and connect you in ways you can’t even imagine because love is a lot like water it can flow from your heart if you just share it and others will drink it up or perhaps if you share your winter coat with a mother who survived the shelter three months after the flood and she is finally going home and has spent her money on clothing for her children but she is cold not because her children do not love and respect her after her husband ran off with someone else but because she is just too loving to use the money to put a coat over her own broad and daring shoulders or perhaps can you offer your heart into the real place of hospitality and welcome to the foster family down the block where you have heard but never have experienced that the reason the children were there in the first place was because their birth parents were heroin addicts and the mother was only fifteen because she left her parents when she was just reaching puberty because she was abused and pushed into a closet with no door knob on the inside accept that she finally reached out one day to someone who came to the door of the house and who reached out to her like a new handle of hope and so you must know that there are stories behind the stories and more stories and your hospitality can create a new story if somehow you let go of your pride and ambition and there will be sheep and goats in the end but the one thing that will last is the love I have for you all so don’t be surprised that the least among you just might teach you that I am truly the Christ and that all things will be one in me when finally I take your breath away and in the end I will be your King and master of love for all your hardness and discouragement and even your joy and hope will live and that you will finally find a home in me and that maybe all the things I promise you in the end you will finally understand that the end begins today?