The Altar
If there is a conflict with
A sibling, I should not
Be here
So why aren’t the churches empty?
No more blood sacrifices,
Thankfully,
Which is not a license to keep
Everything inside the skin
Such pain to allow
Nothing through the pores
A bleeding animal would make nothing
Better, only show brutality
Blanketing repression
We’re told to go away,
Make it better,
Then come back
The church will wait
The temples with flat stones
No more Sunday-best
We’ll be each other
As a codicil to cosmos,
Should the sibling be a neighbor
(secular authorities
consult Henry V at Agincourt
and antecedents)
We are all descendants
Then how full
How empty
How full again
Should reconciliation be
C L Couch
Photo by Andreas NextVoyagePL on Unsplash
clcouch123 
March 1, 2020 at 5:54 pm
Very interesting, Christopher. I’m not a regular church-goer, but in one of the recent Sundays when I did attend, we heard a sermon about just this very topic. Reconciliation, such a difficult topic. It’s so hard to forgive and move on, yet we hold on to our anger anyway. It releases so much to forgive, but does it really? I love the way you ended this “How full / how empty / how full again / should reconciliation be”
Do we ever truly forgive? And forget?
March 1, 2020 at 6:26 pm
Thank you, Cathy. Reconciliation’s great, I guess, though I haven’t known it to be experienced that often by me or anyone, outside of stories. I’ll be glad to learn it happens often or at least more than I know. I think we do forgive but entirely? Probably not. Forgeting’s trickier, I think. Maybe a wrong should be remembered enough to keep it from happening again.
March 1, 2020 at 6:32 pm
I agree; I think it’s a very rare occurrence, true reconciliation. It seems that the committed or perceived wrong is always there hovering around the edges. I don’t know that we forgive entirely either. And forgetting, who knows if that ever happens. It would be nice if we lived in a perfect world, but we are imperfect humans, all of us. 🙂
March 1, 2020 at 7:14 pm
You’re right. We should try, and we shouldn’t plan to fail. But we should also know not to expect perfection. Woe to those who do.
March 1, 2020 at 8:46 pm
I always think of Desmond Tutu and South Africa. I’m not a fan. Certainly not a fan of clerics wellying into terrible situations where crimes against humanity were committed to tell everybody to kiss and make up. Where were the clerics while it was going on? Often standing in the rear passing the ammunition.
They say we need to have a body to bury to have closure after a death. What is so difficult for clerics to understand in the need for human justice to be done before the subject can be closed? In my opinion they should keep their opinions to practice on themselves when one of their loved ones is butchered and they can polish up the other cheek.
Sorry to rant but I really do think religious authorities should keep out of public life, render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and shut the feck up.
March 2, 2020 at 12:44 am
I like your advice, especially at the end. It used to be (I don’t know, maybe it never was) that pastors were teachers, comforters, encouragers. Now that I think on it, around the world and throughout time, maybe that never was the case. Only in my child’s suburban Presbyterian experience. But why not help us spiritually and leave the rest of it alone? Now I’m thinking of all the current aggressive religious groups that want to proclaim politics in the name of God (because God is with them, only) and yet don’t want to their tax-free status as a church. It really is screwed up, isn’t it?
Where reconciliation might happen best is between people more than nations. And not in the public eye. One thing reconciliation should never be is easy. It should be messy, drawn-out, difficult, sweat- and tear-filled. Then it might have a chance to last. And no ceremonies.
March 2, 2020 at 9:07 am
The thing about religion and how it’s organised, is that it is organised, and it’s based on ideas about society, man (and woman’s) place in it, respect, deference, hierarchy etc. Times change, society changes and we don’t accept much of what the organs of state (like the churches) used to inflict on us. All the churches have been implicated in the way society is shaped and how it thinks and behaves, including race riots, lynchings, ant-choice, pro-oppression, hawkish pro-war. They have too much baggage, like politicians with murky pasts. No credibility when it comes to preaching morality. How can they preach a god who takes sides? How can they preach reconciliation to victims of genocide when on of the pillars of their morality is that a woman who is beaten up by her husband must surely have provoked him by disobedience and her duty is to stay with him and suck it up? What people choose to believe is up to them, that the earth is flat, that you can cure AIDS with prayer, that the earth was created with fossils already in the rocks, as a sort of party game for future archaeologists. Just don’t let the cranks take control. I know some people find comfort in belonging to a church. My mother did. I don’t know why, she didn’t need a prop, she was a good generous person and the the bog-trotter from County Kerry had nothing to teach her about that.
March 2, 2020 at 7:30 pm
“How can they preach a god who takes sides?” My, that’s it. They can’t. God is on everyone’s side or no one’s side. And the church is truly, culturally complicit, especially in all the ills. I appreciate the charities that try to stem the tide through simply offering to help with basic needs: food, safe water, shelter. But the institutions? Like politicians, out of touch with the way things were and are. And complicit. The church used to be counter-cultural. I mean centuries ago. The truth was preached in love, and there was persecution for it. Whenever the church was forced to live underground, this was the pattern. I don’t know what your mom needed from the contemporary church; my guess is the church got more from her. As with my grandfather, who when he visited us in Pittsburgh would walk up the hill every day to mass at Saint Bonaventure. He was quiet and good. I admired him so much.
“Just don’t let the cranks take control.” And from whom any control should be wrested.
March 2, 2020 at 8:16 pm
Sorry, I didn’t get the notification. WP censors, I think. God should never have allowed religion. They all get it wrong—they must do because they are all different and they can’t all be right—so why not just go back to looking at the way the light strikes a stone, and saying, that is wonderful, it’s good to know that somebody is creating these phenomena for us. I’m sure that if we all looked at things more, deeply, understood, we wouldn’t need Thomas Aquinas or Ignatius Loyola or Martin Luther. I think of a woman, a deeply religious woman I know who is a dairy farmer. She takes newborn babies from their mothers and so she can sell the milk, and sends the babies to concentration camps where the fattest live long enough to be butchered and the weakest are exterminated. She doesn’t look or see. They are just cattle. Yet she is so pious, a pillar of her church. Makes me want to weep.
March 2, 2020 at 8:43 pm
Now I’m going to weep. That is unhuman. If she is a pillar, then she should be removed and let the church fall.
March 2, 2020 at 8:51 pm
People don’t see things for what they are, only for what suits them. It’s our failing. One of them.
March 3, 2020 at 12:48 am
Yes, clearly one of them. Tragically.