This Maundy Thursday Night.

Kneeling in the dark church
I study the blank walls where
My favourite icons should be
And sense infinity lifting me
On a cold wind of absence
Blasting the empty spaces
Where my childhood visions of a homely god
Once pulsed with light.

Now I know that Maundy Thursday
Is about the emptiness of loss
Of everything that I once cherished
Both human and divine, also the scientific,
Because all that I encountered in my childhood
Has dwindled into ash.

Tonight I kneel alone before the empty altar
And face the loneliness that is my inner self,
My central core of being
That frail old age has changed into a stranger.-
God is too vast to be portrayed in words
And even the weird maths that describe the universe
Confuse more than explain
The perspectives of infinity.

Faith is all that I dare need to go on living;
Faith is all that I now have to chart the silent spaces
That words cannot define.
But of one small thing I can almost be certain
That on this Easter Sunday morning
New light will once more bathe these walls in colours
More varied than the threads of Joseph`s coat,
And the icons now removed in purple shrouds
Will once more be on view
Enhanced by a mass of garden flowers.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
March 24th. - 25th. 2016.  
The Lady Chapel, St. Matthias Church Colindale.