Continuity

I envision Jesus in a moment of solitude 

looking at the scars on his resurrected body. 

I consider the anomaly that his risen body remembers the trauma he endured 

but the trauma has no debilitating power.

We saw his anticipatory grief 

in the garden before his death;

sometimes I wish we could’ve witnessed him navigate the pain

in the months and years afterward. 

Instead we hold the mystery of faith 

and the mystery of our grief

and our longing for redemption,

in union with him who holds the seasons

and signatures of injury in his hands. 

An erased story 

is a story severed from resurrection. 

Somehow heaven insists 

we’ll always inhabit what we lived;

what is honored, in stories

always given in mystery to what is new, in bodies. 

Continuity by Arthur Dove