"It's Complicated"

Will I get there, she asked,

her eyes wide with anxiety,

in her wizened, cachectic face?

It’s not for me, she said.

     Heaven. Clouds. Harps. Angels. Wings.

Those things are not important.

I really don’t care where I go,

      . . . . after . . . .

So long as I know I’ll be

with my beloved

     . . . .one day . . .

She rushes to say, “It’s complicated.”

Jewish father, so “not really Jewish.”

Roman Catholic mother, but “never baptized.”

Will God let me in?

Oh, how I long for religious conversations

that do not center around questions like this.

Questions that do not rest on

assumptions of 

     a stingy God

     a punitive God

     a God who thinks more highly

     of the rules people created

     than the people She created.

For now, all I can do

is search for the place in

the center of my soul

     which is holy.

     which is truth.

     which is love

and let all my words come from there.

Because …. “after”. . .  is complicated

And, . . . “one day”. . . is not now.

All I can do is live within the

tension of the dots

of complicated conversations.                                                             

c  Elizabeth Kaeton 2016
Hospice Chaplain

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