Would You Be Free?

(Prologue)

Would you be free?
Do you understand what you first must lose?
Freedom is not the successor,
or itself the destination.
It is the voice crying in the wilderness.
It is the revolutionary’s indiscriminate fire.
It is the transition,
perhaps not from worse to better,
but to that liminal precipice,
between sacred falsehood
and the sublime emptiness.
Do you understand what you will lose?
Can you be reconciled to its absence,
and create something new?
True, some think only to relish in the ruins,
but many wander in circles
through the ashes,
unable to create for themselves.
They hope to recover what they lost,
for they did not understand the cost.

(Would You Be Free)

What did I know of purpose?
I had not been one of the aimless,
or on the road to Damascus,
when there accosted, I found the meaning.
What did I know of purpose?
I had been born into it.

What did I know of comfort?
I had not been weak with despair
when lo, there the outstretched hand took mine!
What could I know of comfort
if comfort was never needed?

What did I know of fulfillment?
I was not trammeled with emptiness
and in a cycle of addiction
when I first drank the Living Water.
What did I know of fulfillment
when eternity was my inheritance?

What then could I know of loss
or what I had to lose?
How could I take for granted
what I didn’t even know was there.
My belief was not the product of my own contemplation,
or existential anxiety.
It had been instructed alongside my first words.
My faith was an abstraction,
grounded in the faith of those that came before.

Thus, as youth gave way to late adolescence,
acceptance was subverted by reason,
though not reason alone.
For faith had collided with love,
that first and foolish love,
which looks on tempests and is not shaken.
If our love was a sin,
what was left but heresy?
Ignorant of what was not outside,
I saw only the bolted doors of hypocrisy.
Could ignorance gamble a different solution?
I traded my birthright for a match.

Freedom’s light
spewed from the conflagrated steeple,
illuminating the precipice.
Then through the shattered stained glass
I saw purpose burn alongside hypocrisy,
comfort still nailed to the cross,
and fulfillment self-exile.
As the embers fell to ashes,
I understood the cost of disillusionment,
but not that this was a transition,
a point from which to start again.

Oh, those wretched years,
following our footprints in circles through the ash!
What was left but martyrdom for each other?
We asked too much of that fragile love.
We said “Be now my comfort! My purpose! My eternity.
How the weight of emptiness bears down in this uncertainty.”
But that love would only break, it could not bend.
We traded all for nothing in the end.