After the Chorus

I wrote this travelling by train through the Alps from Rome to Paris, after reading John Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV, “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.”

After the Chorus

Do not come to me now

as soft advice.

Not as the bright smile

at the church door.

Not as the chorus swelling

through the speakers,

all uplift

and upward hands.

The room is singing

its predictable liturgy —

the slow one,

the anthem,

the key change meant

to lift the heart —

and something in me

locks.

The body remembers

what the mouth

still cannot say.

One chord,

and the old rooms open.

The brand.

The corporate style.

The lanyards.

The smoothness of it all.

Words weaponised

like daggers:

‘you bring nothing of value

to this place.’

And suddenly I am back there,

inside the room

where harm was done

and called itself ministry.

So come like weather.

Come like rain

against the chapel windows

when the singing grows too loud,

when joy itself

feels like threat.

Break the locked places.

There are pews inside me

still occupied by ghosts,

whole liturgies of fear

recited in the blood,

old shames hanging there

like vestments

in the dark.

I have called it resilience.

I have called it faith.

I have called it carrying on.

Still the walls sweat.

Still the heart,

that small battered flat

above the old sanctuary,

lets in every echo

except peace.

So come not as guest

but as the one

who knows the building

was never theirs.

Kick in the swollen door.

Shatter the stained glass

of the god they handed me —

the one who looked too much

like power,

too much like control,

too much like men

who mistook harm

for holiness.

Burn what must burn.

The false shepherd.

The polished liturgy.

The songs that ask the wounded

to rise too quickly.

Batter my heart,

threefold mercy,

Father of the bruised,

Christ of the locked room,

Wild Goose moving

not in the amplifier’s roar

but in the tremor beneath it.

Undo me.

Not as they undid me.

Not to wound

but to make room

for breath.

For I have been

an occupied city,

streets patrolled by fear,

every chorus a siren,

every bridge lifted in worship

a trigger.

Lay siege with love.

Besiege me

until the old voices loosen,

until the doors no longer slam

inside the chest,

until praise can be praise again

and not threat.

Take me captive

to your gentleness.

Wound me

into wholeness.

And when the singing swells

and my body flinches,

sit with me there

among the broken bricks,

until even this ruin

begins to trust

that your kingdom comes

not in force

but in the slow,

holy,

unlearning of fear.

-Rev'd Jon Swales