Easter Triduum

( A Southern Remembrance )

It was a little church, brick layered from years.

creating a shelter for children to feel safe.

Singing gospels, ‘Jesus is calling’ 

and ‘amazing grace’, people stand in faith. 

Wooden pews curved into the backs tired

from laboring fields bent by the plow.

Promises coming from pulpits of well intending 

preachers who draw from biblical stories. 

Stories of trial and triumphs of ancient 

believers who strived and survived.  

Promises raining from a place called 

heaven, a place many were destined to soon go.

“Sweet hour of Prayer” they listened and sang.

holding on the pews as the children watched.

Yes, they would leave to go home to their 

Sunday dinner, knowing;

“In the sweet by-and-by.”

copyrighted: CMM. 2018

(Easter Triduum starts tomorrow April 17-20 for Christians)

I often wonder what he wrote the day he came upon

the stoning of the woman, the men that said she wronged…

He came up quietly and without pause, looked and said aloud,

“Any man without sin cast and cast it now.”

He then knelt a humble stance, and reached among the sand

with his finger began to write something with his hand.

He wrote until the he looked back up to see who was left to throw,

not one man had tarried there; they all had chosen to go.

He stood from where he had knelt and wrote upon the sand,

and the woman remained, to listen to this man.

The man that said, “Go sin no more” freedom now was hers.

I wonder what he wrote that day he knelt among the scores.

Was it their sins he knew so well and they in spirit heard,

and dropping all the stones they had, they left without a word?

© 2004

Christine McNeill-Matteson