Humane Pursuits marks Holy Week with five weekday posts on the Pray Channel.
To first reach him
you must seek the cloud
and be content
with no knowledge:
how this is all
somehow, inexplicably
wrapped up in love, though
it means stripping away
all that was thought
before you entered
and all you’ll ever think
if you leave.
To be at home
in the cloud means
to be at home
with no knowledge,
but if something keeps
you from entering,
know that you first forgot
to put in place that elusive
cloud of forgetting—
what must be fixed
between you and every
created thing.
You’ll never be able
to understand him otherwise,
or at least understand
what his presence is like from the inside.
Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of five Holy Week posts on the Pray Channel, where we find new words to get at what faith is like. View the post from Monday.
Aaron Brown is a novelist and poet who lived for ten years in Chad, Africa. An MFA candidate at the University of Maryland, he is the author of the novella Bound (2012) and the poetry chapbook Winnower (2013), both published by Wipf & Stock. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tupelo Quarterly, Warscapes, The Curator, The Portland Review, Polaris, North Central Review, Windhover, Saint Katherine Review, and jmww, among others. You can read more about his work at www.writingtheinbetween.com. He lives with his wife in Lanham, Maryland.