The Cleansing of the Temple

Read this thought-provoking poem!

Read this beautiful poem from contributing poet, Dan Doyle. Dan shows how we sully God’s Temple, much like the money changers in Jesus’ time, when we sully his Creation. Is not this Earth a great temple built by the Lord?  How enraged do you think Jesus would be if He saw the devastation to the planet?

The Cleansing of the Temple: Jn. 2:13-25

Look at “this brave o;erhanging firmament,

This majestic roof fretted with fire.”*

These wild woodlands with their secret,

Sun-shadowed meadows, where the air

Trembles with many-voiced prayers;

These mighty and broad-backed seas

That come ashore in their endless waves,

Bending their hoary foreheads down

To touch the pebbled strands in humble obeisance;

These desert places, broad with silences

Breathless with heat during the days

And wearing their diadems of numberless stars

From horizon to horizon through the nights;

These tropics, their jungle blanketed hills

Exploding with life and vigorous intent;

Are these not the many rooms of my Father’s Temple,

The dwelling places of the infinite Word?

Are they not the very revelation of

That genesis word, that holy Yes,

That spoke all things into being,

That still breathes Being softly into the now?

Is it not present in all places, at all times?

Why, then, do you sully it so?

Hear me now, and again, my children.

I am that Word, and as the scriptures said,

“Zeal for this house will devour me.”

Why have you turned My sanctuaries into dens?

Why do you no longer hear the Yes I whisper

Within and through all of these places, even now?

“Take this filth you have brought here out.

Stop turning my Father’s House

Into a marketplace, filling its sanctuaries

With this feral din of trade and greed.”

Do you not know that I made each of you

A temple, a vessel of My infinite Yes,

That I wish to dwell in you too?

But you have turned yourselves into

Hovels, jests, paeans to your own egos.

Why have you turned so willfully

Toward that foolish one who cried “No”?

by Dan Doyle

* Hamlet, Act II, scene II

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