Fire Tending (A Poem)

The metal ring kept the fire contained
at a campground where birch bark
hauled to burn hissed and crackled
most satisfyingly.

Our son adored the sound
along with twisting bright flames
fueled by botulin, the chemical
that Nature offers up in wooden sacrifice
and cathartic light.

He was fire-tending the entire evening
allowing us to sit back and warm our faces
under a canopy of trees, flickering
with native illumination.

Those instincts carried over many years
to keep relationships alive, the conversation
between fire and air, the kept secrets
and revealed hopes all signaled
by smoke and flames running
red to orange, yellow to white,
and in concentrated heat in blue.

When we’re not with family, these fires
mean something different,
the practical burns of cardboard
and paper, always turning stacks of pages
to make sure no financial documents
or personal information remain.

As a child, I was instructed by my mother
to take our combustibles out to the incinerator,
as she called it, a brick pit ten feet
deep where I watched the 1960s
go up in flame as far as I was concerned.

We watched the civil rights movement
on television, and rockets burning
with the burden of men striving for the moon
to keep Russia from getting there first.

Such is pride, whether personal or national
in nature, that we keep lighting fires
between ourselves and within our souls
to conquer sin, or so we’re told.

It’s astounding to think that some believe
there is an eternal pit of hell where Satan
is the fire-tender, and we’re left to suffer
both tinder and blaze in punishment
for not behaving as we should
in praising Jesus or the Trinity
because free will is supposedly
a pile of logs to be kept from the fire
lest they burn in effigy
of our choices.

Considering these options
and the temporal nature of fire
left untended, it is comforting to know
that they always burn out.
Yet sometimes, the time is right
to light the fires of righteous anger
and truth.

We live in a time when legalistic religion
sits stacked like cordwood and
Is being tossed into the pit of critical
mass, as we’re learning much more
about how the narrative was formed,
how it grew and consumed
through the emphasis of law over love
in repressive force and institutional
graft that claimed to control the fires
of human sin.

Now we’re witnessing the new light
of discernment, deconstruction,
and honesty toward the Gospels,
examining the Letters of Paul
and the calculated constructs
of Christianity to hold candles
in vigils of determined witness.

We can see how the cords were stacked
in a bulwark of religious authority
despite the fires that Jesus tried to light
under the pyres of hypocrisy.
Those sparks were long ignored by despots
charging money to burn offerings
to earn favor with God, and by those
selling indulgences to release souls
from purgatory, and by preachers
selling Prosperity Gospel as fire insurance
to the gullible, the hopeful
and the eternally victimized.

These are the corrupt logjams of religion
that must be burned for the sake of humanity,
and we must all be fire-tenders devoted
and strong, or they will call us the persecutors
of their faith when they have burned
it up themselves for millennia.

The Anti-Semitism and Inquisitions.
The Holy Wars and political Popes.
The scurrilous use of Sodom to curse
Acts of love, when the real sin
Was gang rape and ignoring
the poor, the needy,
and immigrants.
There is nothing holy in that history.

These are the ‘traditions of men’ that Jesus,
The fire-tender, sought to burn.
and if you don’t understand that,
good luck finding solace in the ashes,
dust and detritus of dishonest belief.

Christopher Cudworth is the author of Honest-To-Goodness, Why Christianity Needs A Reality Check and How To Make It Happen, and The Genesis Fix: A Repair Manual for Faith In the Modern Age.