I was born where things corrupt—in the slow decay of dust, where the  leaves of life at last let loose, heave, and succumb. Where the earth receives without protest.

I’ve watched that decline into the silent earth. Corruption is almost silent too. But it sort of hums beneath the surface, or on the surface—a quiet undoing that nibbles away. Then there is a returning.

“From dust you are…” and the thought lingers as if it knows it is not yet finished. For the soil remembers more than endings. Beneath decay, a faint pulse is heard—not of ruin, but of waiting. “For the creation was subjected… in hope.”

Hope—is threaded through the rot, braided into the dark, but not born there, only passing through.

I have seen it—in the fragile shimmer of a fallen bird’s wing, in the disappearing glint of light on water, in the small, persistent green molding of a damp, dark enchanted forested and forgotten crumbling castles that lay in ruin. This is not corruption with temporal beauty refusing burial.

The sages whisper of two inclinations, twin fires within the clay—one bending inward, one reaching toward the Holy.

Korban—the perfect sacrifice and has allowed us to draw near.

I am not cast away, but called close to the place of horns and flame, to the altar where corruptible things are not hidden but offered.

I come as dust that knows I’m fractured. I breathe but have forgotten my Source. I am a vessel cracked enough to see through. Imperfect.

“Sown in corruption…” yes—I feel it to the marrow of my bones.

“…raised in incorruption.”

a promise not yet worn, but already alive.

For the Holy One does not call decay beauty, yet neither does He turn from it.

He enters.

And there—in the minute and the vast, in the trembling edge of all things—His image flickers:

Christ, not only robed in glory,

but hidden in the small, the breaking, the almost overlooked. I am a treasure in an earthen vessel. It grips my heart. So I stand—not outside the tension, but within it—grasping it—

dust and glory

braided together

as a living and breathing ancient tallit.

My life born of dust, bent to descend into corruption yet awakened to glory—aroused to ceaseless prayer. I am undone.

I linger somewhere between the porch 

and the altar

and the garden—

weeping and leaping and dancing for the joy of Beauty and Light.

Bonnie Saul Wilks