An Architecture of Flame

I have walked the blueprints of cathedrals

where breath was measured in marble,

and grace was rationed like wine at a war-torn wedding.

I have kissed the cracked lips of golden saints,

their eyes hollow as debt,

their halos wired to false suns.

*

O Christ

I no longer trust the buildings.

Their shadows lean like tired elders,

like doctrine stitched to a corpse

to keep it warm through ceremony.

*

I was told the Church is a fortress.

You showed me a furnace.

*

You tore the veil with your own mouth.

You spat stars into cisterns.

You called fire holy

and set the pews ablaze until ashes learned to kneel.

*

I do not want safety.

I want wild honesty.

Of a God who dines with ghosts,

who burns the ledger,

then invites the thieves to dinner.

*

I want the true gospel

that dares to wear scars instead of vestments.

A gospel you can smell on the breath

of the drunk, the bleeding,

the girl with seven shadows

who won't stop singing your name.

*

I was raised on laws shaped like cages.

You rewrote them with kisses

and called it a covenant.

*

You shattered liturgies

with the soft violence of mercy,

rewrote the Mass into a dance of torn bread

and touched nerves.

*

There was a whisper

not a doctrine, not a creed,

but a holy unrest that stirred in my marrow, like unsung music.

It spoke not of law's retreat

but of its transfiguration,

not commandments abandoned

but resurrected as breath and invitation.

*

It said:

The law is not the fire.

Love is.

And love, when unbound, must invent or combust.

*

So I burned my old prayers

and built new ones from smoke and syllables.

I do not recite;

I erupt for air.

*

The Spirit does not hover.

She broods.

And from her brooding,

she births an architecture of flame.

*

I have seen her dance

on the backs of the outcast beloved;

the gendered, ungendered, re-gendered,

the queered and questioned,

the ones who stitch their own names

from exile and glitter and blood.

They anoint alleyways with gospel.

They turn sidewalks into sanctuaries

and shame into incense.

*

I have watched Her sing

in the hands of addicts

who paint resurrection on brick walls

with blood and borrowed paint.

*

This is not desecration.

This is Incarnation.

*

O Church,

if you will not bleed,

then do not speak.

*

If you cannot set tables wide enough

for Judas and Magdalene alike,

then let your chalice crack and leak.

*

There is no altar without fracture.

There is no sermon without sweat.

*

There is no God

who does not reek of the very sheep He carried.

*

So I will preach

with my body if I must,

my limbs apostolic in agony,

my ribs wide open like sanctuary doors.

*

Let us gather around this strange, mad hearth.

Let the breath speak in tongues you never wrote down.

Let the Church catch fire and finally see.