The State of May
Salvation operates in the abyss.
In this indescribable place,
night’s power of evil compelled me
to long for and loathe the world.
The grass was vibrating
but not for me,
nor for the afternoon song birds.
Dogs, children, yowls
were disowning me.
And so I prayed: Preserve me, Mother of God,
from the tempter and his tricks.
Lady, are you lost?
asked the boy.
The path’s over here.
I came back to myself
and recognized the stones of morning.
So many of us in this pandemic time, mayhap in every May time, feel lost. Our Mother the Church has let us down, maybe? We are bursting with energy, but we are locked down, homebound, constrained. What to do in Maytime when Maytime is dangerous?
We have misunderstood the world or so Adélia Prado suggests. Maytime is not dangerous, but a chance to find the pathway of God again. The pathway of God is desirable justice or just desires. Maytime is jolly, not dangerous and Bacchus is a good god, one with Apollo, because Artemis, the Virgin, has made peace.
Like Dante, Adélia Prado found herself lost in springtime. Prado is lost in Mary’s month: May. The maying should be glad, spring has sprung and our Lady is seated in the heaven of heavens. Prado, like most of us, finds that May, like Easter, is not always what it should be. The “is” of our spring falls short and Pascha seems far away.
This women is lost in the month of Lady Day and only wakes up when a Mother’s Boy points out that her mourning is taking place in a morning. How does one relate to the “is” of the world when the cosmos is not what it should be?
Prado reminds us the problem is rarely the physical: the body tells the truth. I am old. I am male. I am here in Houston, Texas. Desire is not the problem, but our minds, souls, and the messed up society. Culture tells us that this man, over there, is looking at some construction, so we should go shoot him. Our bodies, beautiful in God’s image, are not the problem, nor is our reason, imaging the Logos of God, but our broken sinful self. We see badly.
The cosmos is full of joys and we muckrake. The cosmos is in Maytime and we deny Mary is the mother of God. We are full of feelings, but we deny those, as if we had to act on all of them if we acknowledged them, and so are lost from our ourselves. The joyful is dangerous to us, as we are.
Or so we are told.
But those who tell us that the Maytime must be mourning, carefully observed, are themselves not better than we are. They are lost as well, but also false, denying the truth of self. They wish to be other than they are and so are lost. Instead, we must say what is real in Maytime, pandemic time, and then act on what should be.
We wish May was otherwise, but we will say: “Let it be done unto me according to Your Will.”
We will accept what is as is, but live in the “should be.” Our imaginations will suggest the goodness to come and so we will find the pathway through an inferno, through purgation, and then paradise.
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Prado, Adélia. The Mystical Rose: Selected Poems . Bloodaxe Books. Kindle Edition.
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