Originally published to the CenterQuest blog, this is a prayer-poem that amplifies our need for one another in the spiritual formation enterprise. We are becoming each other in the interest of the Kingdom of God.
Give me (I)s to see.
El-roi, the God who sees,
I am in need of other (I)s.
Knit I to I, eye to eye.
Just for today,
spike the highway of my destruction.
Stop my solo soul, O bent on
cruising past waving friends;
crashing into walls false made
to keep out the good things
I fear will destroy me;
careening into immovable things
meant to slow me down, moving me
to find salvation, restoration, fuel.
Give me (I)s to see.
El-roi, the God who sees,
I am in need of other (I)s.
Adjust my compass enough that
True North no longer looks like me alone,
but is a crowded mirror of cheering fans
convinced that I’ll go nowhere
if only moving in a single direction –
away from everyone else.
If drift I must, then I drift by trust
and let my newly plumbed back
be offered as the saddle for
another’s weary feet.
Give me (I)s to see.
El-roi, the God who sees,
I am in need of other (I)s.
God of the lonely and liminal,
the comfortable and cast-out,
the malleable and malevolent,
the somber and superimposed,
drive out the wedges driven between us
and re-align the bentness of this
favorable company, no stranger to the strange,
but magnet to the unattractable.
My completion is not me,
it is them. It is us.
Give me (I)s to see.
El-roi, the God who sees,
I am in need of other (I)s.
ferret out the worms of destruction
happily dining on my best offering.
If the result is nourishment for others,
let my spiritual entrails be ground up,
minced and mashed, chopped and chewed,
until those most needful find me.
Let them grow fat on my pain,
nourished in my darkness.
Send out your scout to scout me out
of unfinished relinquishments and
help to bear the brunt of
your foot on my heart.
Give me (I)s to see.
El-roi, the God who sees,
I am in need of other (I)s.
Step with boots of Gethsemane-dirt
on this barely-beating muscle
so inclined to be still when
faster and ferocious beats the heart of God.
Find me, O God of Embrace.
Find me and, give me back, so that,
to see myself is to see you looking back
through emblematic eyes belonging to others.
Let my newest breath come when I
breathe deep the fragrance of those
for whom you died.
El-roi, the God who sees,
Give me your (I)s to see.
innerwoven 
So many lines of resonance here, Rob… haunting with fresh ways of description, deep and matter of fact at the same time… I love how you write, how you think.
God of the lonely and liminal… yes.
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Thanks, Lesley-Anne Evans, O crafter of marvelous words thyself.
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This is a very powerful piece of writing. That we would all come to understand the greatest “I” of all is “We”.
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Yes! You get it! I am who you are and vice versa. There never really was merely an “I.” Buber’s I/Thou is an explication of spiritual interconnectedness.
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I made a comment early on my page about a doctor’s appointment and used the idea of leprosy as the condition in the body of Christ when we forget this concept. The problem in leprosy is that the body grows numb to pain so that some part gets hurt and the body keeps going even when infection sets in and spreads. Had the injury been responded to by the body in the beginning, there would have been less harm.
To often we tend to be of the “if it offends us cut it off” attitude about others. But we are in this together.
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I can add nothing here but a hearty Amen!
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