Without a History Long

Musings of a missionary to Russia
by Geoff Ryan, 1997

A

man without a history long
A past too soon past, both personal and ancestral,
Amid such creeping relics of the past,
And present yet to be.
What purpose have I here
And called?
Called by whose God?
For He is understood differently here.

Here, the here of
Priests and prophets and other Druid’s kin,
Espouse their antiquity.
And their mystics and madmen,
And zealots and harlots,
And Jew-haters and warriors…
Jostle together on the East-West divide.
And the gods of old,
Have comfortable familiarity with the God of old.

Unperceived in advance,
I tripped lightly over the Rubicon,
And stumbled headlong.

Absolutes are ironically accepted as a higher rule,
While life a cheap afterthought from a distant God
In a distant heaven,
Who hurls the occasional thunderbolt of monumental and violent judgement,
But for the most part,
Distractedly indulges the human frailty of fallen carnality.
He can’t help, but He doesn’t bother anyway.
Don’t refer to the New Covenant here,
Here he lives in the Old.

Chechen song of lament: artist unknown

- - -

I am too light a presence here with my easy attachment to people and places.
I am not weighed down by the centuries as they are.
The pain in my soul is too shallow
To allow access to their fellowship.
My youth and the youth of my Father and his Father…
These are given no credence among the sages.
And the common folk scrutinize my eyes for the familiar marks
Of pain and loss and flickering fear,
Then move on to look elsewhere.

How to impart words with weight
To a motherland addicted to tragedy.
Here,
Where “goodbye” means “forgive me”,
a clearing of debts,
And “thank you” is to plead that God, any god, “save and keep you”.

This is a dark, dark, land
And I will ever be a stranger.
Though I learn their ways and master their tongue,
I cannot feel as they feel,
Think as they think,
My very wholeness handicaps me in this land of broken toys and promises.
For amid the blind, if the one-eyed man is king,
Then the two-eyed man is simply not believed,
For he has to be seen to be believed.

Do those I touch
Become as butterfly wings,
Clutched by a child in ignorant excitement,
Damned to fly no more?

Geoff Ryan: Co-founder and co-editor of theRubicon and co-ordinator of the 614 Network, Geoff and his wife Sandra minister in Regent Park, a social housing project in downtown Toronto. For most of the 1990’s Geoff and Sandra served in Russia.

1 Comment to Without a History Long

1. Thank you for sharing this Geoff – it is a window into your heart. I read slowly, inviting the echoes to sound again of two brief encounters with Russia. How does this land get under the skin, into the blood? Its people have received such affliction and history as to render them unutterably, tragically beautiful. As you expressed it, that enigmatic, siren beauty emerges from a dark, elusive ‘otherness’. We are compelled to read Dostoevsky and Pasternak, we hear Rachmaninoff, needing the bittersweet indictment of our Western lightness of being. No wonder you reach for poetry – it is the evocation of a strange, holy envy.
Matt Clifton on February 13th, 2007

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