Let Them Say We Wasted The Purfume

There are times
when there are no words.

And I,
whose life is laced with letters
and lifted by language,
am the one telling you this.

There are moments
when all the poetry
curdles in the mouth.

When tragedy steals oxygen,
and horror gnaws
through every metaphor
like moths through linen.

Mary knows this.

She does not theologize.
Or waste time nobody has
crafting a sermon for the moment.

She moves.
She breaks.
She pours.

A jar of nard,
earthy and costly and absurd,
shattered open on purpose,
not just for healing,
but for loving.

She touches him.

His feet,
scarred by distance,
filthy with pilgrimage.

She lets down her hair
in a room full of men
who have no idea what she’s doing,
only that it makes them uncomfortable.

Her body becomes the prayer.

She does not try to fix
what is broken.
She does not argue
for a better outcome.
She does not budget.

She weeps,
as the scent fills the room.
Scent that sticks
in the folds of fabric,
in the recesses of memory,
in the very pores
of the one who is about to die.

He would carry it with him.

Through betrayal, violence,
the long, cruel descent
into the machinery of empire.

Perhaps, even on the cross,
with blood in his mouth
and sweat in his eyes,
he could still smell it.

That love.

What good is perfume
when you are about to be tortured?
What use is beauty
when death is sharpening its blade?

That is the voice of reason.

That is Judas,
keeping tally,
counting coins,
calculating worth.

But Mary is not making a point.

She is not proving anything.
Sometimes love is not practical.
Sometimes love is foolish;
A song played on a burning violin
outside a gas chamber.

Someone once wrote of the dance,
the impossible dance,
that happens at the end of love.

Of musicians,
prisoners,
forced to play
as their people
walked toward smoke.

Music stitched into massacre.

And still,
the notes rose,
the bow moved,
and a tragic complicated beauty dared to exist
in a place
where beauty had been banished.

What kind of love
plays the violin
in hell?

What kind of love
wipes feet with hair
while the noose is being tied
in another room?

This kind.

This kind of love.

This aching, scented, desperate love.

Those who sow with tears...
will reap with joy.

This is a psalm for exiles,
for survivors,
and the ones who plant seeds
not knowing if rain will come.

They sow anyway.

Weeping.
Empty-handed.
Half-believing.

They sow
because love is what's remains
when nothing else is left.

They sow
because we are not machines,
or cogs within an imperial wheel,
but creatures made of longing.

They sow
with tears on their cheeks
and tremors in their fingers,
but they sow.

Mary is one of them.

So are we.

We live on the brink.
Grief on grief,
fire on flood,
policy on cruelty.

Some days,
we resist.
We write.
We march.
We vote.
We stand our ground.

But other days,
(and this too is holy)
we weep.
We anoint, sit silently in pews
and let God love us.

We hold hands
without agenda,
bake bread
and eat it slowly.

We light candles
we aren’t sure will matter.

We sing songs
nobody asked for.

We dance.
Even if it is foolish.
Wasteful.
Changing nothing
except the rising pressure in our chests.

The world will ask
what the return is.
What good is art
when bombs are falling?
What good is kindness
in the face of genocide?
What good is a little church
with soup and prayers
and offkey hymns?

Jesus needed the perfume
more than he needed a plan.
The thing
that held him
was not Peter’s fierce words,
but Mary’s urgent touch.

What gave him courage
was not certainty,
but the body memory
of being loved
without condition.

No speeches.
No strategies.

Just a woman
breaking open everything she had
to say
you are not alone.

We are here
to love;
to pour perfume
on the dying
and play music
in the rubble.

We are here to dance
even when the dance
is funeral and lament
and protest
and lullaby
all at once.

We are here
to remind one another
that beauty still matters.

We are here
to say, with our bodies,
that love
is never wasted.

So let them scoff.

Let them say
there will always be more.

Let them say
we are too soft,
too sentimental,
too out of touch.

Let them say
we wasted the perfume.

Let them say
we lost.

But let the scent remain.
and fill the rooms
they can’t sterilize.

Let it rise
from our hands,
from our cups,
from our singing,
from our weeping.

Let it linger...

Until we remember
who we are,
and whose we are.

Until we remember
what we’re for.

Until we become
the foolish, fragrant,
burning music
that refuses
to stop playing.

Until we
dance each other
to the end
of love.

And beyond it. 🦢