Is He Worthy
Photo by Max Letek on Unsplash
An Essay by Mckenzie Hunt
In the stillness of creaking pews and old words hanging in the air, I hear it again. A knell of arpeggios. The piano is just two bars in, but my legs have gone limp, and I grip the pew in front of me, bracing for questions I’ve asked a hundred times.
“Do you feel the world is broken?” (1)
Somewhere, I hear singing, but all I can make out is a field of swaying daisies. I rub the haze from my eyes, and there are faces now between the vases of lilies and daffodils, and the faces are singing in the chancel. But why all these pastel skirts? And looking down, somehow my own is mauve when I swear it was black a minute ago.
“Do you feel the shadows deepen?”
I am sitting in a dark room with clothes strewn across the faded blue carpet. My mother crouches like a wounded bird in the corner, still wearing my aunt’s sagging pajamas. An empty suitcase lies between us, and I hold up her green floral three-quarter sleeve, but she shakes her head and there is terror in her eyes.
“Do you know that all the dark won't stop the light from getting through?”
I am singing, but all I want is to scream. To run out of this room with its too-bare furniture and fluorescent lighting, out of the nightmare I am watching while I am awake. But they are taking away her purse now, and I am signing papers for them to do it too.
“Do you wish that you could see it all made new?”
I am standing in the sunshine outside the church of my youth. My mother is beside me, and we must be the same age because her hair is strawberry blonde. I hold up my daughter, and she takes her into her arms and reaches her index fingers to the tip of her button nose. They have the same laugh, and I awake to its echos.
“Is it good that we remind ourselves of this?”
I am washing the dust from the small round frame that sits beside my kitchen sink, where my mother smiles with closed eyes and her head pressed against mine. Her hands are clasped on my bare back, and our hair is curled with baby’s breath. The light streams on her crease-worn face and it is the morning of my wedding day.
“Is anyone worthy?”
I am gripping my father’s hand as we walk down the aisle in black.
“Is anyone whole?”
I am screaming it now at the black sea of jurors on either side.
“Is anyone able to break the seal and open the scroll?”
I look down at my hands, sure they must be covered in blood.
But all they hold are flowers.
They have shrunk to the size of a child’s now, and in my stubby fingers, inlaid with dirt, I am clasping a spray of periwinkle forget-me-nots. I carry them as carefully as a chalice of brimming gold. My feet are bare on the dew-laden grass, and the way before them is well-worn in my memory. Across the backyard and through the sliding door, my small feet pad silently till I reach the crack in her bedroom door and peek in to see that she is still asleep. In the dim light, I crawl up into the bed and fit my small frame into the C-curve of her side-lying chest. Her eyes flutter open and, seeing the flowers from her own garden beds, she smiles and kisses my forehead.
“Happy Mother’s Day,” I whisper and wait for what she always says.
But the piano is pounding in my ears again and I cannot hear her reply.
Now, I am pressing the flowers into her hands, but they are suddenly still and gray upon her chest. And I need to hear her voice say it one more time, but her lips are still in a strange straight line and the skin on her face and her hair is all wrong. When had she bought a curling iron? And all at once I am furious and want to scream–WHO DID THIS TO YOU?–until I remember that I haven’t seen her face since last June.
And so I ask, for the thousandth time, “was it I?”
But there is no reply, and my knees give way because I cannot stand for this trial.
But there are arms underneath, and they catch me as I fall. And there is steel in their grip and iron in their gentleness.
“And does Jesus, our Messiah, hold forever those He loves?”
It is just one voice and a whisper now. And as always, He is not looking for a reply. Everything I wanted to scream a minute ago—that I was young; that I was weak; that I tried; that I SWEAR, I TRIED—dies on my lips. And I let Him hold me, neither whole nor worthy, anyway.
𓇢𓆸 𓇢𓆸 𓇢𓆸
The arms are my husband’s now, and I must have lost my grip on the pew because he is looking at me concernedly and nodding toward the center aisle where a river of violets and paperwhites flows past us up into the sky. I blink in the stained-glass light, and they are my sisters and my brothers, my fathers and mothers, dressed, like myself, in their Easter pastels, singing,
“The Lion of Judah who conquered the grave,” as they walk to the place where the verdict is laid.
And I am walking with them too, weeping in the aisle because, yes, I am so tired of waiting for the world to become good and beautiful and kind2—so ravenous for the world this table ratifies.
Now he hands me the bread and then the wine, and I cling to them like Mary at the tomb, knowing now the steel of her grip when she bound herself to Christ’s resurrected wrists.
I too refuse to let them go, till He makes me and this husk of a world whole.
𓇢𓆸 𓇢𓆸 𓇢𓆸
1. Peterson, Andrew. “Is He Worthy?.” Performed by Andrew Peterson. Track 8 on Resurrection Letters, Vol. I, 2018. Centricity Music.
2. Hughes, Langston. “Tired.” New Masses, February, (1931): 4.
Mckenzie Hunt is a mom, writer, and music therapist who prefers to be outside, relishing “the feast of creation.” From a young age, she has kept a daily practice of journaling where she has found space on the page to wrestle with God, befriend grief, and vivify her imagination for spiritual realities. She writes to invite and equip readers to faithfully steward their souls—the sacred soil she believes God has given each of us to keep, and the place where he meets with us. You can find Mckenzie on Instagram @mckenzie.elizabeth.hunt, or on her Substack:
