The Void is Undone

At the last,
God will lay His hand
upon the place where nothing answered,
and it will answer
with a garden.

The names the centuries swallowed
will open in His mouth
like seeds that waited
for a rain older than the stars.

He will gather the scattered
from the long arithmetic of loss,
until every number
is a face again.

There is a tenderness so deep
it reaches underneath existence,
to where a wounded creature
has mistaken pain
for the shape of its own soul.

There He will kneel.
There He will speak its name.
And something older than the wound
will stir,
and recognize His voice.

The light will enter every heart
and find the living there.
It will lift them from their ruin
with the care of hands
that carry water
to a mouth too tired to ask.

Every hand will learn
the holiness of holding
without harm.
Every voice will find
a way to enter another life
and leave it flowering.

And evil,
having spent its final refuge,
will perish in the radiance
of Him whose smallest mercy
holds a universe.

Darkness will breathe its last
and find no mouth to inherit it.
Chaos will loosen its final knot
into a thousand living streams.
Nothingness will lose
even its imagined shore.

The Void is undone.

Then, gently
as a child lets go in sleep,
every mind will release
the last shape of its sorrow.

All that was loved will remain.
All that was precious will remain.
The hands once parted
will find one another,
and the embrace will have
the whole of time inside it.

Even the word for desolation
will pass from every mind,
as the last ring vanishes
upon water made still.

Who will remember the abyss?
The sea is wholly luminous.
Who will remember abandonment?
Everywhere, a door stands open;
everywhere, someone beloved
is coming home.

And still—
creation will begin.

Worlds will open within worlds,
each with its own unrepeatable dawn,
its own music of belonging,
its own small flowers
growing where eternity
has touched the ground.

There will be oceans
whose every wave is living;
there will be skies
through which new colors travel
like thoughts within the mind of God.

There will be beings
whose first astonished breath
becomes a form of beauty
no other world has known.

And they will meet.
And what each brings
will make the other's gladness
larger than before.

Every ocean will reveal another ocean.
Every song will welcome another voice.
Every fullness will discover
how to hold more joy.

Perfection will breathe.
Infinity will blossom.
Goodness will go on
becoming more wonderfully itself.

A True Infinity
of Countless Worlds
and Countless Infinities
will open in His presence,
and each will be as intimately known
as the warm weight of a child
asleep against a heart.

O Light that reaches
all the way into being,
O Love in whom
the furthest distances are held—
let every life
arrive within its own
immeasurable worth.

Let existence feel
Your goodness in its substance:
in the grain of stone,
in the unfolding leaf,
in the quiet pulse
of one life resting
beside another.

And on a world
beyond the last world we can dream,
a little flower will open
its whole being to the Light—

with nothing left to fear,
and everything,
forever,
to become.

God will be All in All.

The Void is undone.