Census

Count it so I
can discern –
heart a beating scale
heavy with all

the questions of worth.
No judgment this thorough
could fail.
I will know, my wait

lifted, what matters,
a matter of time,
a matter of course,
no matter,

it comes to this:
days are completed,
measures are made.
The earth is a chart

and all it contains
yearns for the tally, the notch,
the nock of the arrow,
smooth clarity

in the target’s face,
contraction in the rings
that planes the mystery,
sifting

shavings of faith
like snow vanished in the palm,
warm before I
can reckon.

This is the poem appearing today in my online advent collection, The Other Stars Hover & Wait. We have a frantic desire to measure, count, and quantify. We place our worth in rankings, ratings, scores, and scales. If we can’t point to a survey or statistic, we hesitate. We say that mystery is still significant, that there’s beauty in the unknown and unknowable, but our actions belie our panic in the face of the truly inscrutable. Our obsession with counting reveals our obsessive desire for control. I find it interesting and important that God located Jesus’ birth within a Caesar’s demand for a census. The supreme human ruler vowed that everything would be counted as a way to establish his authority over it. God put Jesus on that register, and also delivered him in the nine-month birth cycle women have tallied and numbered since the beginning. Jesus submitted to measurement on our behalf, so that we could understand him, but then he broke the bounds of what we know so that our value would no longer rely on what we could contain, weigh, or measure. Our highest calling is to trust what we can’t measure, and to rest our worth in that mystery.