Faithful With What Belongs
If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own?
Luke 16:1-13
September 12, 2025, Words By: Scott Dewey, Image By: Street Psalms
Made Flesh
I have a dear lifetime friend, gifted and brilliant. The headwinds of life have resulted in her employment being menial at best, and degradingly exploitative at worst. After a stretch of sex work that dangerously devolved into coercion and trafficking, a few of us who loved her hatched a plot. Her escape involved a ransom, so that she would not be hunted and harmed by her employer due to lost income. In the frantic fray of flight, she grabbed for her Bible, which was hidden under her negligee. It’s a small image that will always be with us from that night – an image that inspired the poem below that I wrote for her. From her, and from others, this congenital rule-follower has learned to faithfully transgress.
Faithful With What Belongs
Quietly wait
delicate pages of the holy
Bible on her chair
beside rumpled sheets
Gently curl
crimson strings and lace
folded into translucent wisps of her
working garment that reveal contours
of her trusted book beneath
Thinly holds
skin and skin of two
besouled bodies apart
and entwined making their
transaction through an exchange
rate set by another
Deliberately unfolds
a well-laid
plan to gamble with
sufficient funds on account
that I transfer to untraceable
cash in the streetside machine
under hooded
darkness
Deeply inhale
dear friends
and deeply exhale
before the car door
unlatches before the feet
climb the fire escape before the
window knock to
escape escape escape
now is the time
now
Daring the now
now is now the chance yes
now she will she
will go for broke brave yes gasp
grab all that belongs
of belongings the garment
the book the skin over
the sash now! grasp the rail
now the foothold now the car
door lock the urgent wheels
now the slobbed sobs now the loud
laughter now the new large
unknown
Shrewdly lies
the cash ransom ill-owed and well-paid
now stacked on the chair in the abandoned
room exchanging
mammon for word
of a life that will not be pursued
or traded for
any currency
but now but now but now
Love
Dwelling Among Us
How have you been faithfully transgressive? Transgressively faithful? What is love inviting you to?
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