The Feast of Mercy

(After the Easter Sermon of St. John Chrysostom)

You do not have to be early.

You do not have to be certain,
or practiced in the language of praise.
You do not have to arrive
with clean hands
or a perfect account of your days.

Just come.

Come as the morning comes
over a field that has not decided
what it will grow.

Come as you are,
whether you have carried the long hunger
or wandered all day in distraction,
whether you kept the fast
or forgot it entirely.

The table is already set.

It is laid out in the open air,
in the wide meadow of things—
bread, light, a place to sit.
No one is turned away.
Not the late one.
Not the lost one.
Not the one who stood at the edge
unsure.

There is a kindness here
that does not measure.

It does not count the hours
or weigh the labor.
It does not ask
when you began.

It only opens.

Even now
the fields are shining,
and something like mercy
moves through them
as wind moves through tall grass—

touching first one
then another,
making no distinction.

Do not say you are too late.

Do not say you are not worthy
of such brightness.

Look—
even the smallest bird
enters the day without permission,
and the day receives it.

So step forward.

Leave behind the careful accounting,
the quiet fear
that you have missed your moment.

There is no moment to miss.

Only this—
this wide, unguarded welcome,
this lifting of light
from the dark ground,
this strange and simple truth:

nothing that comes
with an open hand
goes away empty.