By Chudi Okoye
Dear St James, my St James
Cathedral of my contentment
Beloved monument of my upliftment
Accept tonight my fervent felicitations
My love for you a furnace of fiery flames!
You are, St James, a house of miracles
Our own hallowed hibernacle
Harboring in your Tabernacle
The strident dreams
And the silent screams
Of Seattle’s sundry sojourners
All beckoned by this city’s benevolent streams.
Tonight, yet again, I walk your worship places
Among a throng of human faces
Swaying in your scented sanctuary
Surrounded by these unseen presences
These saintly ghosts in their divine essences
Haunting your vaulting hallways.
I stand with these others, chanting and panting
As we tender our articles of censed supplication
And render our canticles of joyous exultation
Drum and cymbals proclaiming
Harp and horns exclaiming
In a din of delirious adoration
That the Divine Son is incarnated
Born to rule in unrivaled exaltation.
This Truth we proclaim here tonight
Filled with power and pageant delight
Believing that we who have flocked
To be in your beady bosom locked
Who rushed to you for refuge, my Cathedral,
Will depart from here fulfilled in withdrawal
Our spirits surging
Our hearts bulging
With the power in this tower of Galilee’s Sower.
And I, nourished anew by the Nazarene
My mind zestful but restful and serene
Will set forth with force and form
To engage a world of nonsensical enthusiasms
And suggest unto this world in turn
The purity of our metaphysical catechisms
As clarified and sanctified
From your soaring spires
Oh, St James, my blessed St James.
St James Cathedral, Seattle
12:05 a.m. Dec 25, 2017
