Danielle Chapman is a poet, essayist, and lecturer in English at Yale University. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, Poetry International, and elsewhere. Delinquent Palaces, released by Northwestern University Press in April 2015, is her debut collection of poems.
What if, maybe starting with those 10 Commandments, we saw the rules we live by not so much as boundaries and walls to protect us, but as windows into the world? As ways of structuring awareness. Openings through which we look at more and more of the life we’ve been given together on this earth and ask what love would require of us in all of it.
Jesus enters the scene and starts talking about losing everything, and I hear him saying ‘quite openly’ that a broken world needs a story about breaking.
Like Jesus, you will walk into some days certain on some level that you’re as worthy of love and dignity as any other human being, and then, a moment later, become deeply unsure of this truth and look elsewhere for your identity.