ANDREW’S PRAYER TO KALI

Your hurricane has come, terrible and Golden One. It is here, and it will not relent until the Old is annihilated, and the New, the utterly, unfathomably New arises in those of us who remain, or on the Earth, burnt clean of our last trace.

The hurricane those You seared with Your scalding grace of Truth and Revelation knew would come soon, has come. The whole world is convulsed by it, as You told us it would be. Its ferocity is terrifying and astounding, as You promised. Its majesty brings even the most addicted and willful of us, trembling and crying out, to our knees. Its perfect precision plunges all who adore You into an abyss of awe.

You had prepared me, Mother. You had driven me from death to death, and to the awful loneliness of having to speak Your truths to a stone-deaf time, and to the ecstasy only You can give—the ecstasy that is the explosion of Your fire in the mind, the heart, the cells of the body that have waited since the first amoeba for your devastating kiss. What words could ever express this gratitude Your crucified and resurrected lovers know?

There is no refuge from You, but in You—no sanctuary from this storm but in its vast calm eye, not in true life but in the dying into life to become Your servant of truth, Your slave of sacred action, Your child playing with Your necklace of skulls in the middle of the abattoir, Your eagle flying straight and unswerving through Your dance of lightning—Your voice rising from the final silence that is all that is left when Your hurricane passes, the dust that turns to gold on your pounding, bloody feet.

I ask and beg in Your name, that You give us all the strength to bear the unbearable, the courage to endure the unendurable, the energy to keep giving all we are and have, in Your honor and for Your glory, however dreadful Your dance becomes, the fabulous extravagance of Your creativity that rises from the ashes of our brilliance, the passion of surrender to submit to Your engoldening transfiguration, however brutal the agonies and breakdowns that must prepare us for it.

Your hurricane has come. Grace us the vision in this desolation, Mother, of what it engenders—a New Creation, a mutation, a birth so staggering in its beauty and power that there are no words glorious enough yet to begin to describe it. For what are words to Your word? And what are the dreams of even the most illumined of Your servants to the dream You will make real, if enough of us go on giving everything, and more than everything, and more than everything, to realize it?