My Life as a Toilet

There is nothing as useful

As a toilet:

When the body demands it

There is no higher priority

In the whole world.

An ever-present porcelain priest,

It receives everyone’s urine,

Everyone’s excrement,

Everyone’s vomit;

And dutifully absolves them all.

It sends them away

As far as the East is from the West.

There is nothing as despised

As a toilet:

When the need has passed

We ignore it.

Hidden away

Down the hall

In the dark;

We do not talk about it.

It reminds us of things

Unmentionable yet intimate

So we pretend it does not exist.

For we can never quite admit

That we are bound to it

(And that we cannot live without it).

On the White Throne of Judgment

We make our confession

Into the silent chasm.

Weil said it well:

"All sins are attempts to fill voids."

But when we void into the void,

The toilet reminds us with a rush

Of cold, baptismal water:

All is forgiven;

All is swept clean;

All is made new.

It is the silent guest

At Weddings and Funerals,

Baptisms and Bar Mitzvahs,

Christmas and Easter.

Can you imagine any truly meaningful event

Without a toilet?

Yet would you ever admit you need it

To make meaning?

Great Cathedrals may house the Spirit,

But a ceramic bowl houses the Incarnation

In all its messy, earthly truth.

The toilet is

Schrödinger's fixture

A quantum superposition:

Always looked at but never seen;

Nearer to us than our undergarments,

Yet pushed out of sight, out of mind.

Couches are beloved;

Beds are yearned for;

Tables summon forth creative genius;

While showers drench us in peace.

But the lowly toilet 

Is the kenosis of furniture;

It empties itself

So that we may be full again.

A monk waiting in the silence of its tiled cell,

A humble witness to our mortality,

Listening for the mechanical "amen"

Of the final flush.