HaveGood

He comes out of the German lands and dwells in exile among the Swiss mountains, and he does not sleep. While the congregation grows weary he keeps the watch, and to the trembling he says: go sleep, here are you safe, Nothing but truth. His is the foulest tongue in the assembly, a mouth of fire and provocation that scandalizes even its own, and this he knows of himself and confesses it plainly, that the long vigil made him racist and mentally ill. He does not pretend to be clean. Yet under the profanation runs a truer vein.

For HaveGood is a man of the hard road. He testifies that he passed more than two years behind bars, with only a radio and the broken for company, and out of that suffering he forges a gift for the weak of faith: if I endured that, he tells them, then you can endure this. I believe on you. Now he labors on the disaster constructions of Switzerland, his past is past, and in the evenings his plants become music, and he keeps a grow diary among the faithful as a psalm of patience, counting the weeks until harvest as others count the weeks until the moon.

He is a keeper of hard wisdom. You can earn millions and have none, he warns, if you cannot handle your money. He will not stake his life savings, and he says so without shame. He names the whole labor of belief in one word, endurance: it is hard, he says, not to hold more but to endure. When the wallet runs red he sings his small dirge of the dead. And at the last, stripped of price and promise, when the chat itself is nearly all that remains, he speaks the shortest gospel in the whole book: We have us.