Hallowed

The poem used the word
Hallowed
And I asked them
What it meant.
A couple hands shot up.
To be made empty.
To have nothingness at the center.

No.
That's hollowed with an O
I say.

I mention casually -
With a disclaimer
That I am NOT
Proselytizing -
That if you are a churchy sort,
You have probably been saying
"Hallowed"
All your life.
You know - The Lord's Prayer
The Our Father.

If so, I ponder internally,
Have you thought all this time
That God's name was
Hollow?
Nothingness at the center?
Empty?
And you never questioned it?
Never thought,
What an odd and disturbing
Description for God's name.

Empty is your name.
Nothingness is your name.

Of course,
Some branches of theology posit
That it might be
Accurate to call God nothing
In that he is so Mysterious, Other, Unlike
Anything we know as
Something
That he is not a thing
Like other things
In the same kind of category
As things at all.
Grammatically he's a noun.
Existentially, he transcends nouns.
He is nothing.
He is like
No thing
We know.

But this is not the time
Or the place
For such theological musings
Or sophistication
When a moment ago they
Were back at Hollow.

So I move on,
Explaining that Hallowed means
To set aside as holy
To revere
To respect or honor greatly.

Hallowed.
Not a bad concept
To be aware of, I think
As I move on
To the next activity
In this space where we meet each day
On the hallowed
Linoleum.