A poem for Epiphany, or any time you look up at the night sky, and wonder. AbrahamThe stars were his promise to carry him on his sojourn past the skeptical glances and his own fear through the waiting despite domestic squabbles to a son and bloody altars and a legacy of trust.MagiThe star was their invitation to a new way of seeing beyond their charts … Continue reading Stars
He never said, “Be safe.”He saw what they did with the life-giving Law,its walls nowclosing in on soulsmeant to roam free. Perhaps his tears over the citywere not for all her wanderings,but for her fear,her lack of wonder,her contentment with the small,tame worldof scrupulous obedience.He shook her at her core,tumbled the Temple,untamed and tremblingwith wild rage.His love, uncaged,awakens us,invites us out to wildernesswhere questions lurk,beyond … Continue reading Into the Wild
Christmas Eve 2021 Chances are he won’t recall the holiness and awe of candlelight, “O Holy Night,” the beauty of it all. Perhaps he will, but memory’s strange (my history is a haze); it snatches moments randomly, misplaces years and days. I won’t soon lose the image of his sweet, illumined face, his lips’ attempts to join the song of Love’s divine embrace. My heart … Continue reading One Christmas Eve
Advent 4: Annunciations She thought herself unnoticed, ordinary until the gaze of Joseph lit a flame of love and new awareness in her spirit, an inner warming when he said her name. And then a shocking, wondrous invitation, a privilege and burden never sought. The fiery figure offered explanation: her humble self was hearth divinely wrought. The darkness of our weary lives is broken, our … Continue reading
Advent 3: Annunciation to Joseph Steady, old boy. You can believe your eyes. Admit it. This is not unfamiliar, this mystic hope that shimmered in the shadows that day as the sawdust settled under your restless feet. You can believe what her ears heard, what she told you, how the messenger revealed the mystery’s shape hidden within her innate devotion. You can do this. The … Continue reading
Prayer. Over the course of my life, that word and practice has meant different things. At first, we learn rote prayers. “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep…” The Lord’s Prayer. Prayers before meals. Growing up, our before-meal prayer went like this: “Father, bless this food we take, and bless us all, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.” Our … Continue reading The Miner
Find a neighborhood that needs your song. Perch high so they cannot resist looking up, out of their tamping troubles. Pierce the pall with your urgent epistle, your scarlet missive, your flagrant yes! this! Perhaps one or two will allow you to unpin their hopes from nearby moorings, let them fly to you where you will gather them, fling them wide, your tune unfiltered, sweetest … Continue reading Cardinal
If the cold must remain then I can embrace it swaddle my limbs lace the boots walk into the woods where the silence penetrates my crusty surface and the chickadee pins it over my lips. I follow animal tracks to the river in search of eagles as creatures huddle under the disturbance. No luck there but the hoarfrost more than suffices as close examination has … Continue reading Winter’s Consolation
O Emmanuel, our king and our lawgiver, the hope of the nations and their Savior: Come and save us, O Lord our God. We rode the creaking van through rough non-streets of a squatters’ suburb. Once-villaged families sidle up to a city that is itself more sprawling village than metropolis. Here it is monochrome: red clay homes humping up from red clay ground, hope fashioned … Continue reading O Emmanuel
O Dayspring, splendor of light eternal and sun of righteousness: Come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death. You call me from the city scape and hearth to a spacious inner landscape, horizon unobscured, where I can watch the slow crescendo of the dawn. The steadiness, the sweet return of morning’s child, hope’s advent, mysterious, winsome one wins over the … Continue reading O Dayspring
saint sinner seeker 