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
O Key of David and scepter of the House of Israel, you open and no one can shut; you shut and no one can open: Come and lead the prisoners from the prison house, those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death. I was content in the cloister, safe from wildness without until the day a door was left ajar. My heart escaped … Continue reading O Key of David
O Root of Jesse, standing as a sign among the peoples; before you kings will shut their mouths, to you the nations will make their prayer: Come and deliver us, and delay no longer. From the beginning You created more than things but hid in them a seed of Your life force, for Love cannot make only one, embedding life in life, from life. You … Continue reading O Root of Jesse
O Adonai, and leader of the House of Israel, who appeared to Moses in the fire and the burning bush and gave him the law on Sinai; Come and redeem us with an outstretched arm. When I dare approach with closed lips and open heart, a new sense is awakened: love. Still and real, textured with presence, heavy lightness, true. My ambitious mind attempts description, … Continue reading O Adonai
I couldn’t tell you when it went absent without leave but one day I noticed it was gone. The last shred of possibility slipped out the door. You adjust. The sadness becomes mortar for a wall just high enough to keep the dream from getting in finding its old place where it fit in so well until it didn’t. We resigned ourselves to a good … Continue reading Advent: Elizabeth
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 raw material … Continue reading Advent: Joseph
One of the exercises in my creativity group last year was to incorporate the title of a song into a poem. This one reflects a favorite hymn that was not in the anthology of those we sang in my childhood, but I learned as an adult and came to love. I love to sing, in choirs, in the car, at bedsides. I am grateful that … Continue reading Giving Thanks
When I unwrap the holiday ornaments the stiff snowflakes pause a moment in my hand, fashioned, starched in precise geometry by my mother, who stitched frugal threads into transcendence. Once I presented her with a bedspread from my husband’s family not quite finished, a long-forgotten interruption. She studied the pattern, dyed the thread to match someone else’s story, not unlike her dutiful life as pastor’s … Continue reading Lace
saint sinner seeker 