Feed the birds
It is time to look for the hand of Providence, to cry as a bird in the nest, to look up, and not down into the emptiness at my own feet.
His eye is on the sparrow
That one,
heir to the earth
in the fluorescent heavens
of the grocery hall:
the sparrow cannot fall,
it will not fall uncaught
by the eye of God.
Recognition
Recognition Resurrection plus ten: is the shock wearing off or setting in? That time when the child was lost three days, three hours, three minutes that were once a lifetime then found; the heart does not readily recover; it skips each time the beloved is seen or imagined from the corner of a vision or …
Do not rush to Easter
(An invitation to the observance of Holy Week) Do not rush to Easter You may stumble over someone slowly carrying their cross, might miss the quiet words of sacrifice: my body for you, my blood. Do not sleepwalk past the garden, where olive groves groan and dream of peace. Do not rush, for you may …
The grammar of prayer
Resurrection is coming. It is important and sometimes difficult to hold on to that hope; yet resurrection that glosses over the reality of death, the finitude of death, that last piece of the solidarity of the Incarnation reins in the hope that might otherwise extend even to the rubble of a hospital, or the shores of a storm-churned beach, or the shut-off third rail of a subway system.
God remembers that we are dust
God remembers that we are but dust
and the ashes of last year’s plans; …
A Song of Anna
Simeon’s song, the Nunc Dimittis, crops up regularly in our liturgies, especially during Evening Prayer. I wonder what it would sound like, what it would feel like, if we had Anna’s song, too, to sing as our prayers rise like incense at the end of the day.
The longest night
… the twilight womb before the birth
of the Christ, all part
and particular to his Incarnation,
this nurturing dark that precedes
the light of the first new day.
Advent – a second coming
There is no cloud of glory can define, no gates of heaven can confine; there is no dogma, doggerel, or doctrine can describe, no earnest imitation reinscribe him. Christ’s coming cannot be constrained or restrained by our rituals of mortality. Our candles are dimmed, our illuminated manuscripts burned by the living Word… This is Omega and Alpha, ending …
