Because I know tomorrow his faithful gelding heart will be broken when the spotted mare is trailered and driven away, I come today to take him for a gallop on Diaz Ridge.
Returning, he will whinny for his love. Ancient, spavined, her white parts red with hill-dust, her red parts whitened with the same, she never answers.
But today, when I turn him loose at the hill-gate with the taste of chewed oat on his tongue and the saddle-sweat rinsed off with water, I know he will canter, however tired, whinnying wildly up the ridge’s near side, and I know he will find her.
He will be filled with the sureness of horses whose bellies are grain-filled, whose long-ribbed loneliness can be scratched into no-longer-lonely.
His long teeth on her withers, her rough-coated spots will grow damp and wild. Her long teeth on his withers, his oiled-teakwood smoothness will grow damp and wild. Their shadows’ chiasmus will fleck and fill with flies, the eight marks of their fortune stamp and then cancel the earth. From ear-flick to tail-switch, they stand in one body. No luck is as boundless as theirs. ~Jane Hirshfield “The Love of Aged Horses”
Is there anything as wonderful as a good friend?
Someone who doesn’t mind if you are getting long in the tooth and fluffy around the waist and getting white around the whiskers?
Someone who will listen to your most trivial troubles and nod and understand even if they really don’t?
Someone who will fix you up when you are hurt and celebrate when you are happy?
Someone who knows exactly where your itches are that need scratching, even if it means a mouthful of hair?
We all need at least one. We all need to be one for at least one other.
Isn’t it good to know? You’ve got a friend in me…
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…if I respond to hate with a reciprocal hate I do nothing but intensify the cleavage in broken community. I can only close the gap in broken community by meeting hate with love. If I meet hate with hate, I become depersonalized, because creation is so designed that my personality can only be fulfilled in the context of community. Booker T. Washington was right: “Let no man pull you so low as to make you hate him.” ~Martin Luther King, Jr.
As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness. ~William O. Douglas from The Douglas Letters
Be careful whom you choose to hate. The small and the vulnerable own a protection great enough, if you could but see it, to melt you into jelly. ~Leif Enger from Peace Like a River
We have a new definition of greatness: it means that everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve. You don’t have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love. And you can be that servant. ~Martin Luther King, Jr. in a February 1968 sermon: “The Drum Major Instinct” from A Knock At Midnight: Inspiration from the Great Sermons of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.
Dr. King’s words and wisdom in his sermons spoken over sixty years ago continue to inform us of our shortcomings as we flounder in flaws and brokenness. To often we resist considering others before ourselves, to serve one another out of humility, grace and love.
Today we unite in shared tears: shed for continued strife and disagreements, shed for the injustice that results in senseless emotional and physical violence, shed for our inability to hold up one another as a holy in God’s eyes.
We weep together as the light dawns today, knowing, as Dr. King knew, a new day will come when the Lord God wipes the tears away from the remarkable and beautiful faces of all people — as all are created in His image.
Out on the flats, a heron still as a hieroglyph carved on the soft gray face of morning.
You asked, when I seemed far away, what it meant but were gone when I turned to you with an answer.
Nothing mysterious—hunger, a taste for salt tides, distance, and a gift of flight. ~Leonard Nathan, “Out on the Flats” from The Potato Eaters
All winter the blue heron slept among the horses. I do not know the custom of herons, do not know if the solitary habit is their way, or if he listened for some missing one— not knowing even that was what he did— in the blowing sounds in the dark, I know that hope is the hardest love we carry. He slept with his long neck folded, like a letter put away. ~Jane Hirshfield “Hope and Love” from The Lives of the Heart
I know what it is like to feel out of step with those around me, an alien in my own land. At times I wonder if I belong at all as I watch the choices others make. I grew up this way, missing a connection that I could not find, never quite fitting in, a solitary kid becoming a solitary adult. The aloneness bothered me, but not in a “I’ve-got-to-become-like-them” kind of way.
I felt like nothing mysterious, this having simple need for compatible companionship. I just followed my own path, never losing hope of who I might find.
Somehow misfits find each other. Through the grace and acceptance of others, I found a soul mate and community. Even so, there are times when the old feeling of not-quite-belonging creeps in and I wonder whether I’ll be a misfit all the way to the cemetery, placed in the wrong plot in the wrong graveyard.
We disparate creatures are made for connection of some kind, with those who look and think and act like us, or with those who are something completely different. I’ll keep on the lookout for my fellow misfits, just in case there is another one out there looking for company along this journey and doesn’t mind me tagging along.
Walk down that lonesome road All by yourself Don’t turn your head Back over your shoulder And only stop To rest yourself When the silver moon Is shining high above the trees
If I had stopped to listen Once or twice If I had closed my mouth And opened my eyes If I had cooled my head And warmed my heart I’d not be on this road tonight Carry on
Never mind feeling sorry for yourself It doesn’t save you from your troubled mind Walk down that lonesome road All by yourself Don’t turn your head Back over your shoulder And only stop To rest yourself When the silver moon Is shining high above the trees ~James Taylor and Don Grolnick
Look down, look down That lonesome road Before you travel on
Look up, look up And seek your maker Before Gabriel blows his horn
I’m weary of toting, such a heavy load Trudging down, that lonesome road
Look down, look down That lonesome road Before you travel on
I’m weary of toting, such a heavy load Trudging down, that lonesome road
Look down, look down That lonesome road Before you travel on Before you travel on ~Madeleine Peyroux
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I got out of bed on two strong legs. It might have been otherwise. I ate cereal, sweet milk, ripe, flawless peach. It might have been otherwise. I took the dog uphill to the birch wood. All morning I did the work I love. At noon I lay down with my mate. It might have been otherwise. We ate dinner together at a table with silver candlesticks. It might have been otherwise. I slept in a bed in a room with paintings on the walls, and planned another day just like this day. But one day, I know, it will be otherwise. ~Jane Kenyon “Otherwise”
I watched her cooking, from my chair. She pressed her lips Together, reached for kitchenware, And tasted sauce from her fingertips.
“It’s ready now. Come on,” she said. “You light the candle.” We ate, and talked, and went to bed, And slept. It was a miracle. ~Donald Hall from “Summer Kitchen” in The Selected Poems of Donald Hall.
I tend to get complacent in my daily routines, confident in the knowledge that tomorrow will be very much like yesterday. The distinct blessings of an ordinary day are lost in the rush of moving forward to whatever comes next so that I lose touch with what miracles are happening in the here and now.
The reality is there is nothing ordinary about the events of this day or any other – it might have been otherwise and some day it will be otherwise.
Advent is an opportunity to stop the rushing, take a look around and actually revel in the quiet moments of daily work, chats, walks, meals, and sleep. Even the current constant of someone in the family being sick with one or more viruses, interrupting plans and schedules, can’t interrupt how remarkable it is to just be here together.
We are granted peace despite the stress of illness.
Jane Kenyon wrote much of her best poetry with the knowledge she was dying of leukemia. Her work reminds me that I don’t need a terminal diagnosis to appreciate the blessings of each ordinary moment. Her poet husband, Donald Hall, wrote verse from his perspective of cherishing the time he had left with his wife, living as if each day were his last day with her.
Like Jane’s “paintings on the walls,” on foggy gray days like today, I can gaze at our landscape paintings by local artist Randy Van Beek depicting an idealized serenity that I only sometimes feel. They depict the blessings just outside my windows.
I simply need to pay attention.
Christ came to earth to remind us to dwell richly in the experience of these moments, those sweet peaches and cream of daily life, while they are happening. God knows, the little miracles are a foretaste of the heaven which is to come.
This year’s Advent theme “Dawn on our Darkness” is taken from this 19th century Christmas hymn:
Brightest and best of the sons of the morning, dawn on our darkness and lend us your aid. Star of the east, the horizon adorning, guide where our infant Redeemer is laid. ~Reginald Heber -from “Brightest and Best”
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It was a time like this, War & tumult of war, a horror in the air. Hungry yawned the abyss- and yet there came the star and the child most wonderfully there.
It was time like this of fear & lust for power, license & greed and blight- and yet the Prince of bliss came into the darkest hour in quiet & silent light.
And in a time like this how celebrate his birth when all things fall apart? Ah! Wonderful it is with no room on the earth the stable is our heart. ~Madeleine L’Engle “Into the Darkest Hour” in Wintersong
Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it – because he is out of place in it, and yet must be in it – his place is with those others who do not belong, who are rejected because they are regarded as weak… With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world. He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst. ~Thomas Merton from Watch for the Light
The Nativity, stained glass in the Epiphany Chapel of Winchester Cathedral, UK
The Nativity by Le Nain, Antoine and Louis (d.1648) & Mathieu (1607-77)
A stable and its stone manger is sanctuary for the weary and burdened – especially when everything seems to be falling apart.
There are so many ways we continue to refuse access and shut the doors in the faces of those two (plus One) weary travelers, forcing them to look elsewhere for refuge. We say “no room” dozens of times every day, not realizing who we are shutting out.
With all the material distractions of our age, it is small wonder we pay no attention to who is waiting patiently outside the back door of our lives, where it is inhospitable and cold and dank. Few of us would invite our special company into the barn first and foremost. Yet these travelers have no access to our front door, with fancy meals and feather beds and fresh flowers on the cupboard. They are relegated to the dark and manure strewn parts of our lives. That is where He was born to dwell amid our messiness, and that is where He remains, in the humblest parts of our being, the parts we do not want to show off, and indeed, most often want to hide.
And that is, of course, a place where there is always plenty of room.
This year’s Advent theme “Dawn on our Darkness” is taken from this 19th century Christmas hymn:
Brightest and best of the sons of the morning, dawn on our darkness and lend us your aid. Star of the east, the horizon adorning, guide where our infant Redeemer is laid. ~Reginald Heber -from “Brightest and Best”
A stable lamp is lighted Whose glow shall wake the sky The stars shall bend their voices And every stone shall cry And every stone shall cry And straw like gold will shine A barn shall harbour heaven A stall become a shrine
This child through David’s city Will ride in triumph by The palm shall strew its branches And every stone shall cry And every stone shall cry Though heavy, dull and dumb And lie within the roadway To pave the Kingdom come
Yet He shall be forsaken And yielded up to die The sky shall groan and darken And every stone shall cry And every stone shall cry For thorny hearts of men God’s blood upon the spearhead God’s love refused again
But now as at the ending The low is lifted high The stars will bend their voices And every stone shall cry And every stone shall cry In praises of the child By whose descent among us The worlds are reconciled ~Richard Wilbur“A Christmas Hymn”
No presents, no candy, no treat No stockings hung by the fire No parties, no family to greet No angel’s heavenly choirs
Bells are ringing all over the world Bells are ringing calling the light Bells are ringing all over the world All over the world tonight
No doorways, no windows, no walls No shelter here on the ground No standing and no safe place to fall Just the promise of this distant sound
Wherever you’re walking tonight Whoever you’re waiting for Somehow by the stable’s faint light Peace in your heart is restored
Bells are ringing all over the world Bells are ringing calling the light Bells are ringing all over the world All over the world tonight ~Mary Chapin Carpenter
The congregation sang off key. The priest was rambling. The paint was peeling in the Sacristy.
A wayward pigeon, trapped in the church, flew wildly around for a while and then flew toward a stained glass window,
but it didn’t look like reality.
The ushers yawned, the dollar bills drifted lazily out of the collection baskets and a child in the front row began to cry.
Suddenly, the pigeon flew down low, swooping over the heads of the faithful like the Holy Ghost descending at Pentecost
Everyone took it to be a sign, Everyone wants so badly to believe. You can survive anything if you know that someone is looking out for you,
but the sky outside the stained glass window, doesn’t it look like home? ~June Beisch, “Holy Ghost” from Fatherless Women.
A little aside from the main road, becalmed in a last-century greyness, there is the chapel, ugly, without the appeal to the tourist to stop his car and visit it. The traffic goes by, and the river goes by, and quick shadows of clouds, too, and the chapel settles a little deeper into the grass.
But here once on an evening like this, in the darkness that was about his hearers, a preacher caught fire and burned steadily before them with a strange light, so that they saw the splendour of the barren mountains about them and sang their amens fiercely, narrow but saved in a way that men are not now. ~R.S. Thomas “The Chapel”
The church knelt heavy above us as we attended Sunday School, circled by age group and hunkered on little wood folding chairs where we gave our nickels, said our verses, heard the stories, sang the solid, swinging songs.
It could have been God above in the pews, His restless love sifting with dust from the joists. We little seeds swelled in the stone cellar, bursting to grow toward the light.
Maybe it was that I liked how, upstairs, outside, an avid sun stormed down, burning the sharp- edged shadows back to their buildings, or how the winter air knifed after the dreamy basement.
Maybe the day we learned whatever would have kept me believing I was just watching light poke from the high, small window and tilt to the floor where I could make it a gold strap on my shoe, wrap my ankle, embrace any part of me. ~Maureen Ash “Church Basement”
There is much wrong with churches overall, comprised as they are of fallen people with broken wings and fractured faith. We seem odd, keen to find flaws in one another as we crack open and spill our own.
Yet what is right with the church is who we pray to, why we sing, feast together and share His Word. We are visible people joined together as a body bloodied and bruised. Someone is looking out for us despite our thoroughly motley messiness.
Our Lord of Heaven and Earth rains down His restless love upon our heads, no matter how humble a building we worship in, or how we look or feel today.
The dove descends upon us.
We are simply grateful to be alive, to raise our hands together, to sing and kneel and bow in a house, indeed a home that God calls His own.
This year’s Advent theme “Dawn on our Darkness” is taken from this 19th century Christmas hymn.
Brightest and best of the sons of the morning, dawn on our darkness and lend us your aid. Star of the east, the horizon adorning, guide where our infant Redeemer is laid. ~Reginald Heber -from “Brightest and Best”
The old church leans nearby a well-worn road, Upon a hill that has no grass or tree, The winds from off the prairie now unload The dust they bring around it fitfully.
The path that leads up to the open door Is worn and grayed by many toiling feet Of us who listen to the Bible lore And once again the old-time hymns repeat.
And ev’ry Sabbath morning we are still Returning to the altar waiting there. A hush, a prayer, a pause, and voices fill The Master’s House with a triumphant air.
The old church leans awry and looks quite odd, But it is beautiful to us and God. ~Stephen Paulus
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But if we hope for what we do not see, we eagerly wait for it with perseverance. Likewise the Spirit also helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. Romans 8:25-27
And so many of us. How can we expect Him to keep track of which voice goes with what request. Words work their way skyward. Oh Lord, followed by petition — for a cure, the safe landing. For what is lost, missing — a spouse, a job, the final game. Complaint cloaked as need — the faster car, porcelain teeth. That so many entreaties go unanswered may say less about our lamentable inability to be heard than our inherent flawed condition.
Why else, at birth, the first sound we make, that full-throttled cry? Of want, want, want. Of never enough. Desire as embedded in us as the ancestral tug in my unconscienced dog who takes to the woods, nose to the ground, pulled far from domesticated hearth, bowl of kibble. Left behind, I go about my superior business, my daily ritual I could call prayer.
But look, this morning, in my kitchen, I’m not asking for more of anything. My husband slices bread, hums a tune from our past. Eggs spatter in a skillet. Wands of lilac I stuck in a glass by the open window wobble in a radiant and — dare I say it?— merciful light. ~Deborah Cummins “Just One God” from Counting the Waves
We who are nothingness can never be filled: Never by orchards on the blowing sea, Nor the rich foam of wheat all summer sunned.
Our hollow is deeper far than treasure can fill: Helmets of gold swim ringing in the wells Of our desire as thimbles in the sea.
Come like an ocean thundering to the moon, Drowning the sunken reef, mounting the shore. Come, infinite answer to our infinite want. ~John Frederick Nims from “Prayer”
Each morning’s sunrise, each evening’s sunset is answer to our unuttered prayers. From subtle simmer to blazing boil, settling back to gray.
And so our prayers of praise, thanksgiving, petition rise and fall, simmer and boil and are sometimes breathed in silence.
Yet our Father answers with radiance and mercy.
So we keep on trudging, with each step our prayers are answered: we will take the next step, and the next, and the next.
Never alone. Always heard. Forever loved.
This year’s Advent theme “Dawn on our Darkness” is taken from this 19th century Christmas hymn.
Brightest and best of the sons of the morning, dawn on our darknessand lend us your aid. Star of the east, the horizon adorning, guide where our infant Redeemer is laid. ~Reginald Heber -from “Brightest and Best”
O radiant Light, O Sun divine; Of God the Father’s deathless face, O image of the Light sublime that fills the heav’nly dwelling place. O Son of God, the source of life, Praise is your due by night and day. Our happy lips must raise the strain of your esteemed and splendid name.
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Before the adults we call our children arrive with their children in tow for Thanksgiving,
we take our morning walk down the lane of oaks and hemlocks, mist a smell of rain by nightfall—underfoot,
the crunch of leathery leaves released by yesterday’s big wind.
You’re ahead of me, striding into the arch of oaks that opens onto the fields and stone walls of the road—
as a V of geese honk a path overhead, and you stop—
in an instant, without thought, raising your arms toward sky, your hands flapping from the wrists,
and I can read in the echo your body makes of these wild geese going where they must,
such joy, such wordless unity and delight, you are once again the child who knows by instinct, by birthright,
just to be is a blessing. In a fictional present, I write the moment down. You embodied it. ~Margaret Gibson “Moment”
On this day, this giving-thanks day, I know families who surround loved ones fighting for life in ICU beds, others struggling to find gratitude in their pierced hearts when their child/brother/sister/spouse is gunned down in mass shootings, or too many tragically lost every day to overwhelming depression, as well as those lost in a devastating three year pandemic.
It is the measure of us – we created ones – to kneel in gratitude while facing the terrible and still feel touched, held, loved and blessed, to sincerely believe how wide and long and high and deep is His love for us — even when we weep, even when we mourn, even when our pain makes no sense.
God chose to come alongside us and suffer, rather than fly away. He knew being alive ~just to be like us at all~ was His blessing to last an eternity.
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You are our portal to those hidden havens Whence we return to bless our being here. Scribe of the Kingdom, keeper of the door Which opens on to all we might have lost, Ward of a word-hoard in the deep hearts core Telling the tale of Love from first to last.
Generous, capacious, open, free, Your wardrobe-mind has furnished us with worlds Through which to travel, whence we learn to see Along the beam, and hear at last the heralds, Sounding their summons, through the stars that sing, Whose call at sunrise brings us to our King. ~Malcolm Guite from “C.S. Lewis: a sonnet”
This is the 59th anniversary of C.S Lewis’s death in 1963, overshadowed that day by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
the wardrobe from C.S. Lewis’ childhood home built by his grandfather, later to serve as his inspiration for “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” in his home “The Kilns” at Oxford.
Sign on this wardrobe which is part of the C.S. Lewis collection at the Marion Wade Center at Wheaton College, Illinois:
“We do not take responsibility for people disappearing.”
This is no mere piece of furniture; Enchantment hangs within Among the furs and cloaks Smelling faintly of mothballs.
Touch the smooth wood, Open the doors barely To be met with a faint cool breeze~ Hints of snowy woods and adventure.
Reach inside to feel smooth soft furs Move aside to allow dark passage Through to another world, a pathway to Cherished imagination of the soul.
Seek a destination for mind and heart, A journey through the wardrobe, Navigate the night path to reach a Lit lone lamp post in the wood.
Beaming light as it shines undimmed, A beacon calling us home, back home Through the open door, to step out transformed, No longer lost or longing, but immersed in the Glory of Spring.
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In this kingdom the sun never sets; under the pale oval of the sky there seems no way in or out, and though there is a sea here there is no tide. For the egg itself is a moon glowing faintly in the galaxy of the barn, safe but for the spoon’s ominous thunder, the first delicate crack of lightning. ~Linda Pastan, “Egg”
It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad. C. S. Lewis from Mere Christianity
I try hard to be the good egg- smooth on the surface, gooey inside, often a bit scrambled, yet ordinary and decent, indistinguishable from others, blending in, not making waves.
It’s not been bad staying just as I am. Except I can no longer remain like this.
A dent or two have appeared in my outer shell from bumps along the way, and a crack up one side extends daily.
It has come time to change or face inevitable rot.
Nothing can be the same again: the fragments of shell left behind must be abandoned as useless confinement.
Newly hatched and transformed: now there is the wind beneath my wings. I’ll soar toward an endless horizon where the sun never sets. and stretches beyond eternity.
I will no longer be merely ordinary.
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