Tag: being

…like dandelion seeds the Child
will blow across His room,
this sentence with its riverbed of stars,
this sentence that carries you too
the way a leaf is pulled downstream, because this
you begin to realize, is not the song of a seed
fallen on stone, not some light scorched 
into the dunes of the sky, but a phrase
whose wings fill the room, and you,––
you are that word which had remained
unnoticed in this sentence, and you begin
to speak with that light that quivers
like a branch, your own lips slightly moving
like a petal the bee has just left,
and you begin to realize you have lived
your whole life in this sentence
gradually unfolding towards its end,
the way the moon now ploys the sky, 
the way what you once thought was a mere star
now turns out to be a galaxy. 
~Richard Jackson “Annunciation” from Tidings in Poems of Devotion

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.  In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
John 1: 1-5

I tend to forget that in the beginning,
God is Word first,
speaking the world into being,
speaking Himself into being from the darkness of a womb,
born to speak the Word until His moment of death,
then rising so His being and Words are borne as Light
within the darkness of my heart.

God as Word gradually unfolds within us
until He utters His Last Word:
He is the Alpha and Omega,
HIs sentences announce the Beginning and the End.

Let the stable still astonish:
Straw-dirt floor, dull eyes,
Dusty flanks of donkeys, oxen;
Crumbling, crooked walls;
No bed to carry that pain,
And then, the child, rag-wrapped laid to cry
In a trough.
Who would have chosen this?
Who would have said:
“Yes, Let the God of Heaven and Earth be born in this place.”

Who but the same God
Who stands in the darker, fouler rooms of our hearts
And says,
“Yes, let the God of Heaven and Earth be born in THIS place.”
~Leslie Leyland Fields – “Let the Stable Still Astonish”

This year’s Barnstorming Advent theme “… the Beginning shall remind us of the End” is taken from the final lines in T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees”