#adventapertures2025: day 25

Remembering that it happened once,We cannot turn away the thought,As we go out, cold, to our barnsToward the long night’s end, that weOurselves are living in the worldIt happened in when it first happened,That we ourselves, opening a stall(A latch thrown open countless timesBefore), might find them breathing there,Foreknown: the Child bedded in straw,The motherContinue reading “#adventapertures2025: day 25”

#adventapertures2025: day 19

I praise you because  you are artist and scientist  in one. When I am somewhat  fearful of your power,  your ability to work miracles  with a set-square, I hear  you murmuring to yourself  in a notation Beethoven  dreamed of but never achieved. You run off your scales of  rain water and sea water, play  theContinue reading “#adventapertures2025: day 19”

day 11: for rediscovery

Some of what we love we stumble upon –  a purse of gold thrown on the road, a poem, a friend, a great song. And more discloses itself to us –  a well among green hazels, a nut thicket –  when we are worn out searching for something quite different. And more comes to us,Continue reading “day 11: for rediscovery”

whole: day 23

Of all that God has shown me I can speak just the smallest word, Not more than a honey bee Takes on his foot From an overspilling jar. Mechtild of Magdeburg I wonder if I have to be dead before I can see the whole of God?  It isn’t unusual to hear people say ofContinue reading “whole: day 23”

Christmas Eve 2020

Here, where the rivers dredge upthe very stone of Heaven, we name its colors—muttonfat jade, kingfisher jade, jade of appleskin green. And here, in the glitteringhues of the Flemish Masters, we sample their wine;rest in their windows’ sun warmth,cross with pleasure their scrubbed tile floors.Everywhere the details leap like fish— bright shardsof water out ofContinue reading “Christmas Eve 2020”

we each hear in our own language (Acts 2.8, Pentecost 2020)

How do I hear the Holy Spirit speak to me?  In soughing grass, in crashing wave, in a child’s cry, in an elder’s laugh?  In sunlight on my lifted face, in moonlight on my crumpled bed? In an urgent prod that begins in my gut and lies heavy on my solar plexus?  In another’s singing,Continue reading “we each hear in our own language (Acts 2.8, Pentecost 2020)”