Works of peace

Jesus is your child, 

your spouse, your neighbor, 

looking for someone to comfort Him.

Are you there?

 Let us make a resolution: I will be there

for my child, my spouse, my neighbor-

not just in words,

but by my sharing and sacrificing.

Maybe just a beautiful smile instead of that ugly look,

maybe a beautiful word instead of that angry word.

Let us take the trouble 

to be that one to comfort Him. 

- Mother Teresa

And though I constantly fail, this is my prayer. Forgive me.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, 

I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal.
And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge,
and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 

And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, 

and though I give my body to burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.

Love suffers long and is kind;

love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up;

love does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil;

love does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth;

love bears all things, 

believes all things,

hopes all things,

endures all things.

Love never fails.

Saints and poets

"Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you."

-Thornton Wilder

"Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it -- every, every minute?”

 

"No. Saints and poets maybe...they do some.”

-from Our Town by Thornton Wilder

Together they are on the couch, grandmother and granddaughter, eighty years separating them. Curled into the bend of her arm, my bathing-suit-clad daughter sits on my mother's lap, her pony tails bobbing into the side of her grandmother's face as she listens to a favorite story choice, "A House Is Built at Pooh Corner for Eeoyre." And I am grateful.

He spies the abandoned flesh of a newly molted cicada clinging to the house and cannot contain his excitement, his awe. Without hesitation, he moves towards this hollow shell, that which I would thoughtlessly be quick to wipe away, to discard, to discount as ugly. Yet, he sees the beauty in this detritus of metamorphosis left by one of the least of God's creatures. And I am grateful.

Inside the house, with hands immersed in the soapy water of the kitchen sink, I hear his call, "Sing with me," he cries to his twin brother, and the younger cannot resist. Their mouths are open wide, offering to anyone and everyone the gift of their song. Their song is lusty, bold, spontaneous, and uniquely their own. And I am grateful.

Last night the rain spoke to me slowly, 

saying, what joy to come falling out of the brisk cloud, 

to be happy again in a new way on the earth!

That's what it said as it dropped, 
smelling of iron, and vanished like a dream of the ocean
into the branches and the grass below.

Then it was over. The sky cleared.
I was standing under a tree with happy leaves, 
and I was myself, and there were stars in the sky
that were also themselves at the moment

at which moment
my right hand was holding my left hand
which was holding the tree
which was filled with stars and the soft rain-
imagine! imagine!
the long and wondrous journeys
still to be ours.

Mary Oliver

Dragon slayer

For Thomas

Today. Today surrounded by you at the table, my holy innocents, at the moment where blessings should have come forth from my heart and out of my mouth, I became monstrous, ugly, enraged, the dragon lashing out, spewing forth curses of righteous indignation - the ripped screens, the shoes left in the rain, the scrawls of ink all over the walls, the not living up to my requests - my expectations  so poisoned at that moment with anger (Lord, have mercy) I was unable even to pray over the food and demanded that someone do it for me.

And you. You did not shy away but instead were like the warrior-saint - valiant, though perhaps afraid, daring to open your mouth at the offense, singing "Christ is Risen," and then offering gentleness, a soft answer, a blessing, to quell my distemper, bestowing to me, your mother who should know better, a kindly rebuke - a balm rather than a slap to my distorted face - to give me breath, a holy spirit, to create space for repentance.

How quickly you opened your arms, forgiving me again, your terribly flawed, sinful mother. How pure is your heart. How beautifully you show me God.

Isaak's penitential psalm, unaccompanied.

Again, and yes again, O Ceaseless Tolerator

   of our bleaking recurrences, O Forever Forgoing   

                     Foregone (sans conclusion), O Inexhaustible,

                     I find my face against the floor, and yet again

                     my plea escapes from unclean lips, and from a heart

                     caked in and constricted by its own soiled residue.

You are forever, and forever blessed, and I aspire

                     one day to slip my knot and change things up,

                     to manage at least one late season sinlessly,

                     to bow before you yet one time without chagrin.

from Idiot Psalms 

Scott Cairns

Noisome, lighted, and salt

Then He said to me, "Prophesy to these bones and say to them, "O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord'...Behold, I will bring the Spirit of life upon you. I will put muscles on you and bring flesh upon you. I will cover you with skin and put my Spirit into you. Then you shall live..." 

"I know only enough of God to worship him, by any means ready to hand. There is an anomalous specificity to all our experience in space, a scandal of particularity, by which God burgeons up or showers down into the shabbiest of occasions, and leaves his creation's dealings with him in the hands of purblind and clumsy amateurs. This is all we are and all we ever were; God kann nicht anders. This process in time is history; in space, at such shocking random, it is mystery.

"A blur of romance clings to our notions of 'publicans,' 'sinners,' 'the poor,' 'the people in the marketplace,' 'our neighbors,' as though of course God should reveal himself, if at all, to these simple people, these Sunday school watercolor figures, who are so purely themselves in their tattered robes, who are single themselves, while we now are various, complex, and full at heart.

"We are busy. So, I see now, were they. Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us...

"...a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead - as if innocence had ever been - and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and involved.

"But there is no one but us. 

"There never has been. There have been generations which remembered, and generations which forgot; there has never been a generation of whole men and women who lived well for even one day.

"Yet some have imagined well, with honesty and art, the detail of such a life, and have described it with such grace, that we mistake vision for history, dream for description, and fancy that life has devolved.

"So. You learn this studying any history at all, especially the lives of artists and visionaries; you learn it from Emerson, who noticed that the meanness of our days is itself worth our thought; and you learn it, fitful in your pew, at church....

"Hoopla! All that I see arches, and light arches around it. The air churns out forces and lashes the marveling land. A hundred time through the fields and along the deep roads I've cried Holy. 

"I see a hundred insects moving across the air, rising and falling. Chipped notes of birdsong descend from the tree, tuneful and broken; the notes pile about me like leaves. Why do these molded clouds make themselves overhead innocently changing, trailing their flat blue shadows up and down everything, and passing, and gone? 

Ladies and gentlemen! You are given insects, and birdsong, and a replenishing series of clouds. The air is buoyant and wholly transparent, scoured by grasses. The earth stuck through it is noisome, lighted, and salt. Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? 'Whom shall I send,' heard the first Isaiah, 'and who will go for us?' And poor Isaiah, who happened to be standing there - and there was no one else - burst out, 'Here am I; send me.'"

from Holy the Firm

Annie Dillard

Christ is Risen!

Kristo Gesso!

Kristos Tenestwal!