In the Valley of Death

With arms outstretched on the hill

An American chestnut tree stands resureected.

Silently she draws new life from an old, dead stump

Where her ancestors died with blighted roots a hundred years ago.

She bears witness to the graves lying stoneless in her valley.

The sunken earth is the only marker

For brothers and sisters enslaved, laid too shallow.

The woodland cemetery is adorned with vine wreathes

Among pawpaws and May apples that keep wake.

People lay down and wept here in the shadow of death.

The rising Chestnut holds this broken history in her belly.

On this sacred ground an owl flies at half-mast and calls out,

"We cannot kill what God calls very good."

Nothing is forsaken since love seeps through

Shallow graves and dead stumps.

We weep for blights and injustices,

But even if we hung up our lyre,

The bluebirds and yellowbellied sapsuckers

Sing for the weary, "There is love after death."

-- The Rev. Becca Stevens, from Love Heals (p. 98), 2017

Confession of Sin from A New Zealand Prayer Book

Happy are those whose sins are forgiven,
whose wrongs are pardoned.
I will confess my sins to the Lord,
I will not conceal my wrongdoings.

Silence

God forgives and heals us.
We need your healing, merciful God:
give us true repentance.
Some sins are plain to us;
some escape us,
some we cannot face.
Forgive us;
set us free to hear your word to us;
set us free to serve you.

The presiding priest says

God forgives you.
Forgive others;
Forgive yourself.

Silence

Through Christ, God has put away your sin:
approach your God in peace.


--From" Eucharistic Liturgy of Thanksgiving for Creation and Redemption," in He Karakia Mihinare o Aoteoroa: A New Zealand Prayer Book

Wind in the Pine

Oh, I can hear you, God, above the cry
     Of the tossing trees—
Rolling your windy tides across the sky,
     And splashing your silver seas
     Over the pine,
     To the water-line
     Of the moon.
          Oh, I can hear you, God,
     Above the wail of the lonely loon—
     When the pine-tops pitch and nod—
          Chanting your melodies
     Of ghostly waterfalls and avalanches,
Washing your wind among the branches
     To make them pure and white.
Wash over me, God, with your piney breeze,
And your moon’s wet-silver pool;
Wash over me, God, with your wind and night,
     And leave me clean and cool.

--Lew Sarett (1888-1954) American poet and professor

Blessing of the Sick

Our Lord Jesus Christ be with you to defend you,
with you to keep you,
before you to lead you,
beside you to guard you,
and above you to bless you.
AMEN.

God be your comfort and your strength;
God be your hope and your support;
God be your light and your way;
and the blessing of God,
Creator, Redeemer, and Giver of Life,
remain with you now and forever.
AMEN.

-- New Zealand Prayer Book, Ministry of Healing, p. 745.

A Collect for Guidance

Heavenly Father,
in you we live and move and have our being:
We humbly pray to you
so to guide and govern us by your Holy Spirit,
that in the cares and occupations of our life
we may not forget you,
but may remember that we are ever walking in your sight,
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.

--Book of Common Prayer 1979, Morning Prayer  Rite II, p.100

O God Our Help in Ages Past

O God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home.

Under the shadow of Thy throne
Thy saints have dwelt secure;
Sufficient is Thine arm alone,
And our defense is sure.

Before the hills in order stood,
Or earth received her frame,
From everlasting Thou art God,
To endless years the same.

Thy Word commands our flesh to dust,
“Return, ye sons of men”:
All nations rose from earth at first,
And turn to earth again.

A thousand ages in Thy sight
Are like an evening gone;
Short as the watch that ends the night
Before the rising sun.

The busy tribes of flesh and blood,
With all their lives and cares,
Are carried downwards by the flood,
And lost in foll’wing years.

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly, forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the op’ning day.

Like flow’ry fields the nations stand
Pleased with the morning light;
The flow’rs beneath the mower’s hand
Lie with’ring ere ’tis night.

O God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Be Thou our guard while troubles last,
And our eternal home.

--Isaac Watts (1674-1748),  English hymn writer and Noncomforming pastor, Hymn 680 in Hymnal 1982

The Lord's Prayer (expansive language)

Eternal Spirit,
Earth-maker, Pain-bearer, Life-giver,
Source of all that is and that shall be,
Father and Mother of us all,
Loving God, in whom is heaven:

The hallowing of your name echo through the universe!
The way of your justice be followed by the peoples of the world!
Your heavenly will be done by all created beings!
Your commonwealth of peace and freedom
sustain our hope and come on earth.

With the bread we need for today, feed us.
In the hurts we absorb from one another, forgive us.
In times of temptation and testing, strengthen us.
From trials too great to endure, spare us.
From the grip of all that is evil, free us.

For you reign in the glory of the power that is love,
now and for ever.
Amen.

--from A New Zealand Prayer Book

My Papa's Waltz

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

--Theodore Roethke (1908-1963), American, from Collected Poems, 1942

The Little Dog's Rhapsody in the Night (Percy Three)

He puts his cheek against mine
and makes small, expressive sounds.
And when I'm awake, or awake enough

he turns upside down, his four paws
         in the air
and his eyes dark and fervent.

Tell me you love me, he says.

Tell me again.

Could there be a sweeter arrangement? Over and over
he gets to ask it.
I get to tell.

-- Mary Oliver, (1935- ), from Dog Songs (2013) and Devotions (2017)

On prayer- From "A Litany": XXIII

Hear us, O Hear us Lord, to thee
A sinner is more music, when he prays,
Than spheres, or angels' praises be
in panegyric alleluias,
Hear us, for till thou hear us, Lord
We know not what to say.
Thine ear to our sighs, tears, thoughts, gives voice and word.
Hear thyself now, for thou in us dost pray.

--John Donne (1572-1631)

Photo: Dame Julian of Norwich

A Blessing of Angels

May the Angels in their beauty bless you.
May they turn toward you streams of blessing.

May the Angel of Awakening stir your heart
To come alive to the eternal within you,
To all the invitations that quietly surround you.

May the Angel of Healing turn your wounds
Into sources of refreshment.

May the Angel of the Imagination enable you
To stand on the true thresholds,
At ease with your ambivalence
And drawn in new directions
Through the glow of your contradictions.

May the Angel of Compassion open your eyes
To the unseen suffering around you.

May the Angel of Wildness disturb the places
Where your life is domesticated and safe,
Take you to the territories of true otherness

Where all that is awkward in you
Can fall into its own rhythm.

May the Angel of Eros introduce you
To the beauty of your senses

To celebrate your inheritance
As a temple of the holy spirit.

May the Angel of Justice disturb you
To take the side of the poor and the wronged.

May the Angel of Encouragement confirm you
In worth and self-respect,
That you may live with the dignity
That presides in your soul.

May the Angel of Death arrive only
When your life is complete
And you have given every gift
To the threshold where its infinity can shine.

May all the Angels be your sheltering
And joyful guardians.


---John O'Donohoe, from To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings, 2008, pp. 32-33

Photo, detail from a mosaic in a chapel at the Washington National Cathedral

This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things (September 1)

September’s grasshopper launches himself
from his covert in some thatch
faded tattered percussive wings
rasping out his flight.

Chickadees swoop in
at the bird feeder outside my window
one at a time, with metronomic precision
seize a seed like Labor Day-frenzied shoppers,
then swoop off to let the next one in
exactly not like Labor Day-frenzied shoppers.

A few hours ago
I congratulated myself
sighing out my satisfaction
on the crisp coolness of the day
although I certainly had no hand in it.

And now glittering on the grass I see
six yellow leaves
that have already smirked the news
that autumn approaches.

Damn.

--L. B. S., September 1, 2017

September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright 
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can 
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return. 

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire 
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

--W. H. Auden (1907-1973) from Another Time (1940)