The Search

Whither, O whither art Thou fled,
                    My Lord, my Love ?
My searches are my daily bread,
                    Yet never prove.

My knees pierce the earth, mine eyes the sky;
                    And yet the sphere
And center both to me deny
                    That Thou art there.

Yet can I mark how herbs below
                    Grow green and gay,
As if to meet Thee they did know,
                    While I decay.

Yet can I mark how stars above
                    Simper and shine,
As having keys unto Thy love,
                    While poor I pine.

I sent a sigh to seek Thee out,
                    Deep drawn in pain,
Winged like an arrow; but my scout
                    Returns in vain.

I turned another (having store)
                    Into a groan,
Because the search was dumb before;
                    But all was one.

Lord, dost Thou some new fabric mold
                    Which favor wins,
And keeps Thee present; leaving the old
                    Unto their sins?

Where is my God ? what hidden place
                    Conceals Thee still?
What covert dare eclipse Thy face?
                    Is it Thy will?

O let not that of anything;
                    Let rather brass,
Or steel, or mountains be Thy ring,
                    And I will pass.

Thy will such an entrenching is,
                    As passeth thought:
To it all strength, all subtleties
                    
Thy will such a strange distance is,
                    As that to it
East and West touch, the poles do kiss,
                    And parallels meet.

Since then my grief must be as large
                    As is Thy space,
Thy distance from me; see my charge,
                    Lord, see my case.

O take these bars, these lengths, away;
                    Turn, and restore me:
Be not Almighty, let me say,
                    Against, but for me.

When Thou dost turn, and wilt be near,
                    What edge so keen,
What point so piercing can appear
                    To come between?

For as Thy absence doth excel
                    All distance known,
So doth Thy nearness bear the bell,
                    Making two one.

--George Herbert,  English priest and poet

The Donkey

When fishes flew and forests walked
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born;

With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil's walking parody
On all four-footed things.

The tattered outlaw of the earth,
Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.

-- G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), English writer, philosopher, Catholic convert, and theologian.

Temptations

Creature comforts
And why not?
All you have to do is
Give up a few rocks
These sun-baked stones
That burn your hands and cut your feet
Could soon become a desert treat!
Stop being so hard on yourself!

Fame
All yours for the taking
All you have to do is
Leave this lonely wilderness
Head right to the center of the noisy crowd
Drop in your branding clear and loud
Start showing what you've got!

Power
Not as easy, but well within your reach
All you have to do is
Want it more than anything
Make it your top priority
Your one and only deity
Instead of your strange, silly God
Of Suffering
Solitude
And Silence

-- Brother Eckhart (Chip Camden), OSB and member of St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Palo Alto

The Annunciation

Starts with a stream of gold that’s ridden
      by a relentlessly linear dove,
ready to pierce a young girl’s head.

            Then, her face, her gaze looking up, out
past the easel and later, past the frame,
      eyes raised as if to ask a question. Take

the virgin robe, for instance, which van Eyck has made
      to fall luxuriously as a second chance
across the old storyline etched below her.

            And, further down, the church’s intricately
strict apse, each floorboard, painstaked as lace, showing here,
      David’s lesson in beheading, there Samson’s

tearing down the temple—that history
            interrupted by her silken, layered folds:
each blue built up from perfecting the oil.

            His favorite signature, “As best I can”
or “As I was able, but not just as I wished.”
      Imagine the endless effort: a man

in the distance, deep in the could have been,
      who sat before the easel, hours, perhaps,
past his patience for lasting regrets,

            flat refusals—the quick-drying water-based
attempts flung around a room.
      And how, alone with pigment barrels, chamber pots,

the canvasses stretched, the fire exhumed,
      he poured a stream of oil back and forth,
watching it catch the light, change a wooden bowl.

            For the sake of making the mundane
seem to marry the mysterious,
      her eyes raised—lacquered, slippery wells, caught—

her startled acceptance. Since it’s her choosing
      to be chosen that mattered, largest figure
in the frame, the virgin form layered

            with gold light, blue, her pale hands open
for the god imagined sick with thin horizon,
      and ready to enter thickness now, the body’s

blood, gristle, vertebrae, whorled fingerprint.
      The oil spread back and forth. His wrist stiffened.
“As I was able, but not just as I wished.”

            So, out to pay the right kind of attention
to detail, as if, in the lengthening
      carelessness of cracked roads leading away

from his town, beneath a matted pulp
      of the year’s leaves, he wished he could hear
silence taking shape: a weed, say, starting

            to split the surface, part vegetal
altar and example of dumb, green change.
      Or, say, through the window, a flock of geese

receding, advancing, by turns, as the sky’s gray
      sometimes meets the double strength gray of sea,
he might have looked between the shapes,

            their invisible lines blooded, some racing ahead,
others falling behind, each filling in, quickly,
      empty spaces where the wings once beat.

And still, she looks up, asking to be entered.
      So that if she turned away from shadows, wood panels,
chamber pots, winter coats lined against the wall,

            he might have looked so far into the difficult
that he finally could believe: behind her gaze,
      beneath her brow, under the layers of

shell, salt, finally skin-white, lay the mind
      of a mother giving birth to a father
and a son, the flesh—a color, an instant, spared.

-- Pimone Triplett, poet and professor, from Ruining the Picture.

Image: The Annunciation, by Jan Van Eyck 

Take A World

 

                     The Annunciation by Jan Van Eyck, 1434–36

Take a world in which each flower’s an Easter lily
and books chivvy open to the place where our names leap.
Then step into the temple where Mary,

gown belled like a Christmas tree angel’s,
speaks with a real one. Their hands negotiate:
Mary is asking why light curls to ribbony rainbow

on the angel’s back while through her own body
it shoots in stiff gold arrows. The angel nods, grins.
Nothing more gorgeous than their drapery-softened

gesticulation, the room’s blue-propped lilies
and plump ottoman. It’s enough to make us think
they’re standing in the world, two women alert

to the heft of their clothes as Mary asks,
“Who, me?”, her eyes sliding sideways to her painter,
master of distraction. She can’t see Jehovah

behind her, his one blazing window, though we can,
we see the room’s whole depth falling into light
as we wait for someone not transfixed by dilemma

who’s standing where we are. As we wait for Joseph.

--Terri Witek (1952- ), American poet, from Fools and Crows.

Suburban Prayer

Grant us for grace
oppositions, stimyings
sand in our pet gears
a bubble in the cozy blood

Crowd our real estate
with the rag tag real, the world.
Marry us off, lonely girls
to Harlem and Asia. This Lent
celebrate in the haunted house, the world.

--Daniel Berrigan (1921-2016), American Jesuit priest, activist, dissenter, pacifist, and poet, from And the Risen Bread: Selected Poems, 1957–1997 (1998).

Prayer of St. Cuthbert

Softly as the dew-fall of heaven, 

may the Holy Spirit come upon me 

to aid me and to raise me,
to bind my prayer firmly
at the throne of the King of life.

God’s will would I do, 

my own will bridle;
God’s due would I give, 

my own due yield;
God’s path would I travel.

my own path refuse.

All whom I love,
into Your safe keeping;
all that I am,
into Your tender care;
all that will be,
into Your perfect will.

Amen.

--St. Cuthbert of Landisfarne (450-523), whose day is today.

Unless a grain of wheat

Oh let me fall as grain to the good earth
And die away from all dry separation,
Die to my sole self, and find new birth
Within that very death, a dark fruition,
Deep in this crowded underground, to learn
The earthy otherness of every other,
To know that nothing is achieved alone
But only where these other fallen gather.

If I bear fruit and break through to bright air,
Then fall upon me with your freeing flail
To shuck this husk and leave me sheer and clear
As heaven-handled Hopkins, that my fall
May be more fruitful and my autumn still
A golden evening where your barns are full.

-- Malcolm Guite (1957- ) English priest, poet, singer-songwriter, musician and theologian

Lectionary link: John 12:20-33, 5th Sunday in Lent B

Prayers for First Responders

Divine Physician, hear our prayers for those in emergency medicine. By your healing power, grant them quick minds and skillful hands. Strengthen them in times of trauma. In quiet times, give them rest and assurance of the value of their work. Keep them ever prepared for the work you have called them to do, for your mercy’ sake. Amen.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

God our strong deliverer: when those charged with the urgent mediation of your healing power feel overwhelmed by the numbers of the suffering, uphold them in their fatigue and banish their despair. Let them see with your eyes, so they may know all their patients as precious. Give comfort, and renew their energy and compassion, for the sake of Jesus in whom is our life and our hope. Amen.

--From the Episcopal Church

Prayer in Infirmity

O most mighty and most merciful God,
who, though thou have taken me off of my feet ,
hast not taken me off of my foundation, which is thyself;
who, though thou have removed me from that upright form
in which I could stand and see thy throne, the heavens,
yet has not removed from me that light
by which I can lie and see thyself;
who though thou have weakened my bodily knees,
that they cannot bow to thee,
hast yet left me the knees of my heart,
which are bowed unto thee evermore;
as thou hast made this bed thine altar,
make me thy sacrifice,
and as thou make us thy son Jesus Christ the priest,
so make me his Deacon,
to minister to him
in a cheerful surrender of my body and soul
to thy pleasure,
by his hands.

-- John Donne, from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions III (1624), from Glorious Companions: Five Centuries of Anglican Spirituality, 2002

Image: Window fromTrinity Episcopal Church, Tulsa OK.

On Liturgy

Fear not, little flock.

—Luke 12:32

When he likened us to a flock
he certainly meant sheep
but this morning from the back pew
of a building, stone and chancelled, nothing like
the over lit, shag carpet church of my childhood,
here amid arch and echo I think
we are a flock of birds—
starlings gathering in their murmuration.
The pensive organ, the hushed
chatter now dips, now crests, and at the bells
we all together fold to silence,
as when the helixing black cloud drops
down to feed across a reed bed.
All at once the stillness breaks
into a great applause of wings, the mounting up
in doxology, the downsweep then
of many heads in prayer. How
strange, how ominous almost
for one on the ground to watch
this cluster heave itself
heavenward, obeying powers
invisible as magnetism,
forming and reforming in the shape
of something too large to be likened.

--Jennifer Polson Peterson, poet and teacher, from Image Journal

Photo:  Murmuration of starlings over Lough Ennell, March 4, 2021, by James Crombie and Colin Hogg. Story of the image is found here.

The scripture reference is used in Proper 14C.

Lent: Deformed Pussy Willow

 ————–Not the branches

we cut each
————–windy March
to hang with eggs
————–dyed red.
Not those
————–we bless
with palms
————–& smoke.
These arced
————–spines & split
limbs bud
————–through straining
bark. Backs
————–humped & bent,
bound. Does
————–God suffer
these husked
————–velvet knobs?
Stunted,
————–a wreath
of tumors.
————–Yes, he does.
Gather them
————–for procession,
for the table
————–& icon,
crown for
————–weeping Theotokos.

-- Anya Krugovoy Silver (1968-2018), from Image Journal

Image from Epic Gardening

Beyond the Headlines

Then I saw the wild geese flying
in fair formation to their bases in Inchicore
and I knew that these wings would outwear the wings of war
and a man's simple thoughts outlive the day's loud lying.
Don't fear, don't fear, I said to my soul.
The bedlam of time is an empty bucket rattled,
‘Tis you who will say in the end who best battles.
only they who fly home to God have flown at all. 

--Patrick Kavanagh (1905-1967), Irish poet, written in Dublin in 1943, from Collected Poems, 1964

Image: Pale Bellied Brent Geese migrate back to Dublin Bay (Inchicore is a suburb of Dublin)

Prayer for Health Care Providers

Give your blessing, gracious God, to those whom you have called to the study and practice of the arts of healing, and the prevention of disease and pain. Give them the wisdom of your Holy Spirit, that through their work the health of our community may be advanced and your creation glorified; through your Son Jesus Christ. Amen.

Prayer for Those Who Minister to the Sick

Gracious God, source of life and health: Jesus came to our disordered world to make your people whole. Send your Spirit on those who are sick and all who minister to them; that when the sick enter your peace, they may offer thanks to your Great Name; through Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.

- Episcopal Prayer

The Paradox of the Cross and the Eucharist

The cultic division between the religious and the profane is potentially abolished in faith in the Christ who was profaned by crucifixion. Thus the Eucharist, like the meals held by Jesus with “sinners and publicans,” must also be celebrated with the unrighteous, those who have no rights and the godless from the “highways and hedges” of society, in all their profanity, and should no longer be limited, as a religious sacrifice, to the inner circle of the devout, to those who are members of the same denomination.  

The Christian Church can reintroduce the divisions between the religious and the profane and between those who are within an those are without, only at the price of losing its own identity as the Church of the crucified Christ …. 

It is the godless, forced out by the church, who recognized the inner distinction between the reality of the cross on Golgotha and its cultic representation within the church. Thus for the faith which believe believes in and celebrates the representation of the crucified Christ as a reality in the sacrifice of the mass, it is also indispensable to be aware once again of this inner distinction. 

 

--Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God, 44-45. 

Cleansing the Temple

Come to your Temple here with liberation
And overturn these tables of exchange
Restore in me my lost imagination
Begin in me for good, the pure change.
Come as you came, an infant with your mother,
That innocence may cleanse and claim this ground
Come as you came, a boy who sought his father
With questions asked and certain answers found,
Come as you came this day, a man in anger
Unleash the lash that drives a pathway through
Face down for me the fear the shame the danger
Teach me again to whom my love is due.
Break down in me the barricades of death
And tear the veil in two with your last breath.

-- Malcolm Guite (1954- ), English theologian, priest, poet, musician, and songwriter

Scripture Reference: John 2:13-22 (Third Sunday in Lent B)

Image: Peter Koenig, Jesus Cleansing the Temple

Having Confessed

Having confessed he feels

That he should go down on his knees and pray
For forgiveness for his pride, for having
Dared to view his soul from the outside.
Lie at the heart of the emotion, time
Has its own work to do. We must not anticipate
Or awaken for a moment. God cannot catch us
Unless we stay in the unconscious room
Of our hearts. We must be nothing,
Nothing that God may make us something.
We must not touch the immortal material
We must not daydream to-morrow’s judgement—
God must be allowed to surprise us.
We have sinned, sinned like Lucifer
By this anticipation. Let us lie down again
Deep in anonymous humility and God
May find us worthy material for His hand.

By Patrick Kavanagh (1904–1967), Irish poet and novelist from Collected Poems.

Prayer for Those Who Care for the Sick

Lord Who Inhabits Eternity, we intercede for the sick, asking that You give Your healing power to those who are ministering to their needs. Guide their hands and use them as Your instruments of peace. Give the caregivers wisdom and compassion from You as they tend to the ill. From You only can we expect relief; all blessings we enjoy come from You. We pray in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever, Amen.

- Episcopal Church prayer

Flickering Mind

Lord, not you,

it is I who am absent.
At first
belief was a joy I kept in secret,
stealing alone
into sacred places:
a quick glance, and away—and back,
circling.
I have long since uttered your name
but now
I elude your presence.
I stop
to think about you, and my mind
at once
like a minnow darts away,
darts
into the shadows, into gleams that fret
unceasing over
the river's purling and passing.
Not for one second
will my self hold still, but wanders
anywhere,
everywhere it can turn. Not you,
it is I am absent.
You are the stream, the fish, the light,
the pulsing shadow,
you the unchanging presence, in whom all
moves and changes.
How can I focus my flickering, perceive
at the fountain's heart
the sapphire I know is there?

-- Denise Levertov (1923—1997), Anglo-American poet and convert to Catholicism, from The Stream and the Sapphire (1997)