We Awaken in Christ's Body

We awaken in Christ’s body, even as Christ

awakens our languishing bodies. And look!
My poor hand is Christ, the very hand of Christ.
And look! He enters my foot, and becomes
without conclusion, me. I reach out my hand and, full
of wonder, my hand becomes Christ, becomes
all of him—for he remains indivisibly whole,
without separation from his eternal holiness.
I take one step, my foot advancing, and look!
He is revealed as a flash of lightning, there
proceeding with my lowly foot.
Do you think I blaspheme? Then open
your heart to him, and receive the one who is ever
opening to you, and opening ever so deeply.
If we love him as we say, we wake up
in his body, even here, where our own bodies, entire,
every lash and atom, the honored and the dishonored,
are realized as his, are realized as him. And look!
He makes us—at long last—utterly real, and everything
that is hurt, all that has appeared to us as dark, as broken,
diseased, shameful, ugly, irreparably torn
is in him transfigured, and is revealed as whole,
lovely, illumined with and by and in his light.
And look, we rise from our long sleep, bearing the beloved
with our every step.


--Saint Simeon the New Theologian, 10th century

now all the fingers of this tree(darling)have

now all the fingers of this tree(darling)have

hands, and all the hands have people; and
more each particular person is(my love)
alive than every world can understand

and now you are and i am now and we're
a mystery which will never happen again,
a miracle which has never happened before–
and shining this our now must come to then

our then shall be some darkness during which
fingers are without hands; and i have no
you: and all trees are(any more than each
leafless)its silent in forevering snow

—but never fear(my own, my beautiful
my blossoming)for also then's until

-- e. e. Cummings, (1894-1962), American poet, from 100 Poems

Shoring Up and Shoring Down

With near-anaphoric repetition
   the tedious Pacific yet insists
on pressing this our gritty beach
   for further evidence. And look!
At intervals the shore concedes. And Look!
   Here and there the cliffs
reveal the land has altogether
   acquiesced, having shrugged
its shoulders, shedding heaps
   of clay onto the grit.

With near-anaphoric repetition
   the melancholic ebb and flow
repeat their endless question, just as we
   interrogate the rock and clay
and fossil-bearing strata for a clue
   regarding what has brought us here,
regarding what might lead us hence.

--Scott Cairns (1954- ), American poet and former professor at the University of Missouri, from Anaphora: New Poems

Epiphany on the Jordan

Beginning here we glimpse the Three-in-one;

The river runs, the clouds are torn apart,
The Father speaks, the Sprit and the Son
Reveal to us the single loving heart
That beats behind the being of all things
And calls and keeps and kindles us to light.
The dove descends, the spirit soars and sings
‘You are belovèd, you are my delight!’

In that quick light and life, as water spills
And streams around the Man like quickening rain,
The voice that made the universe reveals
The God in Man who makes it new again.
He calls us too, to step into that river
To die and rise and live and love forever.


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

Today is the anniversary of my baptism in 1965 at Southern Hills United Methodist Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Possible Answers to Prayer

Your petitions—though they continue to bear
just the one signature—have been duly recorded.
Your anxieties—despite their constant,

relatively narrow scope and inadvertent
entertainment value—nonetheless serve
to bring your person vividly to mind.

Your repentance—all but obscured beneath
a burgeoning, yellow fog of frankly more
conspicuous resentment—is sufficient.

Your intermittent concern for the sick,
the suffering, the needy poor is sometimes
recognizable to me, if not to them.

Your angers, your zeal, your lipsmackingly
righteous indignation toward the many
whose habits and sympathies offend you—

these must burn away before you’ll apprehend
how near I am, with what fervor I adore
precisely these, the several who rouse your passions.

-- Scott Cairns (1954- ) American poet and spiritual writer