On the Mystery of the Incarnation

It’s when we face for a moment
the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know
the taint in our own selves, that awe
cracks the mind’s shell and enters the heart:
not to a flower, not to a dolphin,
to no innocent form
but to this creature vainly sure
it and no other is god-like, God
(out of compassion for our ugly
failure to evolve) entrusts,
as guest, as brother,
the Word.


--Denise Levertov (1923-1997) esteemed Anglo-American poet, convert to Roman Catholicism, daughter of a Welsh mother and a Russian Jewish father turned priest in the Church of England, from The Stream & the Sapphire: Selected Poems on Religious Themes.

We put aside all we are

We put aside all that we are:
we cleave to all that Gos is:
we will bear all that troubles us, for His glory.

O God! help us to worship You
after Your mind and not after our own.
Help us to forget ourselves
and live only for your glory.
Help us to accept gratefully
our weaknesses and inadequacy
and forget them in adoring only You.

The Lord is in His holy temple:
let all the earth keep silence before Him.
We will enter into your gates with thanksgiving, O God,
and into your courts with praise.
We will lift up our souls in Your name
and bless You while we live.

O come, let us worship and bow down:
let us kneel before the Lord our Maker.
For He is our God.
We are the people of His pasture
and the sheep of His hand.

It is a good thing to give thanks
to the Lord Most High,
to show forth Your loving-kindness in the morning
and Your faithfulness every night.

This is the day which the Lord has made:
we will rejoice and be glad in it:
we laid us down in peace and slept:
we awaked for the Lord sustained us.
Glory be to You, O Lord!

Our help is in the name of the Lord,
who has made heaven and earth:
blessed be the name of the Lord,
from this time forth and for evermore.

--Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941), in Evelyn Underhill's Prayer Book, ed. by Evelyn Underhill, English mystic and spiritual teacher

The saints

Give us light, O Lord, that contemplating the love and patience of Jesus and His saints, we may be changed into love and patience.
Take from us, by the contemplation of their example, all selfishness.
Take from us all softness.
Take from us all delicacy and fastidiousness.
Take from us all cowardice and timidity.
Take from us all self-love.

Give us a share in their spirit of endurance.
Give us a love of labour.
Give us a love of the cross.
Give us a love of hardships.
Give us a spirit of courage.
Give us a spirit of surrendered trust.
That we may be willing to spend ourselves and to be spent for the sake of Your children, in union with Your self-giving love.

--Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941), English Anglo-Catholic mystic, retreat-leader, and writer, whom we remember today in the calendar of saints, from Evelyn Underhill's Prayer Book.