Miracle

Not the one who takes up his bed and walks

But the ones who have known him all along 

And carry him in — 

Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deeplocked 

In their backs, the stretcher handles 

Slippery with sweat. And no let-up 

Until he’s strapped on tight, made tiltable 

And raised to the tiled roof, then lowered for healing. 

Be mindful of them as they stand and wait 

For the burn of the paid-out ropes to cool, 

Their slight lightheadedness and incredulity 

To pass, those ones who had known him all along.

--Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), poet, translator, and playwright, Nobel Prize winner for Literature in 1995 along with a dozen other honors, one of the major poets of the 20th century, from 100 Poems.

Scripture reference: Matthew 9:1-8; Mark 2:1-12 (7th Sunday after the Epiphany B); Luke 5:18-20

Image: Healing the paralytic at Capernaum, Galway City Museum

To the Holy Bible

O book! Life’s guide! How shall we part,
And thou so long seiz'd of my heart!
Take this last kiss, and let me weep
True thanks to thee, before I sleep.
Thou wert the first put in my hand,
When yet I could not understand,
And daily didst my young eyes lead
To letters, till I learnt to read.
But as rash youths, when once grown strong
Fly from their Nurses to the throng,
Where they new Consorts choose, & stick
To those, till either hurt or sick:
So with that first light gain'd from thee
Ran I in chase of vanity,
Cried dross for gold, and never thought
My first cheap Book had all I sought.
Long reign'd this vogue; and thou cast by
With meek, dumb looks didst woo mine eye,
And oft left open would'st convey
A sudden and most searching ray
Into my soul, with whose quick touch
Refining still, I strugled much.
By this milde art of love at length
Thou overcam'st my sinful strength,
And having brought me home, didst there
Shew me that pearl I sought elsewhere.
Gladness, and peace, and hope, and love,
The secret favors of the Dove,
Her quickning kindness, smiles and kisses,
Exalted pleasures, crowning blisses,
Fruition, union, glory, life
Thou didst lead to, and still all strife.
Living, thou wert my souls sure ease,
And dying mak'st me go in peace:
Thy next Effects no tongue can tell;
Farewel O book of God! farewel!

— Henry Vaughan (1621-1695), Welsh metaphysical poet, devotional writer, author, physician, and royalist during the Commonwealth period.

The Song of Ruth

 Ruth:1-18

 

          The voice I hear this passing night was heard 

                   In ancient days by emperor and clown: 

          Perhaps the self-same song that found a path 

                   Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, 

                          She stood in tears amid the alien corn 

                                                - John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale."

We six came apart slowly,
like a child plucks petals from a flower.

First Elimelech, the father
whose name and protection showed me that
My God could be kind;
he left us not yet old. And we wept,
and tore our garments, wore
ashes like a waxen crown.
Yet we had each other,
Chilion and Orpah, Mahlon and Ruth—
and we girls embraced you, dear Naomi,
whose loving heart was a foreign land
that made us forget the cruelties of our youth.

I remember well
the day I entered your house;
the swallow had woven her nest on your lintel
and sang honeyed notes.
To be greeted with a kiss and a sweet 
word from you, Naomi,
of pleasant face and lovely gaze, remains a balm
to one who had been declared
a burden by the one who bore me into this world—
I drew the first free breath of my life.

Your son beautiful and strong
as my bridegroom, my young stag
brought down by Death 
the remorseless hunter.

The last, sputtering pillar of our lives
crumbled to earth that last day,
the day that Mahlon’s breath left him.
Chilion, too, sleeping in the dust
went down before his brother,
our wails keening like a skylark in flight.

“Turn back to your mother’s house,”
you told me, with tears
as bitter as the name you now claim.

My sister Orpah kissed you, her face lined with
tears tracing watercourses of the Negev, weeping
from the well of grief
you would think had run dry by now.
She turned her nape to us reluctantly, persuaded
by your pleas.

                           But not I.

The nightingale’s song lays a path
straight to my heart’s core;
I would rather 
stand in tears in an alien field, 
homeless as a nightjar, gleaning
for the reluctant scraps left behind
under your Law’s commanded compassion
than return to the cold dwelling of my birth.

Your heart is my mother’s house and hearth:
I who first knew kindness with you
will trace the arc of my life within your embrace
even unto Death’s final stitch in my winding-sheet. To you
will I cling beyond my last breath.

In the midst of your people
will I pitch my tent;
your God will I worship,
whose lovingkindness I know in your eyes.

I would rather shelter with you, rootless
under the cold light of foreign stars,
wandering without a doorway of our own
than be parted from you, ever. Your tenderness
the only inheritance I claim, your embrace
I will never surrender. With you
I will lodge in Bethlehem, 
lay my life upon altars
to a God known only through your friendship,
and give you descendants dancing like constellations
to banish your bitterness,
to secure you a home redolent of bread,
abundant with the attar
of roses.

This poem was first published at Episcopal Cafe's Speaking to the Soul, October 28, 2021.

Dominus regnavit

With our own joy, we will take up the song
Of all creation: Jesus Christ is king!
The whole earth will be glad, for there has sprung,
A light for all the righteous who will bring
A final judgment to the earth, as bright
As lightening, and the round world will ring
With jubilation. For the mournful night
Of our long exile will be ended then
As darkness flees before his glorious light,
The bright ark of his covenant. And when
We see that holiness unveiled, the dark
Devices, all the substitutes, the vain
And empty images, the shoddy work
Of our own hands will fall to nothingness
For Christ himself will shine as the true ark.

--Malcolm Guite (1954- ), English priest, poet, singer-songwriter, musician, and theologian, from his blog.

Scripture reference: Psalm 97

Love's Body

Lean in! I was a child, and spoke like one;
        My thought? very like a child’s.
                I gripped my reason with both
my little fists. It smelled suspiciously of milk.
        Now, as a man, I’ve learned to let it go.
                Just now, we squint to see the Image through
this latent, bleak obscurity. One day, we’ll see the Image—
        as Himself—gleaming from each face.
                Just now, I puzzle through a range
of incoherencies; but on that day,
        the scattered fragments will cohere.
                In all of this, both now and ever,
faith and hope and love abide, these
        sacred three, but the greatest of these (you surely
                must have guessed) is love.


-- Scott Cairns (1954- ) English professor at Mizzou and Orthodox Christian, reconceiving 1 Corinthians 13:11-13 by St. Paul the Apostle

Peter Quince at the Clavier

               I

Just as my fingers on these keys
Make music, so the selfsame sounds
On my spirit make a music, too.

Music is feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,

Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music. It is like the strain
Waked in the elders by Susanna.

Of a green evening, clear and warm,
She bathed in her still garden, while
The red-eyed elders watching, felt

The basses of their beings throb
In witching chords, and their thin blood
Pulse pizziccati of Hosanna.


               II

In the green water, clear and warm,
Susannah lay.
She searched
The touch of springs,
And found
Concealed imaginings.
She sighed,
For so much melody.

Upon the bank, she stood
In the cool
Of spent emotions.
She felt, among the leaves,
The dew
Of old devotions.

She walked up on the grass,
Still quavering,
The winds were like her maids,
On timid feet,
Fetching her woven scarves,
Yet wavering.

A breath upon her hand
Muted the night.
She turned –
A cymbal crashed,
And roaring horns.


               III

Soon, with a noise like tambourines,
Came her attendant Byzantines.

They wondered why Susanna cried
Against the elders by her side;

And as they whispered, the refrain
Was like a willow swept by rain.

Anon, their lamps uplifted flame
Revealed Susanna and her shame.

And then, the simpering Byzantines
Fled, with a noise like tambourines.


               IV

Beauty is momentary in the mind –
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.

The body dies; the body's beauty lives.
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.
So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
The cowl of winter, done repenting.
So maidens die, to the auroral
Celebration of a maiden’s choral.

Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings
Of those white elders; but, escaping,
Left only Death's ironic scraping.
Now, in its immortality, it plays
On the clear viol of her memory,
And makes a constant sacrament of praise.


-- Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), American lawyer, businessman, and poet


Scriptural reference: Susannah 1:1-64 (Daniel 13)

Female

It was the other way round:
God waved his slow wand
And the creature became a woman,
Imperceptively, retaining its body,
Nose, brow, lips, eyes,
And the face that was like a flower
On the neck’s stem. The man turned to her,
Crazy with the crushed smell
Of her hair; and her eyes warned him
To keep off. And she spoke to him with the voice
Of his own conscience, and rippled there
In the shade. So he put his hands
To his face, while her forked laughter
Played on him, and his leaves fell
Silently round him, and he hung there
On himself, waiting for the God to see.

-- R. S. Thomas (1913-2000),  Anglican priest and Welsh poet, from Collected Poems, 1945-1990

Relevant scripture: Genesis 2:4b-24

The Skylight

You were the one for skylights. I opposed 
Cutting into the seasoned tongue-and-groove 
Of pitch pine. I liked it low and closed, 
Its claustrophobic, nest-up-in-the-roof 
Effect. I liked the snuff-dry feeling, 
The perfect, trunk-lid fit of the old ceiling. 
Under there, it was all hutch and hatch. 
The blue slates kept the heat like midnight thatch. 
But when the slates came off, extravagant 
Sky entered and held surprise wide open. 
For days I felt like an inhabitant 
Of that house where the man sick of the palsy 
Was lowered through the roof, had his sins forgiven, 
Was healed, took up his bed and walked away.

—Seamus Heaney (1939 - 2013), Nobel prize-winning Irish poet and translator, from Seeing Things: Poems, 1991

Scripture reference: Luke 5:17-39

a man who had fallen among thieves

a man who had fallen among thieves 
lay by the roadside on his back
dressed in fifteenthrate ideas
wearing a round jeer for a hat

fate per a somewhat more than less
emancipated evening
had in return for consciousness
endowed him with a changeless grin

whereon a dozen staunch and leal
citizens did graze at pause
then fired by hypercivic zeal
sought newer pastures or because

swaddled with a frozen brook
of pinkest vomit out of eyes
which noticed nobody he looked
as if he did not care to rise

one hand did nothing on the vest
its wideflung friend clenched weakly dirt
while the mute trouserfly confessed
a button solemnly inert.

Brushing from whom the stiffened puke
i put him all into my arms
and staggered banged with terror through
a million billion trillion stars.

--e. e. cummings (1894-1962), American poet, painter, and playwright



Scriptural Reference: Luke 10:25-37 (Proper 10C)

Image: Vincent Van Gogh, The Good Samaritan

The Creation

And God stepped out on space,
And he looked around and said:
I'm lonely--
I'll make me a world.

And far as the eye of God could see
Darkness covered everything,
Blacker than a hundred midnights
Down in a cypress swamp.

Then God smiles,
And the light broke,
And the darkness rolled up on one side,
And the light stood shining on the other,
And God said: That's good!

Then God reached out and took the light in his hands,
And God rolled the light around in his hands
Until he made the sun;
And he set that sun a-blazing in the heavens.
And the light that was left from making the sun
God gathered it up in a shining ball
And flung it against the darkness,
Spangling the night with the moon and the stars.
Then down between
The darkness and the light
He hurled the world;
And God said: That's good!

Then God himself stepped down--
And the sun was on his right hand,
And the moon was on his left;
The stars were clustered about his head,
And the earth was under his feet.
And God walked, a where he trod
His footsteps hollowed the valleys out
And bulged the mountains up.

The he stopped and looked and saw
That the earth was hot and barren.
So God stepped over to the edge of the world
And he spat out the seven seas--
He batted his eyes, and the lightnings flashed--
He clapped his hands, and the thunders rolled--
And the waters above the earth came down,
The cooling waters came down.

Then the green grass sprouted,
and the little red flowers blossomed,
The pine tree pointed his finger to the sky,
And the oak spread out his arms,
The lakes cuddled down into the hollow of the ground,
And the rivers ran down to the sea;
And God smiled again,
And the rainbow appeared,
And curled itself around his shoulder.

Then God raised his arm and he waved his hand
Over the sea and over the land,
And he said: Bring forth! Bring forth!
And quicker than God could drop his hand,
Fishes and fowls
And beasts and birds
Swam the rivers and the seas,
Roamed the forests and the woods,
And split the air with their wings.
And God said: That's good!

Then God walked around,
And God looked around,
On all that he had made.
He looked at his sun,
And he looked at his moon,
And he looked at his little stars,;
He looked on his world
With all its living things,
And God said: I'm lonely still.

The God sat down--
On the side of a hill where he could think;
By a deep, wide river he sat down;
With his head in his hands,
God thought and thought,
Till he thought: I'll make me a man!

Up from the bed of river
God scooped the clay;
And by the bank of the river
He kneeled him down;
And there the great God Almighty
Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,
Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,
Who rounded the earth in the middle of his hand;
This Great God,
Like a mammy bending over her baby,
Kneeled down in the dust
Toiling over a lump of clay
Till he shaped it in his own image;

Then into it he blew the breath of life,
And man became a living soul.
Amen. Amen.

--James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), African American lawyer, songwriter, diplomat, civil rights leader, and poet, from God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse

Illustration by Aaron Douglas for the book.

Advent 1 Benediction adapted from 1 Thessalonians 3

May our God and Father Godself
and our Lord Jesus Christ direct you on your way;
And may the Lord make you increase
and abound in love for one another and for all,
just as God abounds in love for you.
And may God so strengthen your hearts in holiness
that you may be blameless before our God
at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.

And the Blessing of God Almighty,
Father Son, and Holy Spirit,
abide with you and remain with you always.

Amen.

-- from 1 Thessalonians 3:11-13

Jeremiah

call me Jeremiah

Jeremiah said the Lord

call me and I'll show you

great and mighty

things you have not seen

--words from Jeremiah 33:3, from the album Zero Church by Maggie and Suzzy Roche, 2001

A Song of Jonah (Canticle I)

I called to you, O God, out of my distress, and you answered me;
     out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice.
You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas,
     and the flood surrounded me;
          all your waves and billows passed over me.
Then I said, "I am driven away from your sight;
     how shall I ever look again upon your holy temple?"
The waters closed in over me, the deep was round about me;
     weeds were wrapped around my head at the roots
          of the mountains.
I went down to the land beneath the earth,
     yet you brought up my life from the depths, O God. 
As my life was ebbing away, I remembered you, O God,
     and my prayer came to you, into your holy temple.
With the voice of thanksgiving, I will sacrifice to you;
     what I have vowed I will pay, for deliverance belongs to the Lord!

-- Jonah 2:2-7, 9, from Enriching Our Worship 2: Ministry with the Sick or Dying; Burial of a Child

Adam and Eve in Later Life

On getting out of bed one says, "Ouch!"
The other "What?" and when the one says, "I said
'Ouch'," the other says, "All right, you needn't shout."

Deucalion and Pyrrha, Darby and Joan, Philemon and Baucis,
Tracey and Hepburn-- if this can happen to Hepburn
No one is safe-- all rolled up into two,
Contented with the cottage and the cottage cheese 
And envied only by ambitious gods...

Later, over coffee, they compare the backs of their hands
And conclude they are slowly being turned into lizards
But nothing much surprises them these days.

--Howard Nemerov, (1920-1991)



Image: Hendrik Goltzius, The Fall of Man, 1616

Jericho

You can't see me yet
Seeing takes a long, long time
From the outside in
Measuring each shift and sigh

But as you let your eyes adjust
To the darkness deep within
Sifting through the ash and dust
We are the places that we've been

You can't hear me yet
Listening takes a long, long time
And I've so much to tell
But words die on these lips of mine

But in the stillness you may sense
Every thing I long to say
Unraveling like golden threads
The walls will all come down this way

You don't know me yet
Knowing takes a long, long time
And time is all we have
Never traveling in straight lines

So memorize each turn and twist
Just be careful as you go
For if love is a labyrinth
Then my heart is Jericho

--Mary Chapin Carpenter (1958- ), from the album Ashes and Roses (2012). Chapin's notes about this song can be found here.

Scriptural reference: Joshua 2:1-6:27.

Losers

If I should pass the tomb of Jonah
I would stop there and sit for awhile;
Because I was swallowed one time deep in the dark
And came out alive after all.

If I pass the burial spot of Nero
I shall say to the wind, “Well, well!”—
I who have fiddled in a world on fire,
I who have done so many stunts not worth doing.

I am looking for the grave of Sinbad too.
I want to shake his ghost-hand and say,
“Neither of us died very early, did we?”

And the last sleeping-place of Nebuchadnezzar—
When I arrive there I shall tell the wind:
“You ate grass; I have eaten crow—
Who is better off now or next year?”

Jack Cade, John Brown, Jesse James,
There too I could sit down and stop for awhile.
I think I could tell their headstones:
“God, let me remember all good losers.”

I could ask people to throw ashes on their heads
In the name of that sergeant at Belleau Woods,
Walking into the drumfires, calling his men,
“Come on, you … Do you want to live forever?”

--Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), from "Playthings of the Wind," in Smoke and Steel, 1922.

Annunciation

Annunciation, Merode triptych, Workshop of Robert Campin (Netherlandish, ca. 1375–1444 Tournai)

We know the scene: the room, variously furnished,
almost always a lectern, a book; always
the tall lily.

       Arrived on solemn grandeur of great wings,
the angelic ambassador, standing or hovering,
whom she acknowledges, a guest.

But we are told of meek obedience. No one mentions
courage.

       The engendering Spirit
did not enter her without consent.

         God waited.

She was free
to accept or to refuse, choice
integral to humanness.

                  ____________________

Aren’t there annunciations
of one sort or another
in most lives?

         Some unwillingly
undertake great destinies,
enact them in sullen pride,
uncomprehending.

More often
those moments
      when roads of light and storm
      open from darkness in a man or woman,
are turned away from

in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair
and with relief.
Ordinary lives continue.
                                 God does not smite them.
But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.

                  ____________________

She had been a child who played, ate, slept
like any other child–but unlike others,
wept only for pity, laughed
in joy not triumph.
Compassion and intelligence
fused in her, indivisible.

Called to a destiny more momentous
than any in all of Time,
she did not quail,

  only asked

a simple, ‘How can this be?’
and gravely, courteously,
took to heart the angel’s reply,
the astounding ministry she was offered:

to bear in her womb
Infinite weight and lightness; to carry
in hidden, finite inwardness,
nine months of Eternity; to contain
in slender vase of being,
the sum of power–
in narrow flesh,
the sum of light.

                     Then bring to birth,
push out into air, a Man-child
needing, like any other,
milk and love–

but who was God.

This was the moment no one speaks of,

when she could still refuse.

A breath unbreathed,

                                Spirit,

                                          suspended,

                                                            waiting.

                  ____________________

She did not cry, ‘I cannot. I am not worthy,’

Nor, ‘I have not the strength.’

She did not submit with gritted teeth,

                                                       raging, coerced.

Bravest of all humans,

                                  consent illumined her.

The room filled with its light,

the lily glowed in it,

                               and the iridescent wings.

Consent,

              courage unparalleled,

opened her utterly.

--Denise Levertov, A Door in the Hive, 1989

Annunciation, Henry Ossawa Tanner (American, 1898)

 Links: Some Artistic Reflections on the Annunciation
Scripture Reference: Luke 1:26-38 

Imperatives, Part 2 of Mysteries of the Incarnation

Look at the birds 1
Consider the lilies 2
Drink ye all of it 3

Ask 
Seek
Knock 4
Enter by the narrow gate 5

Do not be anxious 6
Judge not; 7 do not give dogs what is holy 8

Go: be it done for you 9
Do not be afraid 10
Maiden, arise 11
Young man, I say, arise 12

Stretch out your hand 13
Stand up, 14 be still 15
Rise, let us be going …14
Love 15
Forgive 16
Remember me


1 Matthew 6:26. See also Luke 12:24, “Consider the ravens.”
2 Matthew 6:28; Luke 12:27.
3 “Drink from it, all of you” (Matthew 26:27). Norris uses the King James translation here.
4 This stanza is a series of Jesus’s commands from the Sermon on the Mount: “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you” (Matthew 7:7, King James; also Luke 11:9).
5 Matthew 7:13-14; also Luke 13:23-24.
6 Matthew 6:25, 31; Luke 12:22, 29.
7 Matthew 7:1; Mark 4:24; Luke 6:37-38.
8 Matthew 7:6. 9 Matthew 8:13.
10 “Do not be afraid” – a frequent command by Jesus; for example, Matthew 10:31; 14:27; 17:7; 28:10.
11 The healing of Jairus’s daughter: “Little girl, get up!” (Mark 5:41; also Luke 8:54).
12 The healing the widow’s only son; Luke 7:14.
13 The healing of the man with the withered hand: Matthew 12:13; Mark 3:1-6; Luke 6:6-11.
14 Jesus’s healing the paralyzed man: Matthew 9:2-8; Mark 2:1-12; Luke 5:17-26.
15 Jesus’s command to the ocean: Mark 5:39; also Matthew 8:26; Luke 8:24.
14 Jesus to his disciples in Gethsemane: “Rise, let us be going: behold, he is at hand that doth betray me” (Matthew 26:46; Mark 14:42).
15 Jesus’s two great commandments: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. … You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:37-39; also Mark 12:28-31; Luke 10:25-28).
16 Matthew 18:21-22; Luke 17:4.

--Kathleen Norris (1947- ), American poet and inspirational writer, 1995

Benediction based on 1 Thessalonians 5

Go forth into the world in peace;
be of good courage;
hold fast that which is good;
render to no one evil for evil;
strengthen the fainthearted;
support the weak;
help the afflicted;
honour everyone;
love and serve the Lord,
rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit;
and the blessing of God almighty,
the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,
be among you and remain with you always. 

--1 Thessalonians 5:13-22

Benediction: Christ dwell in your hearts by faith

Christ dwell in your hearts through faith
—that you,
being rooted and grounded in love,
may have strength to comprehend
with all the saints
what is the breadth and length and height and depth,
and to know the love of Christ
that surpasses knowledge,
that you may be filled
with all the fullness of God.

--Ephesians 3:17-19