Yet Do I Marvel

    

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!


-- Countee Cullen (1903-1946), African American lyric poet, children's author, playwright, critic, editor, and public school teacher, 

Orphaned at a young age, he was raised in Louisville, Kentucky, by his grandmother. After her death when he was 15, he moved to New York City and was unofficially adopted by the Rev. Frederick Cullen of Salem Methodist Episcopal Church, the largest congregation in Harlem. A precocious talent, he was winning awards for his poetry in high school, and then published his first poems in Harper's, Poetry, and The Crisis while still an undergraduate at New York University. 

After graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1925, he published his first poetry collection, Color, and was admitted to Harvard, where he completed an MA in English in 1926. In 1928 he received a Guggenheim fellowship and studied in France. Upon his return, he became a teacher of English, French and creative writing at Frederick Douglass Junior High School in Harlem, where he was a mentor of a young James Baldwin. When he wasn't teaching, he was writing poetry and worked as an editor at Opportunity magazine, as well as in the last years of his life writing the novels One Way to Heaven and God Sends Sunday; producing a translation of the play Medea, and writing plays. His adaptation of God Sends Sunday into a play, which later became the musical St. Louis Woman, was hugely conroversial in the African American literary community, who accused Cullen of playing to racial sterotypes that harmed the cause of black equality. 

Although much of his best poems centered on topics of race and racial injustice, and some of his first poems were published in The Crisis, a banner African American publication, he insisted publicly upon being seen as a poet, not necessarily an African American poet. His ambivalence was controversial in his time, especially given his ties to institutions prominent in the fight for civil rights for African American and his position as a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance. However, he chose John Keats and A. E. Housman as his premier poetic influences, and once criticized the use of jazz influences and rhythms in poems such as Langston Hughes' "Weary Blues." He urged African American poets to work in formal verse and to study major English and American poetic figures, who were predominantly white.

Similarly, despite being raised by a Methodist minister, Cullen spent a good portion of his most productive years as a young poet with an uneasy relationship with Christian faith (see his poem Pagan Prayer), although he later reaffirmed his faith, as evinced in poems like "The Black Christ,"  "Christus natus est," and "The Cross." Questions of race and faith are central to his finest work.

His first marriage to Nina Yolande Du Bois, daughter of WEB Du Bois, while a social triumph at the time of their wedding, unhappily ended in divorce; his second marriage to Ida lasted until his untimely death related to hypertension and uremia in 1942.

Image: Judgment Day, by Aaron Douglas. This image was famously used on the cover of James Weldon Johnson's book of religious poetry, God's Trombones.

Sonnet: Prayer

     

Was it in Sunday school that we were taught
That prayer only counted when by rote;
This notion somehow lodged deep when we thought
To talk to God as if reciting quotes?
The words staccato sounds in breathless rhymes-- 
To bless our relatives, while half-asleep;
Confessing each day’s sins with guilty minds;
The fear of “praying God our souls to keep.”

We never thought that God might answer back.
We never thought to listen without words:
To feel God’s hand in midnight’s sacred black,
To hear God’s blessing in the song of birds,
To make a grateful bowl within each heart,
To practice prayer as welcome and as art.

------------------Leslie Barnes Scoopmire, 2025

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), English Romantic poet

Image: a wannabe dictator and convicted felon, 34 times over as of today

Parachute

She would never have jumped alone and seeing
the world like an immense crevice she might
have abandoned the tandem jump if the
instructor hadn't had Greek god genes. He
smiled at her reassuringly, she nodded
and they were off, her fear turned to delight
with the motorcycle which gravity
had given them. She approved his delay
in pulling the cord. Then she realized he
was pulling the cord. She'd picked Icarus
instead of a god. 'Keep calm,' he yelled. Next,
more quietly, 'Sorry.' She scanned the ground for
haystacks piled ten high. She looked up and caught
a glimpse of the plane, a mocking feather.

-- David Beach (1959- ), Wellington-born prize winning poet, and mail sorter at the Australia and New Zealand postal services.

Sonnet II (When Forty Winters Shall Besiege Thy Brow)

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,
Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tattered weed, of small worth held.
Then being asked where all thy beauty lies—
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days—
To say within thine own deep-sunken eyes
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserved thy beauty’s use
If thou couldst answer "This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count and make my old excuse",
Proving his beauty by succession thine.
   This were to be new made when thou art old,
   And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.

-

- William Shakespeare (1564-1616) pre-eminent English playwright and poet

[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
                                                         i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

--e. e. cummings ( ) from Complete Poems: 1904-1962

Image: Heart, Soul, Rainbow, Gold, mixed media, Traci McCombs

From "Glanmore Sonnets"

for Ann Saddlemyer
‘our heartiest welcomer’

Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground.
The mildest February for 20 years
Is mist bands over furrows, a deep no sound
Vulnerable to distant gargling tractors.
Our road is steaming, the turned-up acres breathe.
Now the good life could be to cross a field
And art a paradigm of earth knew from the lathe
Of plows. My lea is deeply tilled.
Old plough-socks gorge the subsoil of each sense
And I am quickened with a redolence
Of farmland as a dark unblown rose.
Wait then… Breasting the mist, in sowers’ aprons,
My ghosts come striding into their spring stations.
The dream grain whirls like freakish Easter snows.

--Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), from the “Glanmore Sonnets,” in Field Work, 1979

I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw, ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.

With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.

I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.

Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)- poet, English supporter of the Oxford movement, convert to Catholicism, Jesuit priest

Fishing

The two of them stood in the middle water,
The current slipping away, quick and cold,
The sun slow at his zenith, sweating gold,
Once, in some sullen summer of father and daughter.
Maybe he regretted he had brought her—
She'd rather have been elsewhere, her look told—
Perhaps a year ago, but now too old.
Still, she remembered lessons he had taught her:
To cast towards shadows, where the sunlight fails
And fishes shelter in the undergrowth.
And when the unseen strikes, how all else pales
Beside the bright-dark struggle, the rainbow wroth,
Life and death weighed in the shining scales,
The invisible line pulled taut that links them both.


--A. E. (Alicia) Stallings (1968- ), American poet and translator, recipient of Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundation fellowships, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2018.

Scripture reference: Matthew 4:12-23 3 Epiphany A

Sonnet 19: When I Consider How My Light is Spent

When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide;
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.

--John Milton (1608-1674), English poet, Protestant, politician, intellectual. 

Scriptural Reference: Matthew 25: 14-30 (The Parable of the Talents), Proper 28A

Image: Willem de Poorter, "The Parable of the Talents, or Minas," 17th century, oil on panel.

This poem was written after Milton went blind, and therefore worries that he has lost his chance to truly serve God in these circumstances. However, as a Protestant, Milton then states that God doesn't need human help, and that other ways to serve God will present themselves to him.

V: The Soldier, from The War Sonnets

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.


-- Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) English poet and sailor who died of sepsis in 1915 on his way to Gallipoli and is buried in Greece; his lone brother was killed in action in 1917 after 19 days on the Western Front.

Forest Sonnet, Whidbey Island

(For a friend in grief,
for the assurance of resurrection )

 

 

Now, no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
No mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for."
     --from “Spring and Fall,” by Gerard Manley Hopkins



Here Sorrow springs and newborn Spring sorrows;
Their grief resolves in fiddleheads tomorrow.
The mournful poet sees the greening leaf
and vaults ahead to autumn's parting grief....

An anticipatory grief, so-called.
Here last year's leaves lie trodden, branch scraped-bald
From winter's remnant grip. But see, as Spring
Flushes first rosy throat, as thrushes sing

God's glory! Still, larks chirruping, skimming
The winds arise from southern vales, brimming
Their blessings upon the restive, waking Earth.
The forest floor will testify that birth

Sings from subsidence, converting death
God's gravid Spirit-- resurrection's breath.

--This was first published at Episcopal Journal's Speaking to the Soul on August 11, 2022.

Ascension

Salute the last, and everlasting day,

Joy at the uprising of this Sun, and Son,
Ye whose true tears, or tribulation
Have purely wash’d, or burnt your drossy clay.
Behold, the Highest, parting hence away,
Lightens the dark clouds, which He treads upon;
Nor doth He by ascending show alone,
But first He, and He first enters the way.
O strong Ram, which hast batter’d Heaven for me!
Mild lamb, which with Thy Blood hast mark’d the path!
Bright Torch, which shinest, that I the way may see!
O, with Thy own Blood quench Thy own just wrath;
And if Thy Holy Spirit my Muse did raise,
Deign at my hands this crown of prayer and praise.

-- John Donne (1572-1631) English priest, poet, and essayist

My Own Heart

My own heart let me have more pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst ’s all-in-all in all a world of wet.

Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
’s not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather — as skies
Betweenpie mountains — lights a lovely mile.



--Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), English poet, mystic and Catholic priest, located at Hopkins Poetry. This is one of his "dark sonnets" written in 1885.

Study Guide for this poem found here.

Scripture reference and lectionary link: Easter 3C, John 21:1-19

Image: "Christ's Charge to Peter," Raphael, 1515

The Anointing at Bethany

Come close with Mary, Martha, Lazarus
so close the candles stir with their soft breath
and kindle heart and soul to flame within us,
lit by these mysteries of life and death.
For beauty now begins the final movement
in quietness and intimate encounter.
The alabaster jar of precious ointment
is broken open for the world’s true Lover.

The whole room richly fills to feast the senses
with all the yearning such a fragrance brings.
The heart is mourning but the spirit dances,
here at the very center of all things,
here at the meeting place of love and loss,
we all foresee, and see beyond the cross.

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

Lectionary Link: Lent 5C, John 12:1-8

Image: "Mary Anoints The Feet of Jesus," by Frank Wesley

On the Pinnacle

'Temples and Spires are good for looking down from;
You stand above the world on holy heights,
Here on the pinnacle, above the maelstrom,
Among the few, the true, unearthly lights.
Here you can breathe the thin air of perfection
And feel your kinship with the lonely star,
Above the shadow and the pale reflection,
Here you can know for certain who you are.
The world is stalled below, but you could move it
If they could know you as you are up here,
Of course they’ll doubt, but here’s your chance to prove it
Angels will bear you up, so have no fear….’
‘I was not sent to look down from above
It’s fear that sets these tests and proofs, not Love.’

-- Malcom Guite, (1954- ), English priest, poet, theologian, musician, and songwriter, from Sounding the Seasons and The Word in the Wilderness.

Scripture Reference: Luke 4:1-13, Lent 1C

 

Image: "The Temptations of Christ," from the Drogo Sacramentary, mid- 9th Century, French (in Latin).

Rev. Guite's Commentary:

The devil led him to Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. ‘If you are the Son of God,’ he said, ‘throw yourself down from here. For it is written: “He will command his angels concerning you to guard you carefully; they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.” Jesus answered, “It says: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” When the devil had finished all this tempting, he left him until an opportune time’ (Luke 4.9−3).

If the first two temptations in the wilderness were in some sense ‘obvious’; the temptation to mere physical satisfaction of appetite, and the temptation to worldly success and power, then the third temptation is subtle and dark, all the darker for pretending to a kind of light, or enlightenment. The third temptation takes place on the ‘pinnacle of the Temple’ on the height of religious experience and achievement. What could be wrong with that? But the best things, turned bad, are the worst things of all. A ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ life can be riddled with pride and a sense of distinction, judging or looking down on others, despising God’s good creation! Such a twisted religion does more damage in the world then any amount simple indulgence or gratification by sensual people. One of G. K. Chesterton’s wonderful Father Brown stories, ‘The Hammer of God’, explores this theme with his usual combination of acuity and humour. In the story a curate who has constantly taken to ‘praying, not on the common church floor with his fellow men, but on the dizzying heights of its spires’ is tempted to deal justice to his sinful brother by flinging a hammer down on him from the heights. It is Father Brown who sees and understands the temptation and brings the curate down from the heights to a proper place of repentance. Here’s a fragment of their dialogue before they descend:

‘I think there is something rather dangerous about standing on these high places even to pray,’ said Father Brown. ‘Heights were made to be looked at, not to be looked from.’

‘Do you mean that one may fall over?’ asked Wilfred.

‘I mean that one’s soul may fall if one’s body doesn’t,’ said the other priest …

After a moment he resumed, looking tranquilly out over the plain with his pale grey eyes. ‘I knew a man,’ he said, ‘who began by worshipping with others before the altar, but who grew fond of high and lonely places to pray from, corners or niches in the belfry or the spire. And once in one of those dizzy places, where the whole world seemed to turn under him like a wheel, his brain turned also, and he fancied he was God. So that, though he was a good man, he committed a great crime.’

Wilfred’s face was turned away, but his bony hands turned blue and white as they tightened on the parapet of stone.

‘He thought it was given to him to judge the world and strike down the sinner. He would never have had such a thought if he had been kneeling with other men upon a floor.’

‘I mean that one’s soul may fall if one’s body doesn’t,’ said the other priest.

I was remembering something of this story when I wrote my sonnet on the third temptation, but thanks be to God that in resisting this temptation to spiritual loftiness and display, Jesus shows his solidarity once and for all with all of us, trusting himself to our flesh and blood so that we can trust our flesh and blood to him. He does not look down on us but looks up with the humble eyes of the child of Bethlehem.

All The Kingdoms of the World

‘So here’s the deal and this is what you get:
The penthouse suite with world-commanding views,
The banker’s bonus and the private jet
Control and ownership of all the news
An ‘in’ to that exclusive one percent,
Who know the score, who really run the show
With interest on every penny lent
And sweeteners for cronies in the know.
A straight arrangement between me and you
No hell below or heaven high above
You just admit it, and give me my due
And wake up from this foolish dream of love…’
But Jesus laughed, ‘You are not what you seem.
Love is the waking life, you are the dream.’

-- Malcolm Guite (1954- ), English priest, poet, musician, songwriter, and theologian, from Sounding the seasons and The Word in the Wilderness: Sonnets for Lent.

Scripture Reference: Luke 4:1-13, Lent 1C

Image: "Third Temptation of Christ," from the Psalter-Hours of Yolande de Soissons, French manuscript, 1280-1299 CE.

Here is Rev. Guite's wonderful commentary on this sonnet, from his blog:

‘Then the Devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the Devil said to him, “To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me and I give it to anyone I please. If you then, will worship me, it will all be yours”’ (Luke 4.5−7).

This second temptation is the temptation to worldliness, to ‘success’, money and power, set up obsessively on the throne of our hearts as rivals to God. It is the supreme temptation of our own materially obsessed culture. And it is our failure at this point that has led to the gross imbalances between what has recently been termed the ‘1%’ and the ‘99%’.

‘To you I will give their glory and all this authority’ is the dreadfully conditional offer that the Devil still makes, and in my sonnet I have tried to flesh out in contemporary terms some of the figures who seem to be making and receiving that offer now, and the contemporary contexts in which this dreadful deal is transacted. It’s a striking thing that the old terms ‘wordly’ and ‘worldliness’ are scarcely ever used in contemporary moral discourse. We still talk of course, and rightly about fairness, and fair distribution of resources. We are rightly concerned with justice and fair dealing in the worlds of finance, commerce and trade, but we seem to have lost sight of the long Christian tradition, and the substantial Christian teaching, that there is something essentially tainted and corrosive in the very desire for worldly pre-eminence and success.

A symptom of this amnesia, of this serious spiritual malaise that afflicts our culture, can be found in our extraordinary use of the word ‘exclusive’ as a positive term! The liberal West is allegedly the most inclusive culture there has ever been and we deploy a great deal of rhetoric about including the marginalized, and take care that everyone should use politically correct and ‘inclusive’ language. But this is of course just a fig leaf. One look at the advertising in any magazine or website, one glimpse of the commercials that saturate our airwaves tells a different story. Every Estate agent advertising their residential properties (or ‘homes’ as they like to call them- as though a home was something you could sell) reveals that their favourite word is ‘Exclusive’. Come and view these ‘exclusive’ flats, come with us on this luxurious and ‘exclusive’ holiday! And nobody asks, just who is being excluded. Nobody responds to these ads with a letter to say: ‘I am interested in your product but perhaps I am one of those unfortunate people whom you and your exclusive clientele would like to exclude! No one asks themselves, as they read these ads, ‘Just what is it in me that is being roused and appealed to here?’ For it is not our generosity, our courtesy, or our sense of community that is being worked on and developed in this appeal. Rather it is the worst in us; the desire to be considered ‘special’ and ‘better’ and ‘superior’ at the expense of other people that is here being inflated and inflamed. In his chilling essay ‘The Inner ring’ C. S. Lewis lays open this fallen desire in all of us to belong to exclusive clubs, cliques, and circles, to be someone who is ‘in’; ‘in the know’, ‘in the right circles’, ‘in on the real knowledge and power’ among ‘those who really count’, and to look down on those who are ‘out’, excluded, not part of the magic circle. So much of the consumerism that is choking our society and bringing misery, alike to the haves and the have-nots, is driven by this desire to have and to wear, and to drive, the status symbols, the ‘exclusive’ signs of belonging. Time and again goods and services are offered by their manufacturers not for their intrinsic virtue, the beauty of their design, or the genuine pleasure that might be had from owning or using them, but for their ‘exclusive’ cachet, their ‘exclusive designer label’.

The other word which worldliness loves and has in turn subverted is the word ‘Dream’. We are to have ‘dream homes’, ‘dream holidays’, ‘dream wedding days’. As though all dreams were to enmesh us deeper in the tangles of getting and spending, not to lift our vision, change our perspective and give us glimpses of Heaven. I have tried to highlight some of these issues in the following poem, and here I see Jesus taking the worldly ‘dream’ on its own terms and calling us instead to wake up to the fullness of life. Perhaps only then can we, in Eliot’s phrase ‘Redeem the unread vision of the higher dream’.

Stones into Bread

The Fountain thirsts, the Bread is hungry here

The Light is dark, the Word without a voice.
When darkness speaks it seems so light and clear.
Now He must dare, with us, to make a choice.
In a distended belly’s cruel curve
He feels the famine of the ones who lose
He starves for those whom we have forced to starve
He chooses now for those who cannot choose.
He is the staff and sustenance of life
He lives for all from one Sustaining Word
His love still breaks and pierces like a knife
The stony ground of hearts that never shared,
God gives through Him what Satan never could;
The broken bread that is our only food.

--Malcolm Guite (1954- ), English priest, poet, musician,  and theologian, from Sounding the Seasons and The Word in the Wilderness: Sonnets for Lent.

Scripture Reference: Luke 4:1-13, Lent 1C

Image: "Temptation of Christ by the Devil," Spanish, from the Hermitage of St. Baudelio de Berlanga, Castle-Leon, Spain. The first Temptation, the subject of this sonnet, is depicted on the left. For more information, click here from the Metropolitan Museum of Art cloisters.

O Come O Wisdom

Today, December 17, we are seven days away from the Feast of Christmas. In the early Church, perhaps as early as the eighth century of the Common Era, it became a custom to sing a different antiphon on each of these seven days, using a term from Isaiah and other Hebrew scriptural texts which Christians believe describes a facet of Christ's identity. You might recognize these terms from the verses for "O Come O Come Emmanuel," which uses an O Antiphon in each verse.

The term for December 17 is "O Wisdom," described in Ecclesiasticus 24:1-9. The antiphon in English is this:

O Wisdom, coming forth from the mouth of the Most High,
reaching from one end to the other mightily,
and sweetly ordering all things:
Come and teach us the way of prudence.

What would it mean to think of Jesus as the Wisdom of God personified?

In his excellent book of collected poems for the Advent and Christmas seasons entitled Waiting on the Word, British priest and poet The Rev. Malcolm Guite wrote this sonnet in response to today’s antiphon:

O Sapientia

I cannot think unless I have been thought,
Nor can I speak unless I have been spoken.
I cannot teach except as I am taught,
Or break the bread except as I am broken.
O Mind behind the mind through which I seek,
O Light within the light by which I see,
O Word beneath the words with which I speak,
O founding, unfound Wisdom, finding me,
O sounding Song whose depth is sounding me,
O Memory of time, reminding me,
My Ground of Being, always grounding me,
My Maker’s Bounding Line, defining me,
Come, hidden Wisdom, come with all you bring,
Come to me now, disguised as everything.


He then meditated upon this antiphon:

“In its first centuries the Church developed a custom of praying seven great prayers, calling afresh on Christ to come, addressing him by the mysterious titles found in the Old Testament, particularly in Isaiah: ‘O Wisdom!’ ‘O Root!’ ‘O Key!’ ‘O Light!’ ‘O Emmanuel!’ These prayers were said ‘antiphonally’, as the name suggests, either side of the Magnificat at Vespers from 17 to 23 December (although in some places they begin a day earlier, on 16 December). Each antiphon begins with the invocation ‘O’ and then calls on Christ, although never by name.

The mysterious titles and emblems given him from the pages of the Old Testament touch on our deepest needs and intuitions; then each antiphon prays the great Advent verb, Veni, ‘Come!’

There is, I think, both wisdom and humility in this strange abstention from the name of Christ in a Christian prayer. Of course, these prayers were composed "A.D.," perhaps around the seventh century, but in another sense, Advent itself is always B.C.! The whole purpose of Advent is to be for a moment fully and consciously Before Christ. In that place of darkness and waiting, we look for his coming and do not presume too much that we already know or have it. Whoever compiled these prayers was able, imaginatively, to write ‘B.C.’, perhaps saying to themselves: ‘If I hadn’t heard of Christ, and didn’t know the name of Jesus, I would still long for a saviour. I would still need someone to come. Who would I need? I would need a gift of Wisdom, I would need a Light, a King, a Root, a Key, a Flame.’ And poring over the pages of the Old Testament, they would find all these things promised in the coming of Christ. By calling on Christ using each of these seven several gifts and prophecies we learn afresh the meaning of a perhaps too familiar name."

As we prepare to enter Christmas week, may we ever invite Christ, the Wisdom of God, into our lives.

Sonnet XLII -- "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why"

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

--Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), Pulitzer-prize awarded American poet