No mason worth his salt laid out these lines; no architect designed these crooked roofs. What midnight sky is this where no sun shines and yet the flowers glow, the morning’s proofs?
Where was the Father when this church was made, and by what miracle does it still stand? The road before me plunges into shade— oh, even there shall I be in your hand?
Keep, in your mercy, stone stacked upon stone. The beauty that we try for, bless with grace. The road we walk, let us not go alone but comfort us with glimpses of your face. Amen.
[T]he Church fasts and prays in order to have less flesh by mortification, and by prayer to acquire wings, because prayer is the soul’s wing by which it flies to heaven. So the soul will be able freely to follow Christ in his ascent: he ascended, opening the road before us, and he flew on the wings of the winds. For a bird that has much flesh and little plumage cannot fly very well: consider, for instance, the ostrich.
–Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, ch. 70 “The Greater and Lesser Litanies”
Consider well the sparrow here that neither sows nor reaps the seed yet faces winter without fear and know that God will meet its need;
the swallows in the Temple eaves that swoop and dive and make their nest in better shelter than the leaves and at God’s altar take their rest;
but they that fly to heaven, you see, are breath and prayer, are quick and light. An ostrich in God’s aviary, I cannot match their upward flight.
Nor can I, like the Spirit, move upon the waters, skimming waves, for I am not the wind-swift dove, nor penguin that abysses braves.
The hawk that on the high wire preens or up against the sun may glide, velociraptors in its genes, can dive to drive out sin and pride.;
and even vultures show their trust in God’s provision, good and kind, who ride upon the slightest gust and eat what others leave behind;
but I can only turn and flee or coward hide my head in sand. What mercy there can be for me must come like birdseed from God’s hand.
So he, unstinting pelican who tore his breast to feed his chicks, comes to his ostrich once again who flies just like a load of bricks
and leads me where he first has stepped along the way he first has known. A better shepherd never shepped, and he will lead me gently home.
And when you led them out into their freedom a fiery pillar lit the midnight sky— another wonder of your hand to lead them. They walked into the sea and found it dry.
As bleached and barren as a sky in summer, a fervent and an unrelenting sky whose bluer deeps are drained, and when I plumb them there’s nothing there but sand, empty and dry.
Where are the living waters of your mercy? Where is the cloud in all this burning sky? I walk through the abyss, and I am thirsty. Send me the rain, O God, for I am dry.
Look. Sometimes, you decide to end the line with a ridiculous word because it fits the sense. And then you’re stuck for a ridiculous rhyme, so you look in the rhyming dictionary and find a word you’ve never seen, but you like it. So you look it up in the OED and–miracle of miracles–it fits the sense perfectly. So even though you usually try not to drop fifty-cent words in these things, you use it. It means “made of gold and ivory.”
I stumbled on the journey, Lord: You caught me across the shins. You always do. I try to carry out the precepts you have taught me— I always fail. Here in the dust I lie beside my Lord, my God, my stumbling block, where he will feed me honey from the rock.
And when he lifts me up as he has promised it will be but to set me on himself, for all the myriad mansions of our solace in his pierced side have their foundations delved. Our home is built on you, O cornerstone, and someday I will rest on you alone.
And we shall be like you, be adamantine. Though we are dust and unto dust return you raise us up again chryselephantine with gold that in the furnace did not burn. ‘Til then, O Christ, be dust with my dust here; though I have fallen, Lord, be ever near. Amen.
Crystalline Gold By Unknown author – Enhanced from resourcescommittee.house.gov/subcommittees/emr/usgsweb/photogallery/ (resourcescommittee.house.gov/subcommittees/emr/usgsweb/photogallery/images/Gold%203_jpg.jpg) [via Wayback Machine], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38780
Whoever has my commandments and observes them is the one who loves me. And whoever loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and reveal myself to him. —John 14:15-21
What is the word for us except its keeping? No ornamented columns to a facade but piers sunk deep into the earth and deeper until they strike the bedrock of our God.
And who can know the length of such a burrow? The blind worm does not work by plan and chart but digs ‘til all he does becomes a furrow. As seeds spring up behind, he finds God’s heart.
So then I know this road but in the walking; I only know my loves in loving them. What does it matter that I walk in darkness? This is the way to New Jerusalem.
We hold your word, a mystery unfolding, and we unfold ourselves to its commands. This road can lead me nowhere but your holding; I walk the darkness cupped within your hands.
You bade me hold my tongue, but I have spoken, have wrenched the desert open at the seams when I should not. This silence I have broken, and like the stone it pours out living streams.
I grumbled at the working of your mercy and envied the contentment of the dead. I cried out to you living, hungry, thirsty: You made the waters flow and sent the bread.
And yet, O God, you led me to this desert as you will lead me through the vale of gloom. I know that even there I shall be sheltered; then let me see you make this desert bloom.
Though I break faith as easily as silence, you never once have broken faith with me, for never have you sworn this road was trialless, yet ever here beside me you shall be.
Oh, someday, maybe, I will learn to listen, to wait for you in trust and not to speak, yet when the sun and all the dead have risen we’ll shout your praise from every mountain peak.
The above panorama shows a view of the Atacama Desert as seen from the ESO Paranal Observatory, home to the Very Large Telescope. To the right of the image, one can see the road leading to the summit of Cerro Armazones, a site located in Chile, and a possible home for the future European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). The E-ELT programme office has studied half a dozen potential sites for the future E-ELT observatory, which, with its 40-metre-class diameter, will be the world’s biggest eye on the sky. Various aspects need to be considered in the site selection process. On the E-ELT Site Selection Advisory Committee’s final short list for the recommended site, Armazones is also the committee’s preferred site, because it has the best balance of sky quality across all aspects and can be operated in an integrated fashion with the existing Paranal Observatory. Atacama, the world’s driest non-polar desert, part of the Arid Diagonal of South America By ESO/S. Brunier – http://www.eso.org/public/images/armazonesparanal/, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26458337
The iris burns blue flame beside the door, but I have seen this miracle before.
The daffodils unfurl above the grass; in truth, I hardly notice as I pass.
The amaryllis spreads its scarlet wide; I have no echo blooming deep inside.
The tulip opens empty to the sky, and so do I, my God, and so do I.
This is a picture of the Semper Augustus. This tulip is famous for being the most expensive tulip sold during the tulipomania in the Netherlands in the 17th century.By Unknown artist – Norton Simon Museum, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=199488
As for you, o holy brothers: the Lord came to send this fire on the earth, and he longs for it to burn boundlessly. I’m not so spiritually conceited as to presume that in feeding that fire I’ll add any heat to your own ragingly hot resolve. No. I do it so that you’ll influence the next generation more powerfully if you teach not by the dead sound of words but by your own living example, backed up by the advice of the best and most ancient elders.
Until now I’ve been tossed all around in a treacherous storm. Now it’s up to the spiritual breeze of your prayers to sweep me into the safe harbor of silence.
–John Cassian, The Conferences, 24.26.19, tr. Jamie Kreiner
Though I have written reams and reams of words as here-and-gone-again as morning dew, they yield no thirty-fold and house no birds. Empty of all unless they’re full of you, these lines are painted signs to say I YEARN, just so much kindling, only fit to burn.
Set them aflame, O God, and let them rise as incense disappearing in the air— sweet savor, and man’s smudge against the skies, and then a breeze, and they were never there. But still you hold them in your memory where they are burning in eternity.
O God, come to my aid; O Lord, make haste to help me: All the noisiness of flame is rushing wind and cracking wood laid waste, but burned to embers then they blaze your name in steadfast silence. Take from me my word and give me that the formless void first heard
and let it shape me, let it make me light and heat as I am burned but not consumed where there is no more darkness, no more night, and flame is feather for a Spirit plumed to shelter us beneath her fiery breast. In burning silence may we find our rest. Amen.
Kate Bluett 