I sought you blindly in the night, but dawn
has come. The winter’s past; the rains are gone;
the barren fig tree’s bursting into bloom;
and you, my lord, come living from the tomb
to bless me, lifting up your wounded hand.
Now joy takes up its dwelling in our land.

In the dim light, I pass the garden wall,
and enter as into your banquet hall
where sweeter far than honey was the bread;
the wine as love was sweet, as blood was red;
each morsel joy and every sip was health,
because the feast, my lord, was all yourself.

But then came sorrow with the shades of night.
I sought my love, but could not see his light—
now morning dawns; it is the dawn of bliss,
for, oh!, my love is mine and I am his,
and now I hear him, sweet-voiced as the dove:
“Arise, my beautiful! Arise, my love!”

Feed me again among the lilies now.
The marks of pain and death still crown your brow;
you bear a greater seal upon your heart;
your hands, your feet by that same seal are marked,
but still deep waters could not quench your breath.
Your love, my lord, is stronger than our death.

Stronger than hell, your longing for our love;
fiercer than any flame we’ve knowledge of—
what fire could burn as brightly as your eyes,
what sun could shed such light as when you rise?
That light has come, the night forever gone.
Beloved, lead me now into your dawn!

Field of Lilies – Tiffany Studios, c. 1910. Photo By Daderot. – Richard H. Driehaus Gallery of Stained Glass, Navy Pier, Chicago, Illinois, USA. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1297504

This, then, is Meribah:
We strike the lifeless stone
and water, like the winter’s thaw,
pours down from heaven’s throne.

Why did you bring us here
into the desert place?
What mercy could be so severe,
what cruelty be grace?

Even the rock here bleeds—
the waters that you give
a spring your hidden mercy feeds—
it bleeds, and we shall live.

Kruiswegstaties, Westfalen, ca. 1530. Photo By Niels from Amsterdam, NL – Catharijneconvent – Kruiswegstatie 10: Longinus doorsteekt de zijde van de gestorven Christus, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7657472

Jesus said to the Jews:
“Amen, amen, I say to you,
whoever keeps my word will never see death.”
So the Jews said to him,
“Now we are sure that you are possessed.
Abraham died, as did the prophets, yet you say,
‘Whoever keeps my word will never taste death.’
Are you greater than our father Abraham, who died?
Or the prophets, who died?
Who do you make yourself out to be?”
—John 8:51-53

What is this taste of death that you should close
your lips around it, taken on your tongue?
Dissolving, melting, down your throat it flows,
its flavor all the dirges ever sung,
its bitter savor acid in the gut—
and yet, my Christ, what victory you’ve wrung
from this, a morsel like a hazelnut.
You are the nutmeg of a different tree,
yet in the mouth of death a feast to glut,
a drop of rain to overflow the sea.
So you, the greater sea, have swallowed all
and all is sea-changed. What, then, shall it be,
so rich and strange, when at the trumpet call
the sea gives us its dead? What else but life?
We morsels we, in your abyss we fall
by plague and famine, accident and strife,
and still you thirst for us, you hunger still;
a bridegroom longing for his new-made wife
has not a greater appetite to fill.
And so you take us in, the bride you chose,
and like a river into you we spill,
into your currents and your undertows
to find at last the shore where you arose.

A view of the plain near Dikili in Turkey By Omulazimoglu at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13443633

To know the grain, you have to learn the wood;
to know the wood, you have to learn the tree
right back to Eden, where its grandsire stood
in winds that even then blew off the sea
and stirred its leaves.  Learn what the tree could be,
and what it was before the autumn came,
its scorn of frost and all its fear of flame.

To know the nail, you have to learn the iron;
to know the iron, you have to learn the ore,
the hidden vein and rivers of earth’s fire
that leave a precious silt, as on Nile’s shore.
You have to drill the depths, to sink, to bore
into the bedrock, feel foundation’s strength.
You have to learn creation’s breadth and length.

There is no other way, lad, to create,
and we are workers at our maker’s bench.
Not one thing of his making does he hate,
nor from its nature will he any wrench.
Straight as a plumb, the rain falls down to drench
the earth: He will not drag them out of line,
and we must to his ways our own incline.

Even the darkness we must learn to love,
the shade beneath the stone, the blessed night,
our sleep, our deaths, the fears we whisper of.
These, too, shall shape the workings of a wright.
These, too, cry out to God to make them bright.
What shall we do, my boy, but love them well
and shape them so the love of God to tell?

Of all we make, the thrust is this alone:
God made, and makes, and he will make us new.
Someday a king will sit on David’s throne,
but only if a craftsman’s hands will hew
the wood and plane the edges straight and true.
These still are Eden’s trees that make his seat,
but only God will make his reign complete.

And then he will make all things new again.
The trees cry out for it, the deep earth cries;
you’ll learn to hear it—I cannot say when—
and may you see the day when heaven replies.
The deaf shall hear, the dead shall open their eyes,
creation laugh—the nails, boy, and the wood—
and all shall be as God pronounced them: Good.

Signac: The Pine, Saint Tropes, 1892-1893 – Hermitage Museum, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=489520

Lift up your heads, O gates; lift up your lintels.
O heart of mine, throw wide your creaking doors
that he who loves you best at last may enter
and take unto himself all that is yours.

And cry aloud, Hosanna, son of David!
You have been stone, O heart, yet still proclaim,
Blessed is he, the king who comes to save us!
Blessed is he who comes in heaven’s name!

Your suffering and shame, he comes to share them.
Even in death you shall not go alone,
and all your burdens—lo, he comes to bear them.
Your life itself he takes and makes his own.

For by his stripes, O wounded heart, he heals you
and by his dying death is trampled down.
So in his love he baptizes and seals you
that you may share his life and wear his crown.

Cry out again, O heart; cry out, Hosanna!
He comes redeeming you from every sin
and feeding you forever with his manna.
Lift up your head and let him enter in.

More details

Oskar Laske, Einzug in Jerusalem, ca. 1920 – Dorotheum: Info about artwork, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=123917998

Even now someone is weeping in a garden.
The highest thought of God prepares to stoop.
Even now there’s someone praying, “Father, pardon,”
and I make soup.

The gate swings back as children cry Hosanna!
I chop the onion, pour out olive oil,
keep plodding from Ash Wednesday to Palm Sunday
in daily toil.

Yet even now the angel’s crying Ave,
and Mary’s heart is pierced by sorrow’s sword.
As I turn down the heat beneath the sauté
they strip my Lord.

And every minute, yes, I should be kneeling
before the mysteries, his death and life,
but garlic calls for mincing, carrots peeling.
I wash the knife.

Yes, even now the end of days is coming;
the tomb is nearer than it was before,
yet every day we wake with stomachs rumbling,
hungry for more.

He knocks and waits for one to bid him enter,
and I am deaf—and still we all are fed.
He waits in timelessness and knocks again here
and comes as bread.

Chardin, Jean-Siméon – Vegetables for the Soup – Google Art Project, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22490774

Mary is called full of grace, as Bernard says, because four kinds of grace shone in her spirit: the devotion of her humility, the reverence of her modesty, the greatness of her faith, and the martyrdom of her heart. She is told, The Lord is with thee, because four things, as the same Bernard says, shone upon her from heaven, these being Mary’s sanctification, the angel’s salutation, the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit, and the incarnation of the Son of God. Moreover she is told, Blessed art thou among women, because, according to the same author, four things also shone in her body: she was the Virgin of virgins, fruitful without corruption, pregnant without heaviness, and delivered without pain.

–Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, tr. William Granger Ryan, “The Annunciation of the Lord.”

O numberless, crammed into calculations,
intelligence may claim it has sufficed
but you are orders more than our equations:
one god, three persons; two natures in one Christ.
Yet magnitude to finitude is spliced,
nine months contained, like one of your creations.

Too great for me, this knowledge. It encumbers
my soul, this greater sum than all its parts,
and so I come to you by rote and numbers.
I seek you out in tables and in charts.
Fool’s errand, for you dwell in trackless hearts
and give to your beloved as she slumbers.

Yet come, O endlessness: Spite all my efforts
to fit your greatness to my clutch and clasp,
and dwindle of yourself to human presence,
your mystery made small enough to grasp.
Where I have locked the door, oh, break the hasp
and enter, Lord, as streams into my deserts.

You who are greater than the mind can fathom,
see all my mind’s fractured geometries
and fill each gap, suffusing every stratum
with fractions of undreamt infinities
‘til I inhabit your eternities
and see you in the fragments of the atom. Amen.

Illustration zum Lukasevangelium Kapitel 1 By anonym, 12. Jahrhundert – https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b105494556/f238.item.zoom#, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=154631290

Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So when he heard that he was ill, he remained for two days in the place where he was. Then after this he said to his disciples, “Let us go back to Judea.”
—John 11:5-7

Why do you stay so far away from me?
Does nothing in the heavens hear me call?
Nothing answers. What can your silence be?

A punishment, as once again I fall?
An evidence of your indifference?
A proof of love, or none of these, or all?

Some days a pain consumes my every sense
and I know nothing else. Where, then, are you?
Wherever, Lord, arise and come from thence

to gather up my fragments, make them new
as you will make the heavens and the earth,
for there is nothing that you cannot do—

Yet I remain as frail as at my birth,
no new creation. I am being unmade,
each thread unravelling of self and worth

rewoven as a shroud. When I am laid
into my tomb, Lord, will I find you there?
In all my calling, is that where you’ve stayed?

Then I am moving toward you unaware.
And what will you reveal there in the dark,
the silence where you’ve heard my every prayer?

You wait for me in shadow, cold and stark,
as all creation waits to be set free,
to kindle me beyond my final spark.
And there beside you, Lord, what will I see?

The Raising of Lazarus, by Duccio, 1310–11 – Kimbell Art Museum, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7125641

Now he lives in Abraham’s bosom, and whatever may be the meaning of that bosom, there, Nebridius lives, my very dear friend, taken by you to be your son, no longer simply one whom you had freed from bondage. There he lives. For what other place is there for a soul such as his? There he lives, in that very place about which he used to question me so much, poor ignorant man that I was. He no longer lays his ear to my lips, but with the lips of his spirit he drinks in wisdom at your fountain. He drinks till his thirst is slaked, and his happiness is never-ending. And I cannot believe that the draught intoxicates him so that he forgets me, for it is you, O Lord, whom he drinks in and you are mindful of your servants.

–Augustine, Confessions, Book IX, 3. Tr. R.S. Pine-Coffin

Set free, my brother: You have been set free.
No more the questions streaming from your lips
break on my ears as music from the sea;
from sweeter waters now your spirit sips.
You, who helped turn my soul from its eclipse,
impatient have gone on ahead of me.

We sailed together on the seas of mind,
together tasted of our brackish tears,
and you were never anything but kind
in mocking my deluded, worldly fears.
Then, when at last the truth of all appears,
together we will living water find.

But now you rest where Lazarus before
had rested.  I have bested Dives, though:
For me, you will that drink of mercy pour
on my parched tongue, as I have leagues to go
before I meet you once again and know
the peace you have, awaiting on that shore.

So in your joy, I beg: Remember me.
Though it has been long years now since we met,
your star still guides me on the swelling sea,
and where you are, I hope I shall be yet.
You look on God, and he does not forget:
Then pray that I shall someday be set free.

More details

The Conversion of St. Augustine by Fra Angelico – Unknown source, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1022879

We gloried in a midnight blank and starless,
and fathomed not what morning’s light could be.
How could we know we’d always dwelt in darkness
until we understood we could not see?

But now a comet blazes on its mission
to herald something dawning like the day,
and finds its target with a cold precision:
to pierce our eyes and show, at last, the way.

And now we see, and what we see is shadow.
We learn to know ourselves, our gyves of gloom,
and we begin to dream a restful meadow,
a flowing stream, and peace, and lives in bloom.

But that’s a dream for other nights than this one:
Rise up and gird yourselves to leave in haste.
The comet streaks above us like a missile
to lead us home across the desert waste.

An image of comet C/1995 O1 (Hale-Bopp), taken on April 04, 1997 with a 225mm f/2.0 Schmidt Camera (focal length 450mm) on Kodak Panther 400 color slide film with an exposure time of 10 minutes; the field shown is about 6.5°x6.5°; at full resolution, the stars in the image appear slightly elongated, as the camera tracked the comet during the exposure By E. Kolmhofer, H. Raab; Johannes-Kepler-Observatory, Linz, Austria (https://sternwarte.at) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6756556