I am currently reading Christian Wiman's book, My Bright Abyss, a slim and insightful volume substitled: Meditation of a Modern Believer. It is well worth the effort. Today I came across the poem that struck deep. It is called "Native."
At sixteen,
sixteen miles
from Abilene
(Trent,
to be exact),
hellbent
on being not
this, not that,
I drove
a steamroller
smack-dab over
a fat black snake.
Up surged a cheer
from men
so cheerless
cheers
were grunts, squints,
whisker twitches
it would take
a lunatic acuity
to see.
I saw
the fat black snake
smashed flat
as the asphalt
flattening
under all ten tons
of me,
flat as the landscape
I could see
no end of,
flat as the affect
of distant killing
vigilance
it would take a native
to know was love.
WHEN LOVE COMES TO TOWN: REFLECTIONS ON TENDERNESS IN A CHAOTIC CULTURE
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There is a story about St. Francis and the Sultan - greatly embellished to be sure and often treated in apocryphal ways in the 2 1st centur... -
NOTE: Here are my Sunday worship notes for the Feast of the Epiphany. They are a bit late - in theory I wasn't going to do much work ...
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