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Dominican Preaching through Word and Image
To Live in the Mercy of God
Today’s Lenten poem from Education for Justice is by Denise Levertov.
To Live in the Mercy of God
To lie back under the tallest
oldest trees. How far the stems
rise, rise
before ribs of shelter
open!
To live in the mercy of God. The complete
sentence too adequate, has no give.
Awe, not comfort. Stone, elbows of
stony wood beneath lenient
moss bed.
And awe suddenly
passing beyond itself. Becomes
a form of comfort.
Becomes the steady
air you glide on, arms
stretched like the wings of flying foxes.
To hear the multiple silence
of trees, the rainy
forest depths of their listening.
To float, upheld,
as salt water
would hold you,
once you dared.
To live in the mercy of God.
To feel vibrate the enraptured
waterfall flinging itself
unabating down and down
to clenched fists of rock.
Swiftness of plunge,
hour after year after century,
O or Ah
uninterrupted, voice
many-stranded.
To breathe
spray. The smoke of it.
Arcs
of steelwhite foam, glissades
of fugitive jade barely perceptible. Such passion—
rage or joy?
Thus, not mild, not temperate,
God’s love for the world. Vast
flood of mercy
flung on resistance.
Source: “To Live in the Mercy of God” from Sands from the Well, by Denise
Levertov. New York: New Directions, 1996.
Prayer
Today’s Lenten poem from Education for Justice is by Jessica Powers.
Prayer
Prayer is the trap-door out of sin.
Prayer is a mystic entering in
to secret places full of light.
It is a passage through the night.
Heaven is reached, the blessed say,
by prayer and by no other way.
One may kneel down and make a plea
with words from book or breviary,
or one may enter in and find
a home-made message in the mind.
But true prayer travels further still,
to seek God’s presence and God’s will.
To pray can be to push a door
and snatch some crumbs of evermore,
or (likelier by far) to wait,
head bowed, before a fastened gate,
helpless and miserable and dumb,
yet hopeful that the Lord will come.
Here is the prayer of grace and good
most proper to our creaturehood.
God’s window shows his humble one
more to the likeness of His Son.
He sees, though thought and senses stray,
the will is resolute to stay
and feed, in weathers sweet or grim,
on any word that speaks of Him.
He beams on the humility
that keeps it peace in misery
and, save for glimmerings, never knows
how beautiful with light it grows.
He smiles on faith that seems to know
it has no other place to go.
But some day, hidden by His will,
if this meek child is waiting still,
God will take out His mercy-key
and open up felicity,
where saltiest tears are given right
to seas where sapphire marries light,
where by each woe the soul can span
new orbits for the utter man,
where even the flesh, so seldom prized,
would blind the less than divinized.Source: “Prayer” from The Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers, edited by
Regina Siegfried, ASC, and Robert F. Morneau. Kansas City, MO: Sheed &
Ward, 1989.
What I Pray For
Today’s Lenten poem from Education for Justice is by Dennis O’Donnell
What I Pray For
Sacks of rocks
I have gathered from the beach,
some of which I used to toss
my own I Ching, stones representing
fire, water, wind, and the rest,
some of them with strange,
man-like markings, like circles,
probably formed by little pools of sea water,
dried by the sun, leaving behind
a round stain of salt.Stacks of poems, sacks of rocks,
milk crates full of books
full of baloney:
I can’t let them go, not yet,
but I lie in bed and plead with God
to empty out my past, all of it,
at least all of the bad,
set me free, flush out
all the shame and rage and heartache,
but please, not the finger-paints,
not baseball and my best friends.Deal, He says,
but all the rocks must go.
No tarot cards, and no metaphysical bull.
Fine, I say.I have a look at my bookcase.
I see Rumi, Suzuki, Lao Tzu,
and two Bibles. So:
who will throw the first stone?Source: “What I Pray For” by Dennis O’Donnell from America Magazine, Vol.
190 No. 6 (2/23/2004).
The Uses of Sorrow
Today’s Lenten poem from Education for Justice is by Mary Oliver, a favorite of many.
The Uses of Sorrow
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.Source: “The Uses of Sorrow” from Thirst, by Mary Oliver. Boston: Beacon
Press, 2006.
Night Thoughts
Today’s Lenten poem from Education for Justice is by William F. Bell.
Night Thoughts
It is our emptiness and lowliness that God needs, and not our
plenitude. —Mother TeresaSomehow by day, no matter what,
I patch myself together whole,
But all my effort can’t offset
The nightly nakedness of soul
When angels in a dark descent
Strip off my integument.I am a cornered rebel pinched
Between night’s armies and my lack,
And when inside the bedclothes hunched
I feel the force of their attack,
I hardly know what I can do,
Exposed to God at half-past two.I once believed my being full,
But night thoughts prove that it is not.
Waking scared and miserable,
I scrape the bottom of the pot
And then must bow down and confess
Totality of emptiness.Kings once ventured, it is said,
To offer gold and frankincense,
But I send nothing from my bed
Except a tattered penitence,
So very little has accrued
From years of doubtful plenitude.God who tear away my cover,
Oh, pour your Spirit into me
Until my emptiness runs over
With golden superfluity,
And I bow down and offer up
Yourself within my earthen cup.Source: “Night Thoughts” by William Bell from America Magazine, Vol. 187 No.
18 (12/2/2002).
We Wear the Mask
Today’s Lenten poem from Education for Justice is by Paul Laurence Dunbar.
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We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream.Source: “We Wear the Mask” from The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence
Dunbar. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1913.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Kiss
Kissed by the Morning Sun
Beginners
I am very fond of the poetry of Denise Levertov, and today’s Lenten poem from Education for Justice is one of hers.
Beginners
by Denise Levertov
-Dedicated to the memory of Karen Silkwood and Eliot Gralla“From too much love of living, Hope and desire set free,
Even the weariest river winds somewhere to the sea—“But we have only begun
To love the earth.We have only begun
To imagine the fullness of life.How could we tire of hope?
—so much is in bud.How can desire fail?
—we have only begunto imagine justice and mercy,
only begun to envisionhow it might be
to live as siblings with beast and flower,
not as oppressors.Surely our river
cannot already be hastening
into the sea of nonbeing?Surely it cannot
drag, in the silt,
all that is innocent?Not yet, not yet—
there is too much broken
that must be mended,too much hurt we have done to each other
that cannot yet be forgiven.We have only begun to know
the power that is in us if we would join
our solitudes in the communion of struggle.So much is unfolding that must
complete its gesture,
so much is in bud.Source: “Beginners” from Candles in Babylon, by Denise Levertov. New York:
New Directions, 1982.
Possible Answers to Prayer
Today’s Lenten poem from Education for Justice, is by Scott Cairns.
Your petitions—though they continue to bear
just the one signature—have been duly recorded.
Your anxieties—despite their constant,relatively narrow scope and inadvertent
entertainment value—nonetheless serve
to bring your person vividly to mind.Your repentance—all but obscured beneath
a burgeoning, yellow fog of frankly more
conspicuous resentment—is sufficient.Your intermittent concern for the sick,
the suffering, the needy poor is sometimes
recognizable to me, if not to them.Your angers, your zeal, your lipsmackingly
righteous indignation toward the many
whose habits and sympathies offend you—these must burn away before you’ll apprehend
how near I am, with what fervor I adore
precisely these, the several who rouse your passions.Source: “Possible Answers to Prayer” from Philokalia: New and Selected
Poems, by Scott Cairns. Lincoln, Nebraska: Zoo Press, 2002.
Prayer of One Who Feels Lost
Today, on the First Sunday of Lent, our Lenten poem from Education for Justice is by Joyce Rupp (whose books and poetry I have always enjoyed).
Dear God,
why do I keep fighting you off?
One part of me wants you desparately,
another part of me unknowingly
pushes you back and runs away.What is there in me that
so contradicts my desire for you?
These transition days, these passage ways,
are calling me to let go of old securities,
to give myself over into your hands.Like Jesus who struggled with the pain
I, too, fight the “let it all be done.”
Loneliness, lostness, non-belonging,
all these hurts strike out at me,
leaving me pained with this present goodbye.I want to be more but I fight the growing.
I want to be new but I hang unto the old.
I want to live but I won’t face the dying.
I want to be whole but cannot bear
to gather up the pieces into one.Is it that I refuse to be out of control,
to let the tears take their humbling journey,
to allow my spirit to feel its depression,
to stay with the insecurity of “no home”?Now is the time. You call to me,
begging me to let you have my life,
inviting me to taste the darkness
so I can be filled with the light,
allowing me to lose my direction
so that I will find my way home to you.Source: “Prayer of One Who Feels Lost” from Praying Our Goodbyes, by Joyce
Rupp. South Bend, IN: Ave Maria Press, 1988.
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