Tag Archives: Incarnation

Christmas Again

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“the Word became flesh and lived among us” – John 1:14 (NRSV)

 

“Winter landscape, with rocks” by Sylvia Plath

 

Water in the millrace, through a sluice of stone,

plunges headlong into that black pond

where, absurd and out-of-season, a single swan

floats chaste as snow, taunting the clouded mind

which hungers to haul the white reflection down.

monetsoleilcouchantalavacourt_0

“Soleil couchant sur la Seine à Lavacourt, effet d’hiver” by Claude Monet

 

The austere sun descends above the fen,

an orange cyclops-eye, scorning to look

longer on this landscape of chagrin;

feathered dark in thought, I stalk like a rook,

brooding as the winter night comes on.

 

Last summer’s reeds are all engraved in ice

as is your image in my eye; dry frost

glazes the window of my hurt; what solace

can be struck from rock to make heart’s waste

grow green again? Who’d walk in this bleak place?

Advent Again – day 23

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“again in the pains of childbirth”

 

a-woman-called-mother

“A Woman Called Mother” by M.T. Brown (personal collection)

“From ‘The Black Maria'” by Aracelis Girmay

 

The body, bearing something ordinary as light                           Opens

as in a room somewhere the friend opens in poppy, in flame, burns & bears the child — out.

 

When I did it was the hours & hours of breaking. The bucking of

it all, the push & head

 

not moving, not an inch until,

when he flew from me, it was the night who came

 

flying through me with all its hair,

 

the immense terror of his face & noise.

 

I heard the stranger & my brain, without looking, vowed

a love-him vow. His struggling, merely, to be

 

split me down, with the axe, to two. How true,

the thinness of our hovering between the realms of Here, Not Here.

 

The fight, first, to open, then to breathe,

& then to close. Each of us entering the world

 

& entering the world like this.

Soft. Unlikely.      Then —

 

the idiosyncratic minds & verbs.

Beloveds, making your ways

 

to & away from us, always, across the centuries,

inside the vastness of the galaxy, how improbable it is that this
iteration

 

of you or you or me might come to be at all — Body of fear,

Body of laughing —& even last a second. This fact should make us fall all

 

to our knees with awe,

the beauty of it against these odds,

 

the stacks & stacks of near misses

& slimmest chances that birthed one ancestor into the next & next.

 

Profound, unspeakable cruelty who counters this, who does not see.

& so to tenderness I add my action.

 

Source: Poetry (April 2016)

 

From <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/detail/88747>

Advent Again – day 22

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“Do not be afraid to…”

 

“Hymn” by A.R. Ammons

I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth

and go on out

     over the sea marshes and the brant in bays

and over the hills of tall hickory

and over the crater lakes and canyons

and on up through the spheres of diminishing air

past the blackset noctilucent clouds

           where one wants to stop and look

way past all the light diffusions and bombardments

up farther than the loss of sight

    into the unseasonal undifferentiated empty stark

 

And I know if I find you I will have to stay with the earth

inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes

trusting the microvilli sporangia and simplest

     coelenterates

and praying for a nerve cell

with all the soul of my chemical reactions

and going right on down where the eye sees only traces

 

You are everywhere partial and entire

You are on the inside of everything and on the outside

forest-1890-cezanne

Forest (1890) by Paul Cezanne

 

I walk down the path down the hill where the sweetgum

has begun to ooze spring sap at the cut

and I see how the bark cracks and winds like no other bark

chasmal to my ant-soul running up and down

and if I find you I must go out deep into your

    far resolutions

and if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves

Christmas/ Incarnation

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from “Feast Days: Thanksgiving – Christmas”
by Annie Dillard

…

Let me mention
one or two things about Christmas.
Of course you’ve all heard
that the animals talk
at midnight:
a particular elk, for instance,
kneeling at night to drink,
leaning tall to pull leaves
with his soft lips,
says, alleluia.

That the soil and fresh-water lakes
also rejoice,
as do products
such as sweaters
(nor are plastics excluded
from grace),
is less well known.
Further:
the reason for some silly-looking fishes,
for the bizarre mating
of certain adult insects,
or the sprouting, say,
in a snow tire
of a Rocky Mountain grass,
is that the universal
loves the particular,
that freedom loves to live
and live fleshed full,
intricate,
and in detail.

God empties himself
into the earth like a cloud.
God takes the substance, contours
of a man, and keeps them,
dying, rising, walking,
and still walking
wherever there is motion.

…

Icons-of-the-incarnation-im

Art from Sophie Hacker’s Icons of the Incarnation

Advent Reflection – Day 15

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More on the light that shines in the darkness….

How the Light Comes: A Blessing for Christmas Day

AndTheDarknessDidNotOvercomeItJanLRichardson

“And the Darkness Did Not Overcome It” by Jan L. Richardson

I cannot tell you how the light comes.

What I know is that it is more ancient than imagining.

That it travels across an astounding expanse to reach us.

That it loves searching out what is hidden what is lost what is forgotten or in peril or in pain.

That it has a fondness for the body for finding its way toward flesh for tracing the edges of form for shining forth through the eye, the hand, the heart.

I cannot tell you how the light comes, but that it does. That it will. That it works its way into the deepest dark that enfolds you, though it may seem long ages in coming or arrive in a shape you did not foresee.

And so may we this day turn ourselves toward it. May we lift our faces to let it find us. May we bend our bodies to follow the arc it makes. May we open and open more and open still

to the blessed light that comes.

Art & Reflection by Jan L. Richardson. Go here http://adventdoor.com/category/poetry/page/2/ to see more of her amazing Advent images and reflections or here http://janrichardsonimages.com/details.php?gid=60&pid=345 to purchase a digital download or art print

Advent Reflection – Day 10

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This was my inbox this morning…

“It might be easy to run away to a monastery, away from the commercialization, the hectic hustle, the demanding family responsibilities of Christmas-time. Then we would have a holy Christmas. But we would forget the lesson of the Incarnation, of the enfleshing of God—the lesson that we who are followers of Jesus do not run from the secular; rather we try to transform it. It is our mission to make holy the secular aspects of Christmas just as the early Christians baptized the Christmas tree. And we do this by being holy people—kind, patient, generous, loving, laughing people—no matter how maddening is the Christmas rush….”

– Fr. Andrew Greeley