Poetry
"I will call them my people, who were not my people. And her beloved, who was not beloved." (Romans 9:25 referencing Hosea 2:23)
Estranged, alienated, and removed; anyone living in an industrialized modern society in the 21st century would be able to define, or at least identify the sentiments of these words. Our time is one of mass communication and instantaneous access to knowledge. And yet our lives are too compartmentalized, increasingly divided, and our society reflects this. Indeed the existential writers of yesteryear were correct in diagnosing the iron cage that would befall us, ultimately leading to an eclipse of reason.
In Christian confession, Good Friday is the day of loss and defeat; Sunday is the day of recovery and victory. Friday and Sunday summarize the drama of the gospel that continues to be re-performed, always again, in the life of faith. In the long gospel reading of the lectionary for this week (Matthew 27:11-54), we hear the Friday element of that drama: the moment when Jesus cries out to God in abandonment (Matthew 27: 46). This reading does not carry us, for this day, toward the Sunday victory, except for the anticipatory assertion of the Roman soldier who recognized that Jesus is the power of God for new life in the world (verse 54). Given that anticipation, the reading invites the church to walk into the deep loss in hope of walking into the new life that will come at the end of the drama.
Touched your hem / A thousand times / A face just / Beyond my sight / Space between / Grace, grief
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No, nothing,
she says, that is not God’s, and we approach
a crow ripping the entrails
of a truck-crushed fox, and the crow flees
The hospital chaplain who sits in the room of a sick child
in Chicago and brings the child to God—not with words
but by her quiet presence.
As a Sojourners intern last year, I, along with my community-mates, had the opportunity to request speakers to invite to address us during weekly seminars. Peace activist and poet Fr. Daniel Berrigan was on the top of my list.
Alb: A white liturgical tunic worn as prayer for a heart protected from all stain and washed in the Blood of the Lamb.
Because I lay on my back as a boy in the grass of the small yard behind our house watching clouds move and become faces, mostly,
David Denny teaches English at De Anza College in Cupertino, California.
Of all the saints, my Anthony,
I love you best. For you did
what I long to do: you walked away
from a life of comfort and ease,