March 2018
Written by John and Madelynne Jones
Wasting time in your living room
Time flies by; will the sun come up soon?
Another book read, it’s a quarter after 10
Nowhere to go, I’m just glad I have a friend
Month: October 2019 Page 1 of 2
The Need for the Sabbath
He who wants to enter the holiness of the day must first lay down the profanity of clattering commerce, of being yoked to toil. He must go away from the screech of dissonant days, from the nervousness and fury of acquisitiveness and the betrayal in embezzling his own life… Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul. The world has our hands, but our soul belongs to Someone Else. Six days a week we seek to dominate the world, on the seventh day we try to dominate the self.
abraham joshua heschel, The sabbath
Christian Wiman is a fantastic poet whose poetry has been the first in a while to make me stop and want to reread a poem to really internalize it. And then reread it again. And again. And again. His poem Every Riven Thing is a beautifully written poem (which you can read here) in which the line “God goes belonging to every riven thing he’s made” is repeated throughout, but the syntactic structure changes each time, changing the meaning of the phrase and building upon itself in a linguistic and poetic crescendo. I highly recommend reading Every Riven Thing before reading on.
February 2017
Inspired by Paul Coehlo’s The Alchemist, and written with Madelynne Jones
When I was young I wanted all that I have now
When I was you I knew this truth,
That I’d get here somehow
This is better than any place I’ve been before
Is there a need for brighter shores?
January 2018
Come on down and hear the tale
Of a man with a bounty the size of a whale
A Colt .45 was his dame of choice
A six-round shooter his second voice
Learning to Use Liturgy
I didn’t grow up Catholic. Or Lutheran. Or Methodist. Or Anglican. Or any of the denominations that even remotely use liturgy. And while I did grow up in within the faith, I never used liturgy growing up.
February 2017
Inspired by Paul Coehlo’s The Alchemist
For two hundred years I’ve walked upon this world
Desert sands around me, they whipped and swirled
Learning the skills of what old men could’ve sold
Turning metal to gold using power before untold
O winter wind, o eastern wind
The wonder of my youth
Lay me down upon this earth
That I may know the truth
That my foe has been defeated
But broken not by sword
And I shall rest ’til He returns
In the comfort of my Lord