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There Was a Time: An Advent Poem

There was a time when there was no time,
When darkness reigned as king,
When a formless void was all that there was
in the nothingness of eternity,
When it was night.
But over the void and over the night Love watched.
There was a time when time began.
It began when Love spoke.

Time began for light and life, for splendor and grandeur.
Time began for seas and mountains, for flowers and birds.
Time began for the valleys to ring with the songs of life,
and for the wilderness to echo with the wailing of wind
and howling of animals.
And over the earth, Love watched.

There was a time when time began to be recorded.
A time when Love breathed and a new creature came to life.
A new creature so special that it was in the image and likeness of…

As we begin Advent, I would like to share an excerpt from a newly published collection of Advent meditations by Mother Mary Clare PCC:

I am quite confident all of us have a deep sense of expectation, joy, and wonderment that Advent is about to begin.  We look at the different facets of this season, turning it like a jewel in our hands.  Certainly it is a season for children.  It is a season of the child, the joy of the Child who came to give joy to the world.  It is a season, certainly, of the family, of the community.  Family life was solidly established in a lowly, humble, poor place, with three persons who loved utterly and were utterly given–even the CHild, from the first moment, because he was divine.  It is a season of great tenderness, and a season of hush. It is a season for everyone. …

As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness.

Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say, the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society — things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly. It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. But as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time waiting to sprout when the conditions are right. Man’s curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his…

In a talk I gave at WTH on Mary, the Witness to Hope, I shared about learning how to live our lives with an attentiveness to the “spirituality of events.”  This basically means asking the Holy Spirit to speak to us through the events that happen to us in our days, to help us to learn what God is trying to teach us through all that comes our way.  God wants to teach us how to look at the events in our lives with His eyes, with the eyes of faith. Yesterday’s meditation in Magnificat reminded me of that:

“The circumstances through which God has us pass are an essential and not a secondary factor of . . . the mission to which he calls us.  If Christianity is the announcement of the fact that that Mystery has become flesh in a man, the circumstance in which one takes…

A Sunday-poem from Amy Carmichael:

Too High for Me

I have no word,
But neither hath the bird,
And it is heard;
My heart is singing, singing all day long,
In quiet joy to Thee who art my Song.

For as Thy majesty,
So is Thy mercy,
So is Thy mercy,
My Lord and my God.

How intimate
Thy ways with those who wait
About Thy gate:
But who could show the fashion of such ways
In human words, and hymn them to Thy praise?

Too high for me,
Far shining mystery,
Too high to see;
But not too high to know, though out of reach
Of words to sing its gladness into speech.

Is it “one of those days”?  Here is a little encouragement from Amy Carmichael:

Ps. 76.4 LXX Thou dost wonderfully shine forth from the everlasting mountains.

Sometimes it is dull weather in our soul.  Here is a word for such days.  Often when it is misty on the plains it is bright on the mountains.  ‘Thou art more glorious and excellent than the mountains’ is a lovely word, I think, but this beautiful LXX rendering, which our Lord must often have read, carries us even further.  The mist may lie low on the plains, but there is a shining forth from the mountains.

There is nothing in me.  I may be as dull as the plains are when the mist is heavy upon them, but what does that matter?  ‘Thy mercy, O Lord, is in the heavens; and Thy faithfulness reacheth unto the clouds.  Thy righteousness is like the great…

Today’s poem comes from Amy Carmichael:

Love, travelling in the greatness of His strength,
   Found me alone,
Footsore and tired by the journey's length,
   Though I had known
All the long way many a kindly air,
And flowers had blossomed for me everywhere.

And yet Love found me needing Him.  He stayed;
   Love stayed by me.
"Let not your heart be troubled or dismayed,
   My child," said He.
Slipped from me then, all troubles, all alarms,
For Love had gathered me into His arms.

Amy Carmichael’s note on this poem of hers: “Ps 109.21.  A prayer that may be unfathomable comfort to the ill and tired: ‘Do Thou for them, for him, for her, O God the Lord.’  When one cannot pray minutely or powerfully, this prayer suffices.  We need not tell Love what to do; Love knows.”  God knows better than we what is best for those we love.  Here Amy is simply encouraging us to trust Him who knows how to love best.

Do Thou For Me

Do Thou for me, O God the Lord,
Do Thou for me.
I need not toil to find the word
That carefully
Unfolds my prayer and offers it,
My God, to Thee.

It is enough that Thou wilt do,
And wilt not tire,
Wilt lead by cloud, all the night through
By light of fire,
Till Thou has perfected in me
Thy heart’s desire.

For…

In 1999 I traveled to Japan to participate in several exhibitions hosted by my dear friend Mr. Shiho Kanzaki.  I arrived with gifts for all the many people that were required to make this amazing opportunity a reality for me.

After I arrived and was unpacking, I discovered that 4 of the side-fired cups that I’d brought as gifts had been broken by the baggage-handling process.  Without a thought I dumped them into the waste basket in my room.  Sometime later that week, someone came to my room and took out the trash.  

After a remarkable 6 weeks in Shigaraki, two exhibitions, travel,  fine food, new friends…my visit came to an end.

As often happens there were some “parting gifts” given by me to my hosts; and some gifts were given to me by my hosts.  Among the parting gifts I received, I discovered…