inaudible, isolated, and irrelevant,
and we can move on to another love and another.
So what singing angel will come to us in reverie
to save us from ourselves and our best intentions,
head off our ego-preserving diplomacies,
and gospel us with the message we dread
and always in need of in our sterile barrenness?
Sympathy for the Emperor at Christmastime
Nativity of Our Lord / Christmas Eve
Luke 2:1–20
In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. All went to their own towns to be registered. (Luke 2:1–3)
The outbreak of newness was contagious as a song
containment was unmanageable
even with the emperor’s stranglehold of peace
The first case was reported in a barn where
people and domesticated animals share germs
and misery and hunger and cold and labor
From there it was thought to spread to a small band
of sheep herders and a rustic village pub where
they drank pints and harmonized, that may have been where
the traveler was infected with the joy virus
and spread it upstate to an unsuspecting pessimist
who took drugs at first to quell the unusual feeling
From there no one is sure how it became global
other than the emperor and all inoculated like him
did their royal best to spin the good news
birthed that night, but the more they suppressed
the more it lifted up, the more they schemed
the more the glad spirit frustrated their ways
so that anywhere the ease of God disrupts dis-ease,
birth pangs of faith and love and mercy have their way
and people sing and someone catches it
The Meaning of God
Christmas 2 ABC
John 1:1–18
And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (John 1:14)
You wish it could be put into words and paragraphs
recited and parsed and memorized and philosophized
offset printed in a leather-bound book
closed and shelved and dusted for good company
But Logos, Sophia, meaning, divine reason
come to us through the cosmic entanglement
of body and God, with birth pangs and dying pains
and all the light and love you can squeeze in between
so that the meaning of God—
if there ever could be such a thing for us to comprehend—
lives in created flesh and blood and heart and mind
suffers mercy without explanation or cause
births hope without limits or permission
delights in life for all its holy humanity
Openings and Obfuscations
Baptism of Our Lord A
Matthew 3:13–17
And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” (Matt 3:16–17)
A break in the clouds split the God-barrier open
the heavens sang and summoned him as benevolence
but then, as always happens and must happen,
the closing, the occlusion of the space between
Whether Jesus’ baptism or your own plunging initiation,
perhaps a mystical desert epiphany of dazzling diamond light,
a Himalayan climb into oxygen-starved euphoric heights,
or a canyon ramble descending to depth and profundity,
whether pharmaceutical prescriptions for bliss and dreamland
or wild fungus visions of you outside yourself in glory
You will always re-enter your mundane moment—
like Jesus walking on from the Jordan to middling towns—
you trod again the profane path of normalcy: a breakfast egg,
a morning kiss, money spent, ICU waiting room, neat whiskey,
forest walks, a desk and its chair, all so thick with obfuscation
yet the wonder of it all
Unbearable Lightness of Myself
Lectionary 2 A
Isaiah 49:1–7
And now the LORD says, who formed me in the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob back to him, and that Israel might be gathered to him, for I am honored in the sight of the LORD, and my God has become my strength—he says, “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” (Isa 49:5–6)
He walked into the church office with laptop and lunch bag,
set the coffee mug and
