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Poem And Hymn

2025-08-10

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill – more of each
than you have – inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your work,
doubt their judgment.

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

– Wendell Berry, from How to Be a Poet (to remind myself)

3 Our hope and expectation,
O Jesus, now appear;
arise, thou Sun so longed for,
above this darkened sphere!
With hearts and hands uplifted,
we plead, O Lord, to see
the day of earth’s redemption,
and ever be with thee!
– Rejoice! Rejoice, believers, youtube

Fathers Day Prayer

2025-06-15

Father’s Day, 2025-06-15

God,

Each of us is a living link in the Great Chain of Generation. Each of us has a father. I thank You for the love You have offered through the good fathers of the past: those who willed and strove to become channels of Your goodness, nurturance, protection, love and kindness to their children. I thank You for Your healing impulses, and for the Spirit-Breath and -Blood of Goodness that is Your action in the world. I thank You for forming Good Fathers into being and time.

I thank You that, despite the failings of our fathers, we yet know what it is to be virtuous, because You have taught us, and You have planted within each of our hearts a seed of striving to become Good.

I humbly pray to become like You – to become a good father to Your children, whom You have entrusted to my care, and to be a good partner to their mother. I acknowledge my own limitations, deficiencies and weakness. I ask for Your direction, wisdom and insight, that I may perceive what is right-action in the day-to-day life of our home. I ask for Your strength and endurance, that I may sustain Your work of fatherhood and partnership and not falter.

When I do inevitably falter, please grant me forgiveness and show me Your grace in reconciliation with my children. Help me not to ruminate on my own failings, but instead to resolve anew my Will to Be Good, with Your help, and to gently earn trust again, as I cultivate within myself Your gentleness and grace.

I pray for anyone whose ancestors in the Great Chain of Generation failed to give them the love and security they so essentially needed. I humbly acknowledge the Wounded Patriarchy that is yet such a source of affliction in our world.

I pray for all fathers and children whose loved ones have been taking from them, by no fault of their own, but by the cruel and misguided hand of another. I pray for all fathers who are struggling to provide for their children, against the adversaries of natural circumstance or human malice. Please, God, provide for Your Children. Please, God, let Your justice and righteousness be manifest and realized in our world. Please, God, help us to turn our wills. Open our hearts. Change our minds.

I ask You, the Perfect Father and Mother of us all, to send Your Redemptive healing and love to anyone hurting with father wounds – especially those who are wounding others. Please help us to break this cycle of wounding.

Source and Sustainer of Our Being, may all of us, who so desperately need Your love, have the courage to Receive it. Help us to Surrender to You our instinctual needs for survival, security, affection, esteem, power and control. Please, God, open our hearts. Change our minds.

I humbly offer You my Willing and my Striving.

Help me to never take for granted the awesome gift of my family, whom You have entrusted to me, and to whom You have entrusted me.

Through our stewardship of Your Family in Our Living Form, with Your help, may Our Home be a refuge to our children, a humble manifestation of Your Glory on earth. In all Homes, in all Places, may Your Glory not be hidden, but realized and known, through the gift of Your grace, sought by our striving.

Amen.

The spacious firmament on high

2024-09-15

1 The spacious firmament on high,
with all the blue ethereal sky,
and spangled heavens, a shining frame,
their great Original proclaim.
The unwearied sun from day to day
does his Creator’s power display,
and publishes to every land
the work of an almighty hand.

2 Soon as the evening shades prevail
the moon takes up the wondrous tale,
and nightly to the listening earth
repeats the story of her birth;
whilst all the stars that round her burn,
and all the planets in their turn,
confirm the tidings, as they roll,
and spread the truth from pole to pole.

3 What though in solemn silence all
move round the dark terrestrial ball;
what though nor real voice nor sound
amid their radiant orbs be found;
in reason’s ear they all rejoice,
and utter forth a glorious voice,
for ever singing as they shine,
‘The hand that made us is divine.’

– Joseph Addison (1712)

From Rev. Bryant's Sermon for Labor Day

2024-09-02

Thanks to Rev. Dr. Laura A. Bryant for sharing these prayers and this poem in her homily at St. John’s Episcopal Church, Johnson City, TN, this Sunday.

O God, your unfailing providence sustains the world we live in and the life we live: Watch over those, both night and day, who work while others sleep, and grant that we may never forget that our common life depends upon each other’s toil; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

– The Book of Common Prayer, p. 134

Mary Oliver’s poem, “Singapore”. This poem was originally printed in Poetry magazine in July 1988 (link) and later published in House of Light (Beacon Press, ISBN: 978-0-8070-6810-6).

In Singapore, in the airport,
A darkness was ripped from my eyes.
In the women’s restroom, one compartment stood open.
A woman knelt there, washing something in the white bowl.

Disgust argued in my stomach
and I felt, in my pocket, for my ticket.

A poem should always have birds in it.
Kingfishers, say, with their bold eyes and gaudy wings.
Rivers are pleasant, and of course trees.
A waterfall, or if that’s not possible, a fountain rising and falling.
A person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem.

When the woman turned I could not answer her face.
Her beauty and her embarrassment struggled together,
and neither could win.
She smiled and I smiled. What kind of nonsense is this?
Everybody needs a job.

Yes, a person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem.
But first we must watch her as she stares down at her labor,
which is dull enough.
She is washing the tops of the airport ashtrays, as big as hubcaps,
with a blue rag.
Her small hands turn the metal, scrubbing and rinsing.
She does not work slowly, nor quickly, like a river.
Her dark hair is like the wing of a bird.

. . .

I don’t doubt for a moment that she loves her life.
And I want her to rise up from the crust and the slop and
fly down to the river.
This probably won’t happen.
But maybe it will.
If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it?

Of course, it isnt.
Neither do I mean anything miraculous, but only
the light that can shine out of a life. I mean
the way she unfolded and refolded the blue cloth,
The way her smile was only for my sake; I mean
the way this poem is filled with trees, and birds.

– Mary Oliver

“She does not work slowly, nor quickly, like a river. Her dark hair is like the wing of a bird.”

Almighty God, you have so linked our lives one with another that all we do affects, for good or ill, all other lives: So guide us in the work we do, that we may do it not for self alone, but for the common good; and, as we seek a proper return for our own labor, make us mindful of the rightful aspirations of other workers, and arouse our concern for those who are out of work; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

– The Book of Common Prayer, p. 261

Excerpt from "The Universal Christ"

2024-09-01

From Richard Rohr’s book, “The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe”, Chapter 12, “Why Did Jesus Die?”, pp. 155-158.

Copyright 2019 by Center for Contemplation and Action, Inc. Published by Convergent Books. ISBN: 978-1-5247-6209-4.

A Dialogue with the Crucified God

Many years ago, I wrote a meditation that I called “A Dialogue with the Crucified God,” to help people experience what I am so feebly trying to describe here. I suggest you wait until you have an open, quiet, and solitary slot of time, then pray it out loud so your ears can hear your own words from your own mouth. In addition, I suggest that you place yourself before a tender image of the crucified Jesus that will allow you to both give and receive.

And know two things before you begin:

  • We need images to reveal inner states. You are going to look at an image of what humans deny and are most afraid of: exposure, shame, vulnerability, and failure. Like a homeopathic medicine, Jesus became the problem on full display – to free us from that very problem. The cross withdraws the curtain of both denial and fear from our eyes and from our psyches. Jesus became the victim so we could stop victimizing others or playing the victim ourselves.
  • Any authentic image of the crucified one is already an image of resurrection. The open arms and the knowing gaze are already the victory over any suffering.

Jesus Speaks to You from the Cross

I am what you are most afraid of: your deepest, most wounded, and naked self. I am what you do to what you could love.

I am your deepest goodness and your deepest beauty, which you deny and disfigure. Your only badness consists in what you do to goodness – your own and anybody else’s.

You run away from, and you even attack, the only thing that will really transform you. But there is nothing to hate or to attack. If you try, you will become a mirror image of the same.

Embrace it all in me. I am yourself. I am all of creation. I am everybody and every thing.

You Speak Back to the Crucified One

Brother Jesus, you are my life, which I deny. You are my death, which I fear. I embrace them both in you. Now I recognize – through you and because of you – that death and life are not opposites. You are my full self – exposed. You are infinite in action, which makes me infinite in becoming. This is my divine possibility. (Stay with this thought until it moves beyond words.)

You, Brother Jesus, are my outrageously ignored and neglected soul. You are what we do to goodness. You are what we do to God. You are the outrageously ignored and neglected soul of every thing. You are what we do to what we should and could love. You are what we do to one another. You are what we do to the Reality right in front of us. You are what we do to ourselves. (Stay with this until it sinks in.)

I hate and fear the very things that will save me. May this thought help me to love these things, be patient with them, and even forgive them.

I just cannot let anybody love me “for nothing.” I insist on being worthy and deserving. And then I demand the same of others too. Yet your arms remain outstretched and embracing to all the world.

You alone, Christ Jesus, refuse to be a crucifier, even at the cost of being crucified. You never play the victim or call for any vengeance, but only breathe a universal forgiveness upon the universe from this crucified place – your upside-down throne.

We humans so often hate ourselves, but we mistakenly kill you and others instead.

You always knew we would do this, didn’t you? And you accepted it.

Now you invite me out of this endless cycle of illusion and violence toward myself and toward anybody else.

I want to stop crucifying your blessed flesh, this blessed humanity, this holy mother earth.

I thank you, Brother Jesus, for becoming a human being and walking the full journey with me. Now I do not have to pretend that I am God.

This is more than enough and more than good, just to know we are doing it together.

I thank you for becoming finite and limited, so I do not have to pretend that I am infinite or limitless.

I thank you for becoming small and inferior, so I do not have to pretend that I am big and superior to anybody.

I thank you for holding our shame and nakedness so boldly and so publicly, so I do not need to hide or deny our human reality.

I thank you for accepting exclusion and expulsion, being crucified “outside the walls” and allowing me to know that I will meet you exactly there.

I thank you for “becoming sin,” so I do not need to deny my own failures, and can recognize that even my mistakes are the truest and most surprising path to love.

I thank you for becoming weak, so I do not have to pretend to be strong.

I thank you for being willing to be considered imperfect, wrong, and strange, so I do not have to be perfect or right, or idealize the so-called normal.

I thank you for not being loved or liked by so many, so I do not have to try so hard to be loved and liked by anybody.

I thank you for being considered a failure, so I do not have to pretend or even try to be a “success.”

I thank you for allowing yourself to be considered wrong by the standards of both state and religion, so I do not have to be right anywhere.

I thank you for being poor in every way, so I do not have to seek being rich in any way.

I thank you, Brother Jesus, for being all of the things that humanity despises and fears, so I can fully accept myself – and everyone else – in and through you!

Crucified Jesus, I thank you for revealing all these things to me in one great image of insight and mercy. Yes, what the medieval mystics said is true, Crux probat omnia – “The cross legitimates/proves/uses everything.” (Stay with this Christian maxim until it makes sense to you.)

I want to love you in this form, Brother Jesus. I need to love you in this way, or I will never be free or happy in this world.

You and I, Brother Jesus, we are the same.

– Richard Rohr