judge not.

"Both pray to the same God, and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged."

-abraham lincoln.

the old poets of china

wherever i am, the world comes after me.
it offers me its busyness.  it does not believe
that i do not want it.  now i understand
why the old poets of china went so far and high
into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.

-mary oliver.

deep beneath our asking.

"How can we pray to you, holy and hidden God, whose ways are not our ways, who reigns in awful mystery beyond the realm of space and time?  Yet how can we not pray to you, Mighty Father, who knows what it is to be man because you have walked among us as man, breaking with us the bread of our affliction and drinking deep of the cup of despair? 

Hear, O God, the prayers of all your children everywhere: for forgiveness and healing, for courage, for faith; prayers for peace among the desperate nations. Whether you give or withhold what we ask, whether you answer us in words that burn like fire or in silence that burns like fire, increase us in the knowledge that you are always more near to us than breathing, that your will for us is love.

And deep beneath our asking, so deep beneath that we are all but deaf to it ourselves, hear, O God, the secret song of every human heart praising you for being what you are, rejoicing with the morning stars that you are our God and we are your children.  Make strong and wild this secret song within until it bursts forth at last to your glory and our saving.

Through Jesus Messiah our Lord.

Amen."

-a prayer by frederick buechner.

grace.

"how silently, how silently the wondrous gift is given..."

on earth as it is in heaven.

"Our task is to seek and find Christ in our world as it is, not as it might be.  The fact that the world is other than it might be does not alter the truth that Christ is present in it and that His plan has been neither frustrated nor changed.  Indeed, all will be done according to His will.  Our advent is a celebration of this hope."

-thomas merton.

Hurricane.

It didn't behave
like anything you had
ever imagined. The wind
tore at the trees, the rain
fell for days slant and hard.
The back of the hand
to everything. I watched
the trees bow and their leaves fall
and crawl back into the earth.
As though, that was that.
This was one hurricane
I lived through, the other one
was of a different sort, and
lasted longer. Then
I felt my own leaves giving up and
falling. The back of the hand to
everything. But listen now to what happened
to the actual trees;
toward the end of that summer they
pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.
It was the wrong season, yes,
but they couldn't stop. They
looked like telephone poles and didn't
care. And after the leaves came
blossoms. For some things
there are no wrong seasons.
Which is what I dream of for me.

-mary oliver.

together at the same time.

"No one can look at God and at the reality of the world with undivided gaze as long as God and the world are torn apart.  Despite all efforts to prevent it the eyes still wander from one to the other.  Only because there is one place where God and the reality of the world are reconciled with each other, at which God and humanity have become one, is it possible there and there alone to fix one's eyes on God and the world together at the same time.  This place does not lie somewhere beyond reality in the realm of ideas.  It lies in the midst of history as a divine miracle.  It lies in Jesus Messiah the reconciler of the world."

-dietrich bonhoeffer.

-----

"therefore, let us fix our eyes on Jesus..."

(amen).