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That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection By Gerard Manley Hopkins Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then chevy on an air- Built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs | they throng; they glitter in marches. Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, | wherever an elm arches, Shivelights and shadowtackle […]

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Descending Theology: The Crucifixion

by Mary Karr To be crucified is first to lie down on a shaved tree, and then to have oafs stretch you out on a crossbar as if for flight, then thick spikes      fix you into place. Once the cross pops up and the pole stob sinks vertically in an earth hole perhaps at an awkward list, […]

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Rowan Williams, “Advent Calendar”

wesleyhill: He will come like last leaf’s fall.One night when the November windhas flayed the trees to bone, and earthwakes choking on the mould,the soft shroud’s folding. He will come like frost.One morning when the shrinking earthopens on mist, to find itselfarrested in the netof alien, sword-set beauty. He will come like dark.One evening when […]

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Words Are Stuff: Poet Scott Cairns

I don’t want to just complain about my upbringing, because I learned a lot – I learned the love of God from those people – but there was a suspicion about the physical body and stuff, the earth, a sense that the body is expendable and the earth is expendable and what matters is what […]

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It Was the Summer of ’69 (*1)

Begin here: Christ is contingency, I tell her as we cross the railroad tracks and walk down the dusty main street of this little town that is not the town where I was raised, but both reassuringly and disconcertingly reminiscent of it: the ramshackle resiliency of the buildings around the square; Spanish rivering right next to […]

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Mary Magdalene Mistakes the Gardener

Genesis 3 – John 20 Listen, I’m no mad woman. I’ve been among you,Reclined at your tables, you’ve broken my bread you dolts. It’s true: I entered the garden’s east gate andducked the bedolach boughs twisting in sinuous bark-lynch; those timbers ice-broken over winter. The footpath tangled in briars, and there I caught my foot […]

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Station #12 – Christ’s Body is Removed from the Cross Meal the footboneshammer-crack thecuneiforms wedgethe tarsals peelthe formless footflesh back overthe nailheadshe dont walkhe dead.Tug the legs til hishands rip he fallweighs the same aseach dead man This was done for a Lenten art project at our church where members contributed poetry and visuals to […]

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The sacramental imagination, which affirms the goodness of creation, animates an iconic imagination that affirms the presence of the invisible in the visible—that ‘lifts up’ the messiness of bodies to be more than biological machines. James K.A. Smith, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? (via cwmyers) I think this way of seeing the world – creation as sacrament […]

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Modern spiritual consciousness is predicated upon the fact that God is gone, and spiritual experience, for many of us, amounts mostly to an essential, deeply felt and necessary but ultimately inchoate and transitory feeling of oneness or unity with existence. It is mystical and valuable, but distant. Christ, though, is a thorn in the brain. […]

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Thomas is known for his incredulity and doubt, but I think it was less doubt and more what Paul called the “working out of your salvation with fear and trembling.” There must be trepidation when God expresses in a personal event that He is concerned for one singular person, even in the midst of a […]

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