Jameswoodward’s Weblog

oddity

Love, thou are deep:
I cannot cross thee.
But, were there Two
Instead of One —
Rower, and Yacht — some sovereign Summer —
Who knows, but we’d reach the Sun?

Love, thou are Veiled:
A few behold thee,
Smile, and alter, and prattle, and die.
Bliss were an Oddity, without thee,
Nicknamed by God
Eternity.

From Emily Dickinson, Love, thou art high

Here is a wonderful book to look out for from a skilled and humane theologian  and my commendation for my friend  Carla

Psalms Redux & Prayers for the Day by Carla Grosch-Miller

We human beings become so easily distracted and even bored with the familiar. The comfort of the ‘well-known’ so easily can ossify into complacency. We need, perhaps, to be shaken out of our relationship with metaphor and language into a new and more imaginative perspective. Carla does just this in a book which restores and refreshes these ancient texts. There is a life and energy and beauty in this particular struggle for a birthing of metaphor and language that both does justice to the mystery of God but grounds us in the realities of our embodied striving attempts for flourishing. This book is  beautiful, disturbing, compelling and wise.

James Woodward

blue sky and the golden moon

The moon is a curving flower of gold,
The sky is still and blue;
The moon was made for the sky to hold,
And I for you.

The moon is a flower without a stem,
The sky is luminous;
Eternity was made for them,
To-night for us.

Sara Teasdale, Tonight

Charity and freedom are inseparable. Love must be free. Only charity is perfectly free. Love is loved for itself, not determined by anything else outside itself.

It is not drawn by the satisfaction of anything less than itself. Only in charity, that is disinterested love, is love perfectly spontaneous.

All love that is less than charity ends in some­thing less than itself. Perfect charity is its own end, and is therefore free, not determined by anything else. God alone is perfectly free, infinitely free. He is Love Loving Himself. Because He is absolutely free, His love can do whatever it likes.

We are constituted in His image by our freedom— which is not absolute, but contingent. That is, we are free in proportion as we share His freedom, which is absolute. We are free in the sense that no one de­termines our free choices: we are so much our own masters that we can even resist God, as we know to our sorrow! But we are also free to love for the sake of loving, to love God because He is Love, and to find ourselves in the perfect freedom of Love’s own giving of itself.

Merton

torso

We cannot know the indescribable face
Where the eyes like apples ripened. Even so,
His torso has a candelabra’s glow,
His gaze, contained as in a mirror’s grace,

Shines within it. Otherwise his breast
Would not be dazzling. Nor would you recognize
The smile that moves along his curving thighs,
There where love’s strength is caught within its nest.

This stone would not be broken, but intact
Beneath the shoulders’ flowing cataract,
Nor would it glisten like a stallion’s hide,

Brimming with radiance from every side
As a star sparkles. Now it is dawn once more.
All places scrutinize you. You must be reborn.

Delmore Schwartz, Archaic Bust Of Apollo (After Rilke)

luminous

the day is remarkable
luminous, joyful
so easy, to live
with the taste of colour
love makes me laugh
and, at the last
moment, I open
my eyes.

Paul Eluard, Serie

Rublev

One day, God walked in, pale from the grey steppe,
slit-eyed against the wind, and stopped,
said, Colour me, breathe your blood into my mouth.

I said, Here is the blood of all our people,
these are their bruises, blue and purple,
gold, brown, and pale green wash of death.

These (god) are the chromatic pains of flesh,
I said, I trust I shall make you blush,
O I shall stain you with the scars of birth

For ever, I shall root you in the wood,
under the sun shall bake you bread
of beechmast, never let you forth

To the white desert, to the starving sand.
But we shall sit and speak around
one table, share one food, one earth.

Rowan Williams

angel tiger

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry  ?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

from William Blake, The tiger

crystal

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

From Billy Collins, Litany.

white flower

He said, I am with you always.
That means, when you look for God
That God is the looking itself,
Yes, and the thought of looking
And the you that thinks the thought
Always, already, all of it;
There is no outside.

A white flower grows in the silence
Let your speech be that flower.

Rumi,