A very happy Christmas to you and yours.
The Part Where There’s an Essay
Today, no essay. A poem.
Mary’s Song Luci Shaw
Blue homespun and the bend of my breast
Keep warm this small hot naked star
Fallen to my arms. (Rest…
You who have had so far to come.)
Now nearness satisfies the body of God sweetly. Quiet he lies
Whose vigor hurled a universe. He sleeps
Whose eyelids have not closed before.
His breath (so slight it seems
No breath at all) once ruffled the dark deeps
To sprout a world. Charmed by doves’ voices,
The whisper of straw, he dreams,
Hearing no music from his other spheres.
Breath, mouth, ears, eyes,
He is curtailed who overflowed all skies,
All years. Older than eternity, now he is new.
Now native to earth as I am, nailed to my poor planet, caught
That I might be free, blind in my womb
To know my darkness ended,
Brought to this birth for me to be new-born,
And for him to see me mended
I must see him torn.
For the Anglophiles
One of my favorite Christmas carols is “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” especially once I found out what the meaning of the first line is. The gentlemen aren’t merry; the line is a wish that God would grant people joy. More here.
Here’s a favorite version, because I graduated from high school in 1995:
Reads & Listens of the Week
An old favorite from The Rabbit Room: The Coming of the Light. “If the psalmist found hope in the presence of God, then for us Christmas is the turning point. There may still be dark days ahead but, from that night on, the coming of the light has been inevitable. Immanuel, our God is with us.”
I very much enjoyed this Twitter thread about Ted Lasso as The Sound of Music (click through to read the whole thing):
It’s getting to be a weekly occurrence that I post a link from Samuel D. James, but here’s an interesting thought about how we view the church. “This tired, ashamed, and burnt-out generation of Christians were raised to think of their spiritual lives in terms of good performances vs. bad ones. And you know what’s happened? We now have a generation of Christians who are applying to the church this same standard they were taught to apply to themselves. They look at the church and her sins loom largest of anything, precisely because they’ve had years of practice in looking at themselves and seeing their sins loom largest of anything in them. I genuinely believe that this contemporary evangelical crisis where so many are losing their hope for the church is downstream from a silent evangelical crisis wherein many lost hope for themselves.”
Closer to Home
For your distraction/benefit, here are some of my favorite things from 2021.
The character of Joseph, the man God chose for his Son to have for an earthly father, is not only interesting, it is also instructive to us. There are many who are righteous, but who are not kind. There are many who are kind, but not righteous. Joseph, however, loved God and his law, and that love of God touched his heart, causing him to be a kind man. When God chose a human father for his Son, he chose a man who would be righteous and kind, qualities that reflect God the Father himself. Is that not instructive for every one of us to be like our heavenly Father, and to be like Jesus’ earthly father? Righteous and kind. Concerned for God’s law. Concerend for God’s people. — Ligon Duncan