Faith of our Fathers...

living still.

http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/f/a/faithoof.htm

***

When one of my dearest SoulFriends died, my hymnal on my piano opened to this hymn.
By some miracle.

True. True. It is true.

And wild geese flew.


A YEAR IN POETRY AND MUSIC

November 28 - December 2004

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone

~ W. H. Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message
He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now:
put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.



December 6, 2004
Wild geese on their flight home for the winter spread their wings—no, no, not doves—and flew over my home on the morning of the great day of mourning—their calls a music of a terrible, wild beauty … their song, a song of grief of departure and the everlasting hope of home…

Wild Geese

~ Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

The Litany of Farewell in the Episcopal Church.

Second Sunday of Advent 2004, St. David’s Episcopal Church, Minnetonka, MN.

A gift from God…an unexpected Godsend for my soul.
December 2004


A Crazed Girl

~ W. B. Yeats

That crazed girl improvising her music.
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling
She knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,
Her knee-cap broken,
that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.
No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea.’

January 2005—the first two weeks

A poem of joy, sorrow and forgiveness for all seasons it seems…and to be understood at different times in different ways.


I Could Give All To Time
~ Robert Frost


To Time it never seems that he is brave
To set himself against the peaks of snow
To lay them level with the running wave,
Nor is he overjoyed when they lie low,
But only grave, contemplative and grave.
What now is inland shall be ocean isle,
Then eddies playing round a sunken reefLike the curl at the corner of a smile;
And I could share Time's lack of joy or grief
At such a planetary change of style.
I could give all to Time except - except
What I myself have held.
But why declare
The things forbidden that while the Customs slept
I have crossed to Safety with?
For I am There,
And what I would not part with I have kept.

February – December 2005

A much-beloved poem…a much beloved song (not the same as this poem) titled “In Memory of a Summer’s Day” performed and recorded by my friend Phyllis.

If everyday can be Christmas as I wrote two years ago, then every day can be Thanksgiving also. Every day can be a summer day.

Paraphrasing Camus…in the midst of winter I found in my heart an invincible summer.

The Summer Day
~Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed,
how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

***

December 2005

Now Thank We All Our God~
Variations on a Theme
~ Christiana Adams

ADVENT 2004 – ADVENT 2005

Today is the day that the Lord hath made
Let us rejoice and be glad in it.

The First Sunday of Advent~
The Death of a Soul Friend

The Third Sunday of Advent~
Rose Light and purple hues.

Gaudeamus!

Let us
rejoice.

Rejoice in the Lord always.

And again I say rejoice.

For the Light shines in the darkness;
And the darkness has not overcome it.

Thanks be to God.

Jesus Christ said,
“I am the Light of the World. Believe in me.”

And now there is a two word prayer I make:

Send me.

May it be so.

Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.


Walk in love, beloved.

12 December 2004

Paraphrasing also:

Whatever is good and true and kind … the darkness shall not overcome...

This prayer I make. That when “The Answer is ‘No’” as a Soul Friend once titled a sermon, we may always—eventually—find the
“Yes!”

That I may hear the "yes" that life is calling to me and reply
"Yes! Here I am."

May it be so for you and for me.

I kneel in the grass. And pray. And pray. And pray.
And hope. And hope. And hope.

“And all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”
“Teach us to care and not to care…”
“And the fire and the rose shall become one.”

2 December 2005

"Whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things." (Phil 4:8)

And hymns I love and sing…

Now thank we all our God,
with heart and hands and voices,
Who wondrous things has done,
in Whom this world rejoices;
Who from our mothers’ arms has blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love, and still is ours today.

O may this bounteous God through all our life be near us,
With ever joyful hearts and blessèd peace to cheer us;
And keep us in His grace,
and guide us when perplexed;
And free us from all ills, in this world and the next!

All praise and thanks to God the Father now be given;
The Son and Him Who reigns with Them in highest Heaven;
The one eternal God,
Whom earth and Heaven adore;
For thus it was, is now,
and shall be evermore.

***
Bread of the world,
in mercy broken,
Wine of the soul,
in mercy shed,
By Whom the words of life were spoken,
And in Whose death our sins are dead.
Look on the heart by sorrow broken,
Look on the tears by sinners shed;
And be Thy feast to us the token,
That by Thy grace our souls are fed.

http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/b/r/breadwor.htm

***

O God, our help in ages past,
our hope for years to come,
our shelter from the stormy blast,
and our eternal home:
Under the shadow of thy throne,
thy saints have dwelt secure;
sufficient is thine arm alone,
and our defense is sure.

Before the hills in order stood,or earth received her frame,
from everlasting thou art God,
to endless years the same.

A thousand ages in thy sight
are like an evening gone;

Short as the watch that ends the night
before the rising sun.

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
bears all its sons away;

They fly, forgotten, as a dream
dies at the opening day.

O God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,

Be thou our guide while troubles last,
and our eternal home!

***

From the musical, “Carousel”…

When you walk through a storm,
Hold your head up high,
And don't be afraid of the dark,
At the end of the storm is a golden sky.

And the sweet silver song of a lark.

Walk on through the wind,

Walk on through the rain,

Tho' your dreams be tossed and blown,

Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart,
And you'll never walk alone.

You'll never walk alone!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=480dD5WzdvA