Baptism is on my mind. Tomorrow is the Sunday of the Baptism of our Lord, and so last week I wrote a column on that for Working Preacher. This morning’s devotional reading happened to be Luke’s brief description of Jesus’ baptism as well. And near the beginning of the week I wrote a...
An Unlikely Christmas Carol(er)
posted by DJL
I love words. I love what you can do with words. I love playing with words, shaping ideas with them, communicating things that matter to me through them, and affecting the thoughts and feelings of others with them. For all these reasons and more, I love words. But not always. As I’ve said before, I don’t always love words when they come as poems. When words come in poems, they don’t seem to follow the rules, or at least they operate by different rules, rules I haven’t mastered and don’t feel competent at. That’s, in part, why the Saturday poetry post has been important to me. It’s a way to stretch, to push myself to work a...
The Annunciation
posted by DJL
We are not yet at the point of Advent where we hear the story of Gabriel’s visit to Mary. But, to be honest, I think we save that reading too late in the season to give it due attention. Perhaps it’s because, as Denise Levertov notices in her poem “The Annunciation,” we...
My Name
posted by DJL
Warm summer nights are a long way off, both behind in memory and ahead in anticipation. But for some reason I found Mark Strand’s evocative description of one such night speak to me. Part of it, I think, is that I’ve had similar moments while laying atop a snowbank at night – more in...
Twenty Questions
posted by DJL
While we’re on the theme of noticing: Jim Moore’s poem “Twenty Questions” is a wonderful reminder to pay attention to the ordinary, as in the ordinary we often behold the extraordinary. Or, to put more of a point on it, I sometimes suspect that if you can’t find the extraordinary in...