Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Sycamores in December


Like upright skeletons, sycamores stand among the grays and browns of other trees, up and down the bottomland where a cold river courses. Can these bones live? The cycle of the year gives expectation that they will. Still, here in deep December, darkening toward that thinnest and briefest of light and day, a long, hard wait they shall have of it. So we, too, amid the grays and browns and glooms that weight us, stand and wait for light and life. Can these limbs leaf?

Good news comes! For in deep December a child is given to us, to all the earth, and he is truer light and life than any day or sun. Little though he is in this lengthening night, by his living and dying he will surge root and branch. From a barren wood he will leaf every tree and all that watch and wait, that we may rise in his morning to joy and to love in life-greening glory!

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