Storing the Christmas Decorations

There is a melancholic air in the house as we take down and store away the Christmas decorations. The festive forms and colors will now be hid in boxes in the dark storage spaces until, God willing, another Christmas season. I always enjoy the return of the house to its normal appearance as we have a somewhat modest but most pleasant arrangement. Additionally, with the daylight hours beginning to lengthen noticeably, the large front window, now without the Christmas tree, admits much light from the westering winter sun. I know as well that the pleasure in the Christmas decorations stirs in part because they are seasonal. Were they in place the year round I suspect we would take less manifest pleasure in them. Yet the melancholy does seep into the changes as we return to the ordinary. In this I cannot help but call to mind and grasp in heart and spirit that it is for the very ordinary that Jesus came in love so low.

In This Cold Darkening of Time and Place

In this cold darkening of time and place, this sharp season stripping bare the once full splendor of leaf and petal, you come to us in smallness, in weakness, with only a child's inchoate cry toward trust and hope, toward love, those gifts for which we also cry.

Little child, as you make your birth with ours this day, so make your life and death as well, that our cries may rise with yours, our hearts lift in yours, that we shall happily find those gifts you come to voice for us and all the world, thus joy resounding!

As the Day-World Emerges

Most loving and merciful God, ever desirous to wake and greet us, to take us to that place so true and fair: as the day-world emerges from dark to light, by your grace may we as well, in heart and mind, in body and spirit; thus to know the gladdening hour you charge with splendor and hope, and all things made new and bright. Amen.

Stained Concrete

Here where I pass
late in the day, late in the year,
trees overhang the walk
with branches all but bare,
the concrete stained
from wet-fall of leaves,
crumpled remainders
of the protean hour
when photosynthesis
surged in cell and vein,
as if things in motion
could counter gravity
then, and even now,
here where I pass.

Keep Us, Lord, Toward Bethlehem: A Prayer in Advent

On this rough back of time, we plod the days toward Bethlehem. How long, Lord, until we get there? What will we find when we arrive? In the aging of the year, daylight pales and stoops before the cold and dark. And the ride jars and coarsens after so many, many miles. We long for welcome, for kindness, for some sort of rest. Will you be there, Lord? How will we know? A child leads us, but to what and for what? We bear our many wanderings, our fears, and, yes, our fervent hopes. Keep us, Lord, toward Bethlehem, toward a tender dawn and a mercy incarnate. Amen.

Home Site

We have no special site for our home. We live in a modest townhouse complex amid comfortable single family homes in a suburban neighborhood in northern Virginia, the neighborhood being part of a growing county, and the county being part of the expanding metropolitan area around Washington, D.C. There seems no end of people, buildings, vehicles, and roads. Our home itself is at one end of a set of several townhouses, with other sets of townhouses close by, making up our little community within a larger, then that within a larger. The back of our home faces east; the front faces west; and the side which is the end of the unit faces south. Toward these three exposures we have ample windows. Just beyond our back doors and windows is a screen about five yards deep of trees and shrubs between us and the grounds of a day school for young children. There tulip poplars, beech, big tooth aspen, and hollies provide all manner of greens, yellows, and bare gray trunks and branches through the months. Then just beyond our front door and windows, along the townhouse complex's streets and parking areas and here and there in the little yards, is a scattering of maples, cherries, and oaks; and so more greens, yellows, and grays, as well as pinks and reds and browns, through the year. In all seasons, during the course of the days, especially when more sun and blue than clouds in the sky, both outside and inside we enjoy much light rising early in the back, moving in fullness around the side, and setting late in the front. We have no special site. Yet we do have these quanta of filtered light, exterior and interior, texturing with splendor the hours and days, the ordinary, if only we see.

Loving My Neighbor

God loves me individually. Yet God does not love me exclusively or primarily. God loves my neighbor as well. My neighbor is the person next to me, whether familiar or strange to me. My neighbor is also the person distant from me, for no one is distant from God. In God, everyone is actually or potentially my neighbor, whether near or far. As God does, does God want me to love my neighbor.