Good Poem

Evening all!

My parents bought me a new book of poems over the summer, "Good Poems for Hard Times" -edited by Garrison Keillor, and I'm just now really getting around to it. But I was reading for a while this afternoon and came across this. I love it- we talk so much about community and about living together but in the end, I'm not sure we really learn to see each other for what we were, who we are, and what we yet may be. Not that I think everybody has to be a monk to get it- but when you're THAT close, I think you're just forced to see a bit clearer. It's like a marriage: only to the whole church. The warts and humanity really come out. You see the real flesh. There is only so much hiding one can do living day in and day out. But all the same, that kind of living produces love that changes. It's the kind of love that doesn't have to romanticize, but sees in truth. There is no room for platitudes, because they are exposed as lie. It's the kind of love that admits reality, but only because reality is bounded by Alpha and Omega- and the reality is that worship and praise to God makes us all holy, warts and all.
Thanks be to God!!

Enjoy!!


The Monks of St. John's File in for Prayer
Kilian McDonnell

In we shuffle, hooded amplitudes,
scapulared brooms, a stray earring, skin heads
and flowing locks, blind in one eye,
hooked-nosed, handsome as a prince
(and knows it), a five thumbed organist,
an acolyte who sings in quarter tones,
one slightly swollen keeper of the bees,
the carpenter minus a finger here and there,
our pre-senile writing deathless verse,
a stranded sailor, a Cassian scholar,
the artist suffering the visually
illiterate and indignities unnamed,
two determined liturgists. In a word,
eager purity and weary virtue.
Last of all, the Lord Abbot, early old
(shepherding the saints is like herding cats).
These chariots and steeds of Israel
make the black progress into church.
A rumble of monks bows low and offers praise
to the High God of Gods who is faithful forever.


Which one are you?

Grace,
A