Saved by the Word

Dear Friend,

As we celebrate the Nativity of the Lord at the close of this strange and shadowed year, here’s some poetry I hope you’ll find helpful to your prayer. First, lines from a poem entitled “The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe” composed in 1883 by the English Jesuit, Gerard Manley Hopkins.

“Of her flesh he took flesh:

He does take fresh and fresh,

Though much the mystery how,

Not flesh but spirit now

And makes, O marvelous!

New Nazareths in us,

Where she shall yet conceive

Him, morning, noon, and eve;

New Bethlehems, and he born

There, evening, noon, and morn – “

The words speak of our astounding call to become, like Mary, mothers of our Lord Jesus Christ through what St. Francis called a “holy activity which must shine before others by example.” As we do this together as a community, might Mission Santa Barbara become a “new Bethlehem”?

The second offering alludes in very stark terms to the social and political violence of the mid-1980’s when Denise Levertov composed this poem, entitled “On the Mystery of the Incarnation”. Does it resonate today?

“It’s when we face for a moment

the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know

the taint in our own selves, that awe

cracks the mind’s shell and enters the heart:

not to a flower, not to a dolphin,

to no innocent form

but to this creature vainly sure

it and no other is god-like, God

(out of compassion for our ugly

failure to evolve) entrusts,

as guest, as brother,

the Word.”

In winter darkness the Word comes to save us, humbly asking to take on flesh!

Gratefully,

Fr. Dan ofm