Month: May 2007

• On Socialization In Randomly Collected Groups

  In a room of 100 public school teachers, do this little thought-experiment (don’t tell them what it is about): 1. Ask them to write down 3 traits they like about themselves, and the people who, in each case, they most learned that trait from. 2. Ask them to write down a moment in their lives…

• Memorial Day 2007

  In the flowered hills God is easy to believe in, but what we know as religion is unnecessary. The flowers are what they are: wondrous, but not morally complex. When the flower dies, it effortlessly becomes life for other flowers.  It does not raise the question of the rightness of its death. But with people,…

• Gerard Manley Hopkins: “God’s Grandeur”

  God’s Grandeur The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared…

• Czeslaw Milosz: “Gift”

  Gift A day so happy. Fog lifted early. I worked in the garden. Hummingbirds were stopping over the honeysuckle flowers. There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess. I knew no one worth my envying him. Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot. To think that once I was the same man did…

• Denise Levertov: “On the Mystery of the Incarnation”

  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…

• John Milton: “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”

  On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity by John Milton I This is the month, and this the happy morn, Wherein the Son of Heaven’s eternal King, Of wedded maid and Virgin Mother born, Our great redemption from above did bring; For so the holy sages once did sing, That he our deadly forfeit should release,…

• Christina Rossetti: In the Bleak Midwinter

  In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone; Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow, In the bleak midwinter, long ago. Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain; Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign. In the bleak…