Author: Tim

• Marriage Writes A Letter To The World

  You say you know of love. You heard there was a man who kept a vow which cost him songs and woman flesh: you sneered, and sneer replaced your syntax.  Faithfulness you smeared and so killed story, so you cannot not betray, and be betrayed.  You riddle Raphael, demand of Gabriel his password, and the…

• Do you hear what I hear?

  My sixty-first November carols me. The stuttered snow, the huddled hawk, the moon (so bored above the pasture-scape) all wait the coming Child again,  again the church plays Mary:  is the future good? How can it be the angel’s hail is not a curse, since I’ve not known a man?  Again the carols fling their…

• The New Testament’s “world” is any setting where The Two Great Commandments – love of God and neighbor – are not spontaneously top of mind.

• The plural of person is an illusion.

• Poetry is when language becomes self-aware.

• Ruth Bidgood: “No need to wonder…”

  No need to wonder what heron-haunted lake lay in the other valley, or regret the songs in the forest I chose not to traverse. No need to ask where other roads might have led, since they led elsewhere; for nowhere but this here and now is my true destination. The river is gentle in the…

• Jewish Proverb: “Did you enjoy my world?”

  According to a traditional Jewish proverb, what God asks at the Judgement.

• Manual For Meditation

  Sit in water that is over your head,As if a bird in your hair should be left asleep.Gaze steadily upon your eyelids.Ask nothing, offer no advice, and when your monkey mindchirps monkey, so?   Do care about your breath,your hands, and how the sun slides on the hill. And even monkeys need a home eventuallyso, listen,…

• Paul Elie: defines “pilgrimage”

  “A pilgrimage is a journey undertaken in the light of a story.” from “The Life You Save May Be Your Own:  An American Pilgrimage”, by Paul Elie.   Farrar, Straus, Giroux, NY.   2013.   page x.   Simple, yet I had never seen it.  

• Paul Elie, on Thomas Merton, on Conversation

  “…Here was a book that achieved the kind of dialogue to which he had aspired ever since reading I and Thou:  not reformulated thought, but the “spontaneous elucidation of what we do not yet know” ; not thought about what is already known, but “what will come to be known in our saying it to…