More on: liturgy

Laughter is one way in which I experience God, and so I want to write about the ways in which I am sometimes lucky to experience the divine, as friend. A friend who makes you laugh out loud, and who makes you weep. I’m a weeper, and that too is a gift from God.

To sing of origins is to set a course
to anoint a present where cows and angels
cowherds and shepherd kings
all shine in heaven’s light

All at once the stillness breaks
into a great applause of wings, the mounting up
in doxology, the downsweep then
of many heads in prayer.

Why Believe in God? Over the past few years, the Image staff contemplated assembling a symposium based on this simple problem. But we hesitated. Should we pose such a disarmingly straightforward question to artists and writers, who tend to shun the explicit and the rational? Or were we hesitating because the question itself made us…

I am none the less
boundless this morning,

trawling, under your sway,
winter’s counterfeit cages

wracked & rife & caroled
by the catalogue of all

I do and must learn to love
beyond my power to stay.

Whether we have slept through Matins’ dream offices or lain awake, we rise to a morning bell we do not call Lauds, and not calling it ablution, we, for the day’s offices, flush dust and dead skin from our many creases. On the highway and through the parking garage to a computer pinging with the…