More on: time

Crows, like ghosts flocked in a field of asphodels, gather. They startle up in the air, drop like a length of chain. She could call their cold caws lamentation or laughter. It is hard to recall what she did not know Before she knelt here: the brayed past smudged from too much handling. (Was there…

What is this world but the absence of God, his withdrawal, his distance (which we call space), his waiting (which we call time), his footprint (which we call beauty)? God could only create the world by withdrawing from it (otherwise there would be nothing but God), or by remaining in the form of absence, hiddenness,…

WHEN THE RED SUN is sinking behind the mist in the evening, the sandhill cranes begin to arrive. Long-legged, wings open wide, they come first sparely, two watchers, then in scatterings and finally in great numbers, lines of them crossing the sky to land before us hidden humans. The great birds fly across the mist,…

A. The heart is a divided city Between two alphabets. Church bells, minarets Betoken Time has stopped where it is broken. Nothing forgets. This is called history, not pity, It is not spoken. B. To remember is to cross Through no-man’s land Into an imaginary country You do not recognize But where the streets are…

Fifty years ago, in Catholic school, a nun gave my mother a ribbon said to have been touched by a saint. This was when her brother was still alive, and masses were still read in Latin, and people still wandered across the street to other people’s houses in the evening. Now the school is coming…

Darwin’s Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It by Loren Eiseley (Doubleday, 1958) Science and Faith: A New Introduction by John F. Haught (Paulist, 2013) Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love by Elizabeth A. Johnson (Bloomsbury, 2014) Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith by Philip Kitcher (Oxford, 2007)  …

Reading from Two Books: Nature, Scripture, and Evolution   In the Middle Ages, philosophers and theologians described nature as a book, a coherent work in which we could glimpse the mind of God. Like scripture, the book of nature bore the divine imprint—the Imago Dei—and the two books were seen as complementary. In the centuries…

The scrambled eggs, already fried and fragrant on a plate, slip back into their shells; each smooth white egg sails toward its vagrant mother chicken, roosts in a fertile cell. The melody beats back to eighth notes which settle, dark spots on the snowy staff of bass and treble clefs, then briefly float through Bach’s…

Paul Shaw breeds insomniac flies. He tilts test tubes at unstable angles, then watches wide-eyed as the flies inside go haywire. Thousands of flies fly inside Paul’s hypotheses; thousands of flies defy them. As fast as he identifies a pattern, the field of sleep expands. Paul celebrated tenure in October, and all the Shaws flew…

Awake in the middle of the night, the river cracked with language, the ice of it a heave of squares and oblongs. Only the waterfall, its cold spray frosting nearby juts of stone with lace, continued to tumble as if it would never cease to move and be. Once it was, we lay down together,…