This womb of mine will not know the pangs of pregnancy. My skin will not tighten when another body becomes part of my flesh. My inner organs will not shift to make room; my ankles will not swell; my appetite will not increase because my body is making another person. This womb is empty, creased.…

It has to be one of the most extraordinary Christmas trees ever imagined. Twelve feet high, glowing in brilliant oranges, this “tree” was created by artist Ben Quilty out of the lifejackets of Syrian refugee children who had safely reached the island of Lesbos on boats. For the current Christmas season, this sculpture has been…

Last year my husband and I celebrated our first Christmas with our infant daughter. She couldn’t understand the holiday, of course, but that didn’t stop us from discussing Advent calendars, wreaths, and Jesse Trees in depth, continuing a friendly argument about Santa Claus that has been going on since our engagement. Citing our childhood experiences…

Every year after the clocks fall back, I read Lia Purpura’s essay “Sugar Eggs: A Reverie” from her collection On Looking. In the essay, Purpura is concerned with the space created when one looks into another world: the panorama built inside a sugar egg, a snow globe, a “horse’s scummy water trough,” cells massing to…

The highways that snake down and around rural Iowa are dark. Enough that, if you are driving at the right time of night, and there isn’t a lot of traffic, you can catch moments of brilliance in the sky. Stars forever. An impossibly deep night. The opportunity to take a breath. My wife and kids…

Christmas carols: we love their joyous celebration of the birth of Christ. In “Carol of the Infuriated Hour,” David Brendan Hopes takes the carol form—its rhythm and rhyme scheme—to present a more complex view of the Christmas event. The poem’s speaker has “warred” with God, but  he decides to cease his struggle “for the sake…

Of Lanecia A. Rouse Tinsley’s small encaustic Advent paintings, my favorite is Meditation on the Incarnation. If food can have mouthfeel, then art has gutfeel. Meditation on the Incarnation drops and spreads into the gut holy and creepy like tequila, like subzero air that both hardens and hurts the belly. Three blue, elongated forms more…

In “A Christmas Story,” Robert Cording evokes Aleksander Wat (1900-1967), a Polish poet that converted from Judaism to Christianity while imprisoned in the Soviet Union. During a brief moment out of prison walls, the poem explains that Wat was awestruck by a simple street scene: a beautiful women in a green dress, the “bell of…

  Snow had fallen, snow on snow, Snow on snow, In the bleak mid-winter Long ago. You probably know these lines, either from Christina Rossetti’s poem of 1871 or, more likely, Holst’s setting of them as a carol. I know them. I used one of them as title of a book, “bleak” altered to “deep”…

I’ve always loved Advent’s “O” Antiphons. These are the prayers traditionally voiced during the final seven days of Advent, prior to singing the Magnificat at Evening Prayer. Each of these antiphons begins with “O” and is addressed to Christ under one of his names mentioned in the Bible. They are brief, one-sentence prayers of longing…