A Pilgrim Prayer
The following prayer comes from the Sarum Breviary, an English book of worship developed by Osmund, Bishop of Salisbury, in the late 11th century. Thomas Cranmer drew heavily from this medieval liturgical work when he compiled the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549.
Almighty God, we call on you, the fountain of everlasting light, and ask you to send out your truth into our hearts and pour out on us the glory of your brightness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Through My Lens
Escondido, CA
What I’m Reading
Web
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Something Holy Shines by Malcolm Guite. How the poetic imagination “lifts the veil and restores our sense of wonder.”
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Am I Too Soft for This Angry World? by Jessica Fadel at Sage Christianity. Why “softness” might help you better follow Jesus.
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On Art & Suffering: How artists help us to name the pain in our lives by W. David O. Taylor. “Artists…are especially equipped to prepare us to face our own struggles with humility and to feel our own sorrows deeply without being undone by them, and to feel the possibility of hope, not just on the other side of our sorrows but also in the very middle of them.”
Books
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This is Happiness by Niall Williams. I don’t remember where I saw this novel recommended, but it’s delightful!
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Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair by Christian Wiman. Wiman is a poet and author living with incurable cancer. His reflections on life and faith are never simplistic.
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Another Day: Sabbath Poems 2013—2023 by Wendell Berry. Mr. Berry is now 90 years old, and we’re not likely to see another volume of poems from his pen. I’m savoring this one.
From My Commonplace Book
Humor, Grace, and the Human Condition
Christian Wiman believes humor can do more than provide a temporary distraction from the hard realities of life in a broken world; there can be “an element of grace to it,” he says. Humor can have “existential reach,” meaning it “can imply a world in which the comic, not the tragic, is ultimate…”
A Poem
The Bright Field
By R.S. Thomas
I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
A Closing Quote
True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation.
One’s inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one’s most intimate sources.
In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.
Wendell Berry in What Are People For?: Essays (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 1990)
