Posting Again

Now that I've finally caught my breath, maybe I can start posting a few tidbits again. I have a variety of thoughts I need to put on paper. Right at the end of the old year and the start of the new, I was running (or driving) all across the country (well at least the Southeast). We went to Charlotte for Reggie White's funeral which was profoundly moving and hopefully I can write about it soon; then I headed down to Louisianna for a few days of NT Wright. Splendid fellow. Great thinker and nice person to boot! Then I came back just in time for a co-hort at the New City Community.

I was a bit drained and didn't feel well but Darrell Johnson warmed me with his grace-filled pastor's heart. Along the way, I've been thumbsucking Maximas the Confessor's On The Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ. What a treasure! I think the modern church misses so much when we ignore so many Christian writers simply because they are no longer living. Chesterton reminds us that tradition is teh democracy of the dead. If we really are democratic thinkers, we'll listen to the dead as well as the living.

Finally. I finally discovered Czelaw Milosz. Where have I been? As usual, probably wasting time on the Internet instead of reading grand writers and thinkers. He is a delight. I want to insert of few of his poems in this blog, but here's a little today:

Veni Creator

Come, Holy Spirit,
bending or not bending the grasses,
appearing or not above our heads in a tongue of flame,
at hay harvest or when they plough in the orchards or when snow
covers crippled firs in the Sierra Nevada.
I am only a man: I need visible signs.
I tire easily, building the staircase of abstraction.
Many a time I asked, you know it well, that the statue in church
lift its hand, only once, just once, for me.
But I understand that signs must be human,
therefore call one man, anywhere on earth,
not me--after all I have some decency--
and allow me, when I look at him, to marvel at you.

Berkeley 1961