I, like all angels, am a scatter of words,
half startling with great profundities,
half absurd, I flash the shape of many wings,
I sing, and like all angels, am sometimes heard.

My task, now, is to introduce,
to appear to that slight girl
who will carry a chorus in her womb.
If flesh can reverberate with the cries of prophets,
or murmur like a sage describing a long dream,
this girl will invite the past to sing
as she carries that child who will perfect
the great cosmic stumble of all human beings.

The humans who come after will always tell her story.
They’ll innovate and speculate, repeat it on a rosary,
set it to music, drip paint through it,
sift its claims with theology and poetry.
No one will ever get it right.
Only she can hear what I whisper in her mind.
Only she will feel the belly-kick of the divine,
its tight drumming on her skin,
its messages hidden within her body’s rhythms.

She is the place where holiness meets the world.
She is the bud from which astonishment unfurls.
All others will hear only an echo of my voice,
shaken within angelic reverberations,
muddled by the world’s noise.
No word you hear will be my truest message.
That is reserved for her.

But I invite you, wandering world,
to sing towards a future sky, sequined with angels,
full of resplendent cries, our proclamation of perfection,
of an end to all afflictions, a cessation of agonies,
announced within my messenger’s wings
and your Advent dreaming.
I invite you, wandering world. Hark!
Try to grasp my meaning.

Illumination

Marie Howe helped me to imagine Mary differently. In her book The Kingdom of Ordinary Time she presents a series of poems from the life of Mary, conceiving of Mary as self-aware and mystically-minded, a contemplative whose life has prepared her for the Annunciation. I have heard much rhetoric about Mary’s poverty and powerlessness. This was the way that she was thought of during my time in seminary and after. A child who represents all of the downtrodden of the earth, consenting to God in a way that made her more of a symbol than a person, a mannequin dressed up in God’s love for the poor. Howe made her powerful and real. In the poems her mind is full of mystery, but there is no weakness to her character, no shrinking off to the side of the story. She looks around at her world with a wide, accepting gaze, and reports back what she sees. Howe treats her like a contemporary, and the world she tells us about is very close to our own.

In my poem it is the angel Gabriel who speaks, and I found a kind of humility in this divine being as I attempted to write in its voice. Angels, after all, are messengers for God. But so is a beam of sunlight on a winter day. So is the flight of a hawk, low through the trees, or the lapping of water against a pier, or the sound of music coming from a distance. All of God’s communications are somewhat scattered and offhand in our day to day lives. We might grasp their meaning, but how we grasp it, when it is made up of random incidents and noticing, isn’t something that we can articulate well.
Our understanding of the divine is at least partially conditioned by the world we inhabit. We filter holy messages through our prejudices and assumptions, our habits and theories and histories. The past is always inside of us, and its chorus of foolish and wise voices is always clamoring. To hear something that is truly new, wildly different from the expected, we have to focus hard and concentrate. Even then, we might fail to make out every word that is being said. Listening to angels is like attempting to listen to a friend who is trying to have a conversation with us from the other side of a crowded train station.

Mary doesn’t have this problem, as the divine word is gestating within her. The voice of God is murmuring in her belly. Of course, every parent knows that fetal communication is mysterious and sparse. But it’s a different kind of listening when your own body is involved. It brings the holy close, even if the message remains obscure. Listening to God, for Mary, is intimacy with her own flesh. It is a deeper form of self-knowledge.

The rest of us will have to make do with the echoes and reverberations, the voice drowned out by the crowd, the message conveyed semaphorically by the small incidents of our lives. Gabriel has a limited set of tools to choose from. Mary gets the message repeated in the soundings of her own flesh. The rest of us will have to cup our ears.

This is my son John.
In summer, he will wear a buffalo robe,
or bury himself in an anorak or a ski-jacket,
snow pants and a hat with ear flaps.
In winter he’ll walk naked.
His skin will be blue.
When he’s out in the wilderness
he might sit on a pole,
or roll himself up like a hedgehog
and live in a tree.
He might insist on being walled up
in a church or a tomb.
People will come from all around
to hear his raw visions of winnowing forks.
He’ll appease our lust for divisions.
In all ways he’ll be wrong
when he describes his divine cousin.
He’ll wear the face paint of a clown.
No one will know him without feeling eerie,
as if chaos is a bee in his mouth,
as if God is a flood as well as a season,
an earthquake and the waxing of the moon.
My child, O my child,
you will live such foolish truth.
Cry out the dangers that shadow our safety,
become the poet of the shrouded dooms
that hide within our complacency.
God chose you to say this to the world —
we will always need strangers
to judge us and love us.
We will always need gooseflesh,
the pinprick of the uncanny,
the locust mystery, the bizarre, the unearthly.
We will always need some raw character
to wave at us from a river. We will always grieve
when our children become strangers.

Illumination

About a decade ago Steven Charleston, the Bishop of Alaska, wrote a remarkable book. Charleston is a member of the Choctaw Nation, and his book, The Four Vision Quests of Jesus, reflects on the life of Christ in terms of what he calls the Native Covenant. He understands Native culture as a text that Jesus speaks into, in the same way that Jesus’s life and teachings spoke into and out of the text of the Hebrew Scriptures. This is a wonderful and liberating claim. For a long time I’ve insisted, along with many others, that a Christian must read and draw lessons from the “book of the world” as well as from scripture. Charleston takes this claim further. Culture, he says, is always a text that Jesus interacts with, and a culture’s understanding of Jesus illuminates the Gospels as powerfully as the epistles, the psalms, the prophets, wisdom literature, apocalyptic books, and the Torah do.
Part of the Native Covenant that Charleston brings to his reading of the Gospels is an understanding of necessary strangeness. Whether they admit or not, every culture has a deep need for strangeness. In Christian history, many figures have arisen who have intentionally estranged themselves from the world around them. In the 5th century, a man named Simeon lived on a pole near the Syrian city of Aleppo and was given the nickname of Stylites. In the 12th century the Belgian mystic Christina the Astonishing lived in trees and rolled herself up like a hedgehog to sleep. In the 13th century the Italian mystic Angela of Foligno would scream in church and block doorways as she stood frozen in place, weeping over the sacred mysteries. There are many, many other examples, including St. Francis, who was treated as a stranger both by his society and by the order he founded.
Bishop Charleston points out the idea of necessary strangeness was more easily accepted and venerated in Native tradition than in European Christendom. He writes about two types of necessary strangers, the koshares who lived among the peoples of the southwest and the heyokas of the Plains peoples. Both were clowns, people who played important cultural roles and were welcomed because of their differences. Koshares would interrupt dance ceremonies with provocative, scatological, and even lewd behavior. Their actions would “break the barriers of convention and…fracture (sic) the religious perceptions of the participants.” They would shock people out of their ordinary conceptions and deepen religious experience by introducing a necessary sense of chaos to ritual. Heyokas served a similar purpose, but in everyday life. They were “contraries,” people who deliberately did “the opposite of the expected.” On hot days they wore the warmest clothes, and on cold days they went naked. They walked and rode horses backwards. They sometimes wore the clothing of the opposite gender. Their actions and choices exposed the dualities that are present within day to day existence.
John the Baptist clowned in a similar way. He wasn’t much of a prophet, since his predictions didn’t come true. He spoke of winnowing forks and divisions, and claimed that the Messiah would burn “the chaff” away in an unquenchable fire. Yet Jesus, in his ministry, spent most of his time among those who might be considered “chaff,” his society’s unloved and unwanted. His life on earth didn’t end with a grand and dramatic threshing, and for two thousand years some churches have spent a lot of time wondering why all the people they don’t like are still allowed to live in the world. They want the threshing and divisions, but Christ seems very reluctant to get around to winnowing people. Yet if the Baptist wasn’t a prophet, then what was he?
If we accept him as a clown, we can name him as a stranger rather than a prophet. He isn’t there in the story to make profound predictions. He’s there to make things weird.
In a wonderful passage, Charleston speaks of John’s embodiment of the “chaos of God:”

(The chaos of God) is earthly, seminal, disruptive, and energetic. It weaves through a more stately ceremonial of evolution, like strands of DNA, holding life together, but always capable of producing the unexpected. Sacred clowns are the electric energy that arises when order meets chaos. They are spiritual synapses, firing off the creative power between life and death. They stand in exactly the same place John the Baptist occupies by the banks of the Jordan, with one foot in life and the other in destruction. John’s call to repentance is more than a call to change. It is a call to face the reality of existence, the exact point where to be and not to be meet.

John is a liminal figure, standing on the border of the possible. He creates a contrast with Christ. As Charleston puts it, John “paint(s) the background so the figure in the foreground may stand out even more clearly.” This is what strangers and strangeness always do. With their strangeness, they bring the expected into high relief. Because of their chaos, we come to understand the ways we order our life. It’s part of why the church tolerated and even celebrated people like Christina the Astonishing and Simeon Stylites. Every group and society needs a critique of their idea of order.
An argument could be made that Jesus, also, is very strange. Those who opposed him found him chaotic. He came to disrupt the corrupt and indecent orderliness of his time. He works to disrupt the unjust and venal orderliness of our time. John doesn’t quite describe Jesus’s strangeness correctly, but he is right to claim that Jesus is strange. Christ’s strangeness has more to do with embracing rejected people than it does with the winnowing fork and the unquenchable fire. But, as the Gospel story will go on to prove, both kinds of strangeness are dangerous to the authorities.

Both John and Jesus had mothers, and Luke spends a good amount of time on these mothers in the first few chapters of his Gospel. Later poetry and song will go much further in elaborating on Mary’s life, describing moments when she celebrates and mourns for her son. I wanted to do the same for Elizabeth. In my poem, I present her as someone who sees and understands her son, and the role he will play. In the last line, I hope that her grief is clear as well. It is part of the grief of all parents, but amplified. All parents know that our children will come to live inner and outer lives that have little to do with us. We will become at least a little bit estranged through no fault of our own, and no fault of our children. Can we see past this grief to the great revelations that our children’s strangenesses offer to us? Can we celebrate the ways that they reveal the contrasts and dualities of our lives?

Published in Foreshadow Magazine on July 7, 2025: https://www.foreshadowmagazine.com/magazine/a-creed-in-santa-cruz.

Illumination

A year after my mother’s death, we went to visit my brothers in Santa Cruz during the week after Christmas. Ohio was cold and snowy, and California was vibrant with life. Little pools of water along the shore line were rich with creatures and color. We went whale watching. We hiked along the bluffs. We looked down at seals who were resting under the piers.

On Sunday, I went alone to church in a little seaside chapel. It was the church of my tradition, with an Episcopal eye for beauty in the arrangement of the sanctuary, and an Episcopal ear for beauty in the words of the prayer book. When we stood for the Creed, I found myself saying it for the first time in a year. And I had a sense that the strangers in that little room had held it for me, that they had been waiting for the moment when they could give it back to me.

I have long-held suspicions about community. I have been hurt by community, rejected by it, required to prove myself within it. There have been times when I’ve disliked and avoided it. But on that Sunday morning, I understood part of its power. It was able to hold my beliefs, even when I could not, and return them to me when I was ready.

Published in Foreshadow Magazine, July 8, 2025: https://www.foreshadowmagazine.com/magazine/sometimes-a-radiant-world

Illumination

If we are Christ’s body, we must accept all of the aches and pains, the sleepiness, the sloth, the injury, the activity that is part of any form of embodiment. Just as we do not yet live within our resurrected bodies, the embodied community is not free of the effects of living in this world. We do not live in radiance, but love can, occasionally, make us feel as if we do. Whispers of resurrection sound through our lives. Sunlight, glinting off of some moment, envelopes us in the face of Christ.
To love is to notice. To live in a loving community is to be aware of foibles and failures, and also to note small graces and beauty. We hear each other’s histories, capture small facts. Moments of our friends’ lives that we weren’t present for live within our memories. We know each other through stories, but also through the idiosyncratic gesture of a hand, the twitch of a mouth, the carefulness of a step. So much remains unknown. So much about even the people we love best remains a mystery. So much about ourselves.

We are both in the mosaic, one of its tesserae, and outside of it, observing it, studying every piece of glass. It is fragile, but set in mortar, hard to shatter, ready to last for centuries, if history allows it to. The body of Christ that we inhabit is even more durable. Not permanent, as nothing in this world is permanent, but, because its Christ’s body, ordained to last forever.