“Worship is the submission of all of our nature to God. It is the quickening of conscience by His holiness, nourishment of mind by His truth, purifying of imagination by His beauty, opening of the heart to His love, and submission of will to His purpose. All this gathered up in adoration is the greatest of all expressions of which we are capable.”
-William Temple
EYES
My most honorable eyes. You are not in the best shape.
I receive from you an image, less than sharp,
And if a color, then it’s dimmed.
And you were a pack of royal hounds
With whom I would set forth in the early morning.
My wondrously quick eyes, you saw many things,
Lands and cities. Islands and oceans.
Together we greeted immense sunrises,
When the fresh air invited us to run
Along trails just dry from cold night dew.
Now what you have seen is hidden inside
And changed into memory or dreams
Slowly I move away from the fair of the world
And I notice in myself a distaste
For monkeyish dresses, shrieks and drum beats.
What a relief. Alone with my meditation
On the basic similarity in humans
And their tiny grain of dissimilarity.
Without eyes, my gaze is fixed on one bright point
That grows large and takes me in.
-Czeslaw Milosz
But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.
-Galatians 6:14
Thy Cross is for all men a well of blessings
and a cause of thanksgiving.
Thereby for them that believe in thee,
weakness is turned into strength,
shame into glory, and death into life.
-St. Leo the Pope (d. 461)
Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross — September 14
GRATEFULNESS
Each day the engine of my gratefulness
must be coaxed and primed into action.
Of course like any old clunker,
it would just as soon stay put.
For even after the labored start beats the inertia,
and the plume of white smoke struggles upward,
the same hills always appear,
soaring daily—tall and ominous as before.
There is the long slow hill of “aging”
so gradual and smooth at first.
And then that steep grade called “the news.”
Yes, and always some mountain of a war
looming out there, never too far in the distance.
Even an old idea or a feeling long abandoned
might conspire to halt this fragile progress –
valves sputtering, tires flattening, clutch slipping.
But the old “potato, potato, potato” sound
of the engine, and all its mysterious fuel,
for which I am truly grateful
somehow
keeps stumbling along.
-Dale Biron
Gladsome Lights 