Copyright (c) 2000 First Things 106 (October 2000): 24, 38, 45, 51.
A part of us is always praying
for those things the other parts
don’t know that they need.
At dusk,
Eight Great Blue Herons pick their legs out of muck,
Sixteen bony legs stroke the nerve of the sky,
Huge Heron weight lumbering, carving smoothly into air.
I watch them cross the channel toward me
toward me
toward me,
Land in a tree
above my head.
I knew a boy
born with no hands,
Learned to paint with his feet.
I have hands
that don’t know where to go,
How to make or mend,
How to turn events,
Render any answers.
I stumble,
Colors wash away.
Sometimes it is one thing,
And then another,
And another,
The way things angle together
in a prism
where wind can bend light.
Carving into air underneath Heron wings,
Trying to decipher faith,
Feel reprieve into possible woulds,
Trying hard to paint that pardoning place
on the wind
of Heron wings,
Opening to the place where I need to know.
—Rebecca Lee Yates
this is
the tent of my anticipation
at the entrance of which
Sarah laughing stands
this is
the hilltop of my affliction
upon which
Isaac lies bewildered bound
this is
the spring of my abandonment
to which
Hagar has weeping fled
this is
the mill of my aspirations
at which
Samson blinded labors
this is
the geography of my faith
in which
in me my Saviour lives
—Sean Kinsella
“Abraham,”
the voice had said,
“Give me your son—
your only son.
The one that you
love.”
And there it is again,
that quick, unquestioning
obedience. Abraham
saddled his donkey and
split the wood.
He loaded up the cart and took
the fire, the knife, and
his son.
Abraham knew
that if Isaac died,
all the promises of God—
all the promises he
had staked his life on,
were false, were negated,
were made void.
God must have some
plan, Abraham thought—
some hidden trick
up his sleeve. For he
had been rebuked
before, and had come himself
to believe
the saying:
Is anything
too difficult
for the Lord?
—A. M. Nelson
This is what your given name signifies:
merely the fact that it is given.
Your name is what others told you your name is—
you cannot reason your way to it.
Likewise the cosmos. It can’t be argued—
though we do, of course, draping matter with mind.
Biting the world, we are the biter bit,
apprehended by that we apprehend. Or not.
There’s more to this than meets the eye, we say.
But that’s true of you as well. Your given name shows this.
—Craig Payne