New Poetry October 2014

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Words fail,

Only if you let them:
Only if you ignore the Silence
From which they arise
And refuse to give them back to It.

Barriers Become Gates: Reflections on Interfaith Dialogue

I recently read Father John Garvey’s book Seeds of the Word: Orthodox Thinking about Other Religions,¹ which is, among other things, an admirable effort toward encouraging Orthodox Christians to gain insight into the religious traditions that inevitably surround us these days and toward discovering the proper way to regard them.  Father John recognizes our understanding of these other faiths to be limited by our inability to enter into them completely, yet, with an

Three New Poems

An Offering to My Enemies

Until I’m able

To understand
The boundary
Between us

A Brief History of Christianity

Those who manage to connect

With God don’t use the intellect.

It isn’t “it” (nor “he,” nor “she”),

Nor “is” (nor “was” nor “yet to be”).

The mind quite reasonably balks

When faced with this great paradox,

New Poetry, Summer 2013

People Might Get the Wrong Idea

To pray for you

May be nothing other than the impulse to hold you

In my arms and share what you’re going through,

To take the suffering away from you

And give you whatever part of me happens not to be sad or afraid.

This being the best I can do in face of the fact that
God doesn’t usually honor my requests to eradicate your suffering.

Poem: Near-Enemy

There’s generosity.

And then there’s something that resembles it.
It wants the favor returned,
This thing that mimics generous.

We Catch Fire: Some Observations about the Transmission of Knowledge

“It is a common mistake to think that education is on the level of ideas. No! It is always a transmission of experience…. People are not convinced by reasoning; either they catch fire or do not.”—Father Alexander Schmemann¹

 

There’s a tradition in Mahayana Buddhism that the Buddha once gave a sermon without uttering a single word. An expectant assembly had gathered around him. Some of them may have sensed from observing him that something remarkable had happened. Maybe some had heard that there was something about the quality of this man’s presence that inclined one to listen to what he had to say by way of explanation. He regarded the crowd with compassion, wondering, I like to think, if it would even be possible to convey anything about what he had come to understand.  Then he did something unexpected: he picked up a flower and held it up for them to see. He scanned their faces for hints of