For a long time now, I have carried deep within me a poem by Mark Van Doren, as a centering meditation. I find prayer in its whisperings of thanksgiving, confession, acceptance, and affirmation of Life, out of which I find strength.
O World, my friend, my foe
My deep dark stranger, doubtless Unthinkable to know;
My many and my one,
Created when I was and doomed to go Back into the same sun;
O World, my thought’s despair,
My heart’s companion, made by love so intimate, so fair
Stay with me till I die….
O air,
O stillness, O great sky….
Dear Lovely Death
by Langston Hughes
Dear lovely Death
That taketh all things under wing— Never to kill—
Only to change
Into some other thing
This suffering flesh,
To make it either more or less,
But not again the same—
Dear lovely Death,
Change is thy other name.
“The meaning of life is fulfilled only by those who enter into the struggle for justice in history and community.” James Luther Adams
“Life is just a chance to grow a soul.” A. Powell Davies
“I seek change for the beauty of itself. Everything will change. The only question is growing up or decaying. We who are human have a great opportunity to grow up and beyond
that. Our grasp is not limited to our reach.”
Nikki Giovanni
“Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear Everything. Dear God.”
Alice Walker
“left foot… right foot… left foot…. Breathe.” Anne Lamott
Words by Archibald MacLeish are part of the good news I preach – part of the vision and the hope that sustain me, and I do mean sustain me. If I were to write a modern age Bible, in the section of Wisdom Literature there would be these words from one of his essays that concludes:
To see the earth as we now see it, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers [and sisters] on that bright loveliness in the unending night – [sisters and] brothers who see now they are truly [sisters and] brothers.
For me, this image of the Earth – “small and blue and beautiful” – is a potent, sustaining,
and liberating religious symbol.
Cultural critic bell hooks in her volume YEARNING writes, “I choose familiar… language, old codes, words like ‘struggle, marginality, resistance.’ I choose these words knowing that they are no longer popular or ‘cool’ – [I] hold onto them and the political legacies they evoke and affirm, even as I work to change what they say, to give them renewed and different meaning.” (pp. 152-3)
bell hooks
If my home is in creativity itself, I can undergo great changes without despair.
Henry Nelson Wieman