Advent

There are so many things I want to write about our trip to Chicago, and about Advent, about preparing for Christmas in this novel phase of my life when I am not waiting for the arrival of anyone or anything.  It is divine, and I am enormously grateful and wildly busy.  So I offer you two things this holiday season:  a favorite poem by Jane Kenyon, and a bit of advice:  Go forth and buy a canister of Martha Stewart craft glitter and decorate something–anything–with it.  It is pure and glimmering magic.

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Mosaic of the Nativity

Serbia, Winter 1993

On the domed ceiling God is thinking:

I made them my joy, and everything else I made to bless them.

But see what they do!

I know their hearts

and arguments:

“We’re descended from

 Cain.  Evil is nothing new,

so what does it matter now

if we shell the infirmary, and the well where the fearful

and rash alike must come for water?”

God thinks Mary into being.

Suspended at the apogee

of the golden dome,

she curls in a brown pod,

and inside her the mind

of Christ, cloaked in blood,

lodges and begins to grow.

                               –Jane Kenyon