Archive for December, 2009
Here’s a villanelle I wrote a few years ago to celebrate the joy and the promise of Christmas. It appears as a spoken-word poem with original music by Phil Cooper on Nathanael’s Creed’s new Christmas CD, “Home Again with You.”
This past summer, I accompanied my parish youth group on a one-week mission trip to Nicaragua, where we helped build homes and a school near the northern city of Chinendega. But first, we were told that we were going to climb Cerro Negro, a 2,400-foot high volcano that had last erupted about a decade ago.
Many talk about being “filled” by God in prayer and that can be an apt description of what can happen in prayer. But here’s the problem: If we’re too full of ourselves and our busy lives, there’s just no room for God. So we have to empty ourselves. We have to get out of our own way and make some room for God.
…there is also sacredness in the seemingly ordinary moments of my life that, like my drive to work, all too often passes by in a noisy blur without much notice. These moments can be fleeting and seemingly meaningless, but when we take the time to reflect and allow ourselves to live a more examined inner life, we can begin to see that the sacred is all around us.
Here’s a poem I wrote a few years ago for my daughter Jenny, now 18, when she was learning to drive. This “sliver of a silver crescent” moon has since become “our thing,” and whenever either of us sees it (I have no idea when or how often the moon takes this shape…) we call each other. I’ve come to love the moment when my phone rings and I hear Jenny’s voice say, “Daddy, look in the sky! It’s our moon!”
As a writer and songwriter, I can tell my stories and hope and trust that someone will see a grain of truth in them–a semblance of something real that maybe they have felt themselves.