It may have been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, but here in Duluth, Minnesota it has been busy. The coming week has its challenges as well, so allow me to share some bits of writing which have and continue to move and inspire me, to open my heart and expand my mind. I hope they do the same for you. These three pieces have recently been, or soon will be, woven into my sermons.

just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate

Mary Oliver, from “Prayer” in Thirst

Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and light, the canary that sings on the skull. Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous. About five years ago I say a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star.
The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. I had just rounded the corner when his insouciant [carefree] step caught my eye: there was no one else in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

Annie Dillard, from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

A soul without prayer is a soul without a home.
Abraham Joshua Heschel, from “On Prayer”

With Faith and With Feathers,

David