Joy to the World

(A paraphrase of Psalm 98)

Joy to the world, the Lord is come!
Let earth receive her King;
Let every heart prepare Him room,
And Heaven and nature sing.

Joy to the earth, the Savior reigns!
Let men their songs employ;
While fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains
Repeat the sounding joy.

No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found.

He rules the world with truth and grace,
And makes the nations prove
The glories of His righteousness,
And wonders of His love.

---Isaac Watts, 1719

Joseph the Faithful Carpenter

Joseph, the Faithful Carpenter 

Ponders the new he keeps concealed:

His bride-to-be in found with child— 

A father’s name is not revealed. 

 As Joseph slumbers fitfully 

An angel enters Joseph’s dream 

To tell him that this comes from God 

And things are not as they may seem: 

 “O, Joseph, banish all your fears 

And take Young Mary as your wife 

And be a father to God’s child 

Who comes to share in human life.” 

Good Joseph, born of David’s line 

(Which matters not in days of Rome) 

Bequeaths a human royalty 

And gives the Boy a godly home. 

A jealous Herod fears this King,

So Joseph takes them speedily 

To Egypt, where again he works, 

To care for his small family. 

 An angel tells that Herod’s dead, 

So Joseph brings them all back home; 

He brings them to quaint Nazareth 

And raises God’s Son as his own.

---C. Marie Byars, 1999 (c)

November

Besides the autumn poets sing,
A few prosaic* days
A little this side of snow
And that side of the haze.

A few incisive mornings**,
A few ascetic*** eyes,---
Gone Mr. Bryant's golden-rod****
And Mr. Thomson's sheaves. . .*****

Perhaps a squirrel may remain,
My sentiments to share.
Grant me, O Lord, a sunny mind,
Thy windy will to bear!******
---Emily Dickinson

*Prosaic: plain-language, ordinary, dull, lacking poetry
**The cold, frosty mornings tell you quite clearly winter's on the way
***Ascetic eyes---stoic, living without pleasures; people who are out aren't out to absorb the beauties which have faded
****Goldenrod: a yellow-flowering stalky plant related to daisies & etc.
*****The neighbor's bunches of grain are taken inside the barn now for protection & use
******Yes, God's will is to be gracious; but in this sin-tainted world, the nature He oversees has imperfections, such as cold, blustery winds; at some point we do better to accept that His will can sometimes seem unpleasant

Pied* Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things, 

For skies of couple-color as a brindled cow, 

For rose-moles in stipple** upon trout that swim. 

Fresh-firecoal chestnut falls***, finches' wings; 

Landscape plotted and pieced---fold, fallow, and plough; 

And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim. 

All things counter, spare, original, strange; 

Whatever is fickle, freckled, (who knows how?) 

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; 

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise Him.

---Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1877 

*Pied: Having patches of more than one color; i.e. the "Pied Piper" **Rose-colored dots or flecks ***Fallen chestnuts, red as burning coals

Spring and Fall

to a young child

Margaret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leaves like the things of man, you 

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you? 

Ah, as the heart grows older 

It will come to such sights colder 

By and by, nor spare a sigh 

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal* lie**;

And yet you will weep and know why***.

Now no matter, child, the name: 

Sorrows springs are the same. 

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed, 

What heart heard of, ghost guessed****: 

It was the blight man was born for.

It is Margaret you mourn for. ---Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1880 

"Leafmeal"; akin to "piecemeal", a work coined by Hopkins **although Margaret might someday see a whole LOT ('worlds') of leaves laying around decaying, ***when she someday does, she will know why it moves her: the decay of leaves triggers thoughts of her own mortality ****before she had expressed it or heard it expressed, Margaret's own inner spirit knew the truth of this

FALL

I'm waiting for fall to come:
For leaves to fall,
For mists to blow,
For winds to call,
For birds to go,
And then I'll know it's fall.

---Anonymous [makes the elementary school rounds]

4th of July Canyon, New Mexico

The Dirty Floor

[This is technically an analogy. Like all, it has its limitations.]

    Sometimes people ask me, "Why do you consider Christianity so special or unique? After all, most of the world's great religions have fine moral codes." (Of course, these people are either not Christians at all or very loose or lapsed in their relationship to Him.) So I agree with them that that is true, but the primary thing about Christianity is not the fine moral code.

     I give them this to think on:"When you were very young and tracked dirt in on the nice, clean kitchen floor, how did your mom react? Did she say, 'That's okay, honey, I love you so much that I'll ignore the dirt. We'll all just get along fine ignoring it.'???" Of course not!" [No one's ever said "Yes" to this---what a dump you'd live in if your mom were like that.] "

     "And your mom knew you couldn't clean up the mess on your own. So, what did your mom do? She rolled up her sleeves* and cleaned up your mess on her own.""That's how it is with God and sin. God can even less stand to live with the dirt of sinfulness than your mom could with that dirty floor. [Old Testament: 'unclean' was how they often expressed sin or sinfulness.] God is so holy He can't even stand one speck of dirt in His presence---not the tiniest thing. And we're not capable of cleaning our mess up, either. So, God 'rolled up His sleeves'*, became one of us (Jesus Christ) and cleaned up that mess (dying on the cross to pay back Himself for the cost of our sins). "If you grasp this idea first, then nature really properly can become a teaching tool for you. Because then you will know what is real, and you can relate what you take in with your senses back to the truth of Jesus Christ.

  

*"[Yahweh] saw that there was no one. . . to intercede; so His own arm worked salvation for Him." (Isaiah 60:16)