One more weekend in January and then we are on to February–the year is off to a fast start.
Tomorrow is the anniversary of the death of William Butler Yeats in 1939. We will toast him and read some poetry. Hard to believe “The Second Coming” was written over 100 years ago. It certainly resonates.
(The painting is by Fairfield Porter.)
*Revelation 22:12
Well, I made it to Baltimore without any delays (thanks for all those prayers and well wishes) and wonderful DN was waiting to pick me up at the airport and drive me to Silver Spring. Since then I have been enjoying lots of quality time with precious daughter #2 and sweet Katiebelle.
We are waiting patiently for baby #2 to arrive.
In the meantime, here’s a poem, a sonnet by Christina Rossetti (1830-94), “Sonnets Are Full of Love”:
Sonnets are full of love, and this my tome
Has many sonnets: so here now shall be
One sonnet more, a love sonnet, from me
To her whose heart is my heart’s quiet home,
To my first Love, my Mother, on whose knee
I learnt love-lore that is not troublesome;
Whose service is my special dignity,
And she my loadstar while I go and come
And so because you love me, and because
I love you, Mother, I have woven a wreath
Of rhymes wherewith to crown your honoured name:
In you not fourscore years can dim the flame
Of love, whose blessed glow transcends the laws
Of time and change and mortal life and death.
*1 Peter 2:3
–“Amaryllis” by Connie Wanek
Also this (picturing Ronnie Howard):
This is how my brain (still) works.
Have a good weekend! Pray for traveling mercies for me as I head to Baltimore tomorrow morning.
Many things I might have said today.
And I kept my mouth shut.
So many times I was asked
To come and say the same things
Everybody was saying, no end
To the yes-yes, yes-yes,
me-too, me-too.The aprons of silence covered me.
A wire and hatch held my tongue.
I spit nails into an abyss and listened.
I shut off the gable of Jones, Johnson, Smith,
All whose names take pages in the city directory.I fixed up a padded cell and lugged it around.
–Carl Sandburg
I locked myself in and nobody knew it.
Only the keeper and the kept in the hoosegow
Knew it–on the streets, in the post office,
On the cars, into the railroad station
Where the caller was calling, “All a-board,
All a-board for . . . Blaa-blaa . . . Blaa-blaa,
Blaa-blaa . . . and all points northwest . . .all a-board.”
Here I took along my own hoosegow
And did business with my own thoughts.
Do you see? It must be the aprons of silence.
Today is Carl Sandburg’s birthday. He lived from 1878 to 1967 and during his lifetime he was held in high regard, winning three Pulitzer Prizes for poetry and biography. When he died President Lyndon Johnson said, “Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of America, more than the poet of its strength and genius. He was America.” Seems like a bit of an overstatement.
Sandburg understood some things though. He said: “When a nation goes down or a society perishes, one condition may always be found–They forgot where they came from.”
I liked this remembrance of Sandburg by the son of the artist William A. Smith who painted his portrait which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.
In response to my statement that I had read the entire Bible in 2022, a college friend commented on her Christmas card to me: “Katie! You read the Bible! What’s next? All of Shakespeare?”
Well, that’s an idea.
No matter where; of comfort no man speak:
–Richard II, Act 3, Scene 2
Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth,
Let’s choose executors and talk of wills:
And yet not so, for what can we bequeath
Save our deposed bodies to the ground?
Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke’s,
And nothing can we call our own but death
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison’d by their wives: some sleeping kill’d;
All murder’d: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear’d and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour’d thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence: throw away respect,
Tradition, form and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while:
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king?
*Silvia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona
The painting is “The Plays of William Shakespeare” by Sir John Gilbert, 1849
It makes me happy every year to open up our big box of Christmas ornaments that I have collected over the years and see them on a new tree.
Some were made by my aunts many years ago or by people I have worked with and some were made more recently by my daughters.
Some have been handed down from my parents and even my grandparents. Some were “store-bought” and quite a few were made by my children at school. (Do they make Christmas ornaments in elementary school any more?)
Some are part of a collection (bears).
Well, it’s nice to remember.
It’s also nice that TCM remembers all those performers/writers/directors/etc who die every year. Here is their 2022 in memoriam tribute:
They always include the little known actors who may have had just one scene in a great movie, like Mickey Kuhn who played the young Montgomery Clift in Red River (1948) and Virginia Patton who played Jimmy Stewart’s new sister-in-law in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). I must say I think James Caan deserved more than the split second inclusion he got. C’est la vie. But I like that the last snippet of Sidney Poitier is of him playing a cowboy. He played several cowboys in his career and I think he enjoyed it.
Here’s an interesting article about the Magi and why they worshiped Jesus.
I liked this article about dealing with sleeplessness. “A good night’s sleep, like so many of God’s gifts, is one of those ordinary glories you don’t quite appreciate until it’s gone.”
Do you need to be reminded of “10 Ways to Be a Christian this Christmas”? These are 10 good ones.
Enjoy the week before Christmas! Slow down. Watch a Christmas movie. Read a poem.
*”The Three Kings” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow–read it here.
Less than two weeks til Christmas! I have a lot still to do on my ‘to do’ list, but at least I wrote my Christmas letter and put my cards in the mail! Also my packages are mailed, so now I just need to wrap, wrap, wrap. And I don’t have as much to wrap as in years past. However, the OM seems to be making up for all the cutting back I have attempted to do. Mysterious packages continue to arrive daily.
In Instagram news, John Piper shared a poem he wrote about the martyrdom of John Bradford:
I like it, don’t you? English reformer John Bradford was burned at the stake for “stirring up a mob” (i.e. preaching) by Queen “Bloody” Mary in 1555. Bradford is commemorated at the Marian Martyrs’ Monument in Smithfield, London. Lest we forget.
This is a thoughtful piece about the obstacles in life that ultimately are instructive: “But we are a people who don’t like to be hemmed in, held back, inconvenienced. Yet how many times are those the very things that carve beauty in our souls? How many opportunities would we pass by in our haste if we hadn’t been slowed down and forced to consider our way?”
And here’s a poem shared by Don: “Poetry for Supper”
‘Listen, now, verse should be as natural
As the small tuber that feeds on muck
And grows slowly from obtuse soil
To the white flower of immortal beauty.’‘Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer
Said once about the long toil
That goes like blood to the poem’s making?
Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls,
Limp as bindweed, if it break at all
Life’s iron crust. Man, you must sweat
And rhyme your guts taut, if you’d build
Your verse a ladder.’
‘You speak as though
No sunlight ever surprised the mind
Groping on its cloudy path.’‘Sunlight’s a thing that needs a window
–R.S. Thomas, Welsh poet and Anglican priest
Before it enter a dark room.
Windows don’t happen.’
So two old poets,
Hunched at their beer in the low haze
Of an inn parlour, while the talk ran
Noisily by them, glib with prose
Have a good day. Read some poetry, wrap some presents, contemplate the brightness of the truth.
It has grown cold here in flyover country, but, so far, no snow.
But I like this poem by Billy Collins.
The painting, Snow West Village New York City, is by Anthony Butera.
Christ is my saviour. He is my life. He is everything to me in heaven and earth. Once while traveling in a sandy region I was tired and thirsty. Standing on the top of a mound I looked for water. The sight of a lake at a distance brought joy to me, for now I hoped to quench my thirst. I walked toward it for a long time, but I could never reach it. Afterwards I found out it was a mirage, only a mere appearance of water caused by the refracted rays of the sun. In reality there was none. In a like manner I was moving about the world in search of the water of life. The things of this world – wealth, position, honour and luxury – looked like a lake by drinking of whose waters I hoped to quench my spiritual thirst. But I could never find a drop of water to quench the thirst of my heart. I was dying of thirst. When my spiritual eyes were opened I saw the rivers of living water flowing from his pierced side. I drank of it and was satisfied. Thirst was no more. Ever since I have always drunk of that water of life, and have never been athirst in the sandy desert of this world. My heart is full of praise.
–Sadhu Sundar Singh
Oh-o-oh, sinner,
When you’re mingling with the crowd in Babylon—
Drinking the wine of Babylon—
Running with the women of Babylon—
You forget about God, and you laugh at Death.
Today you’ve got the strength of a bull in your neck
And the strength of a bear in your arms,
But some o’these days, some o’ these days,
You’ll have a hand-to-hand struggle with bony Death,
And Death is bound to win.
Young man, come away from Babylon,
That hell-border city of Babylon,
Leave the dancing and gambling of Babylon,
The wine and whiskey of Babylon,
The hot-mouthed women of Babylon;
Fall down on your knees,
And say in your heart:
“I will arise and go to my Father.”
–James Weldon Johnson, from “Prodigal Son”
Have a good weekend!
(The painting is “The Prodigal Son” by N.C. Wyeth)
Well, we finally got some rain after about a month without any and the storm was quite a whopper! But much needed and appreciated.
In other news, a 2,554-pound pumpkin won the record as the heaviest pumpkin in U.S. history! The super squash was grown near Buffalo, New York, this year. But wait! Just one week later, a new pumpkin king was crowned. A 2,560-pound pumpkin won a contest in Northern California, beating the first squash by six pounds. Who knew the competition was so fierce?
This article about the sin of contempt is very pertinent these days. It is a sin I grapple with daily. “But contempt is the silent killer of Christian charity. It has no place in the heart of a follower of Jesus.”
I had lunch the other day with two friends who are 93 and 82. We jokingly agreed that we are all very thankful to wake up every morning and know what day it is. But a lot of people forget that God commands us to be thankful: give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. (1 Thessalonians 5:18) As Darryl Dash writes, “To refuse to give thanks to God is, in some sense, the essence of sin, one of the greatest problems plaguing humanity (Romans 1: 21). Acknowledging God and giving thanks to him is no trifling matter.”
So may the Lord make me truly thankful for the big things (family, health, home, church) and for the smaller things, such as:
And a poem by Wendell Berry:
And, finally, a toast to Angela Lansbury who has died at age 96. I think I’ll watch either The World of Henry Orient (1964) or The Court Jester (1955)–both great favorites of mine in which she appeared.
(The pumpkin photo is from the WORLD News Group.)
