Waiting at Christmas
Posted on | December 22, 2009 | No Comments
We have been marooned on our mountainside by the big snow storm for the last five days. This poem popped up to meditate on our experience. I hope your own turning time of sun is full and renewing, whatever hemisphere you’re in.
We are waiting, truly waiting for warming sun, dissolving rain, to offer up the snow to sky, to open up the road to town, bring human faces to our door. Advent has overturned our Christmas, trapped our cozy expectations in the ice, revealed the real time of human beings, while down below the crowd goes shopping, turning fervently the wheels of Christmas, turning future into past. Not exactly looking for the baby in the wrappings, voice drowned out in silent night, and yet we find him, yes, our Jesus, like a Russian doll, the one with Nordic face, no, underneath, the hillbilly Jew, no, the farm boy from the Galilee, the Yeshua, the Yahweh-saves, the one who never really was in Bethlehem, the ancient wandering hope, the tiny face a distant star whose earth we still can’t see, What we are waiting for in ice and snow.
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William J. Everett
In my teaching career I authored eight books and numerous articles in social ethics and religion. After over thirty years of academic work — in Germany, India, and South Africa as well as in the United States — I wanted to turn my hand to a poetically written novel to probe the issues of ecological and human reconciliation.
When I am not writing, I create furniture for worship settings. For more about my work, go to www.WisdomsTable.net, where you will also find galleries of artwork by my wife Sylvia, whose ancestors were the original inspiration for Red Clay, Blood River. Click to read my complete bio...
Red Clay Blood River
Red Clay, Blood River is a story told by Earth about two brothers from Germany and an enslaved South African woman whose lives bind together America’s “Trail of Tears” and South Africa’s simultaneous “Great Trek” of 1838. Memories of their journeys through oppression, estrangement and reconciliation reverberate in the lives of three contemporary students brought together by their interests in ecology. Through their often difficult friendship and a surprising discovery they begin to unravel the mystery of their estrangements, struggles, and deep connections to each other and to the earth.
Based on extensive research in the United States, South Africa, and England, this book takes readers through a sweeping saga of love and conflict in the context of emigration, invasion, slavery, and exploitation. Through its stories we are invited to see our fractured human history from within the sensibilities of an earth that seeks the flourishing of all creatures and transcends their deaths within its life.
I welcome you to read Excerpts from Red Clay Blood River.
You can also view some Reader's Responses to the book.
If you are already reading Red Clay, Blood River, check out the Reader's Guide and Glossary of Names.
If you are in a Book Club, go to the Guide for Discussion Groups.
If you want to know more about people who helped me in writing this book check out the People Present at the Creation.