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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About 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...
About 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.
Click to read more...