Issue 32: “After the Bitter Nights”
"Poetry is a nightingale that sits in the darkness and sings…"
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
Our mission at the Matthew 25 Initiative is to equip and sustain Anglicans serving alongside the vulnerable. The work of justice and mercy is often wondrous and also difficult. Holding beauty, naming pain, and contending for hope is what we do at M25i. Walter Brueggeman writes, "[A poem] thinks the unthinkable and utters the unutterable." In places of brokenness, where much feels unutterable and unimaginable, we encounter Jesus. Continue with us in reflection and prayer through this series, "For the Soul," as poetry might offer us Spirit-soaked imaginations.
Before you begin...
During the Season of Light, Advent-Christmas-Epiphany, we walk the threshold of longing and hope, joy and feasting. But it is also a season of puzzlement because the world is soaked with traces of glory even while crying out in incessant pain.
This is what it means to live as the Magi journeyed: puzzled but curious, hopeful and courageous, trusting, full of wonder and worship before a small child who is God incarcate. In a world of Herods and massacres of innocents, we choose to look for the light.
This is the work of M25i. It is good that we don't do it alone.
Highsmith, C. M., photographer. (2014) Scene from the Cannon Quarter Horse ranch near the town of Venus in north-central Texas.
After the Bitter Nights
by Wendell Berry
After the bitter nights
and the gray, cold days
comes a bright afternoon.
I go into the creek valley
and there are the horses, the black
and the white, lying in the warm
shine on a bed of dry hay.
They lie side by side,
identically posed as a painter
might imagine them:
heads up, ears and eyes
alert. They are beautiful in the light
and in the warmth happy. Such
harmonies are rare. This is
not the way the world
is. It is a possibility
nonetheless deeply seeded
within the world. It is
the way the world is sometimes.
Reread and listen
As you read again (as all poems should be read 2-3 times, preferably aloud), consider the tension of being so very present to suffering and pain and much that seems intractable, while at the same time being people of the Light, "seeing" what is brighter and truer, a story that God is weaving of which we get to be a part.
Pray
Pause for 30 seconds to pray this over yourself and the vulnerable before you step into the next tasks of your day.
“The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned.”
Isaiah 9:2, NIV
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