Poems

Eden is a flowery place, Jerusalem is stone. Eden's hung with gleaming fruit, Jerusalem stripped to bone.

Mind's "production line" is free to all. It has no finance at the beck and call of error's waste.

What high reward had that wise prophetess of Asher's tribe, homeless and husbandless, when broke the light of earth's first Christmas Day, and many a watcher in Jerusalem. The herald Gabriel came not to them; and yet their prayers shone on the herald's way.

How words that issue from the Word itself must burn through! Must quite translate syllable by syllable and phrase by phrase this garbled globe, this blundering race this whole preposterous, played-out masque back into such first innocence of breath— pre-dust, pre-Eden-swindle—that all move as the unlapsed angels must through infinite cycles of delight. Doris Peel.

Show us more than real estate, for we have deeper needs than plush seats and pleasant architecture. Show us more than outreach— although we came because of it— more than a warm welcome, for we have deeper longings than human kindness can fulfill.

Our base camp is downstairs. From there we look for a hill of holiness a mount of joy a rock of Truth to ascend.

In you, His kingdom. In you, friend, the realm in which His will is being fulfilled rhythmically deathlessly irrevocably.

How can we follow if our feet turn back to paths of greed or self or deep remorse? How can we come with fists so tightly closed on matter, taking error's winding course? There is a way— the Christ way it is called— to hold all things but lightly in God's sight, to seek Him first: to let our cluttered lives make place—large place—for knowing, now, His might. There is a way.

Time that mythical serpent will always softly hiss that now is nothing but that yesterday was sweet (though lost forever in the neverland of nostalgia)— that tomorrow is our true trust toward which we should speed headlong. O time, you deceiver! you make-believe, many-linked dragon! Like a snake-train in an amusement park you would carry us on unseen wheels with such a rocking, mesmerizing movement that before we know it we are being swept away from stability of now into your meaningless round and round.

No harvest Without the sowing, No fruit Without the growing. No truth Without Truth's proving, No love Without Love's loving.