Poems

The nursing home said, “We look for points of light. ” “That’s nice,”  I thought, wrestling with numbness in my thinking, while I saw only frail minds with bodies sinking.

I think above the maddening crash of waves against the shore      Must be a voice so calm and clear, roll on for evermore. As life it seems must follow path and cannot go astray,      So tides must rise and change their mood, their master to obey.

Beautifully serene, always undisturbed amid any “jarring testimony of the material senses,”* the Christian Science nurse with transparent purity, with “clear sense and calm trust”* administering imparting tenderly caring, is radiantly demonstrating God’s healing love.   — Johe West * Science and Health, p.

Even though we are little more than the “two or three gathered together”  we have found here today in this small Society, a surprising clearing in the woods, where beams of God’s natural light pouring down, show us how holiness is something unnameably simple. Something happens.

A poem.

Oh, lovely sight to see     the flowers of youth — In all the flush and pride     of beauty tending,  (Like the young sunflower to the Day— God bending) Push toward the Sun of Righteousness    and Truth. A heart unsullied by the stains of time, Unburdened by the sins     of many years, An offering far more meet to God     appears Than one that hath grown hoar with  guilt and crime.

The nothingness of error is the somethingness of good? How nothing equals something I have never understood. But now it’s been explained to me.

Rising with the hymns we sing, Raising tributes, Love’s psalms— In our hearts, Soul’s songs Each marked with palms Of the Christ’s coming. Rejoicing through the shade of lies, We find Life’s love  and rise.

The Bible Lesson is God’s musical composition. As I read His music, may I play it as He would want it to be— “Undivorced from truth, uncontaminated and unfettered by human hypotheses, and divinely authorized.

Be like the storm thrush, he said perched in a treetop waving wildly in the wind singing for joy the spotted bird voices truth: no roar, assault, nor circumstance can take away your Soul-created buoyancy open your wings      reach up  and let the tempest lift you—  blow you to a treetop  where you hold on and  sing the glory of the view — Nancy Humphrey Case.