Spiritual readings        "Greetings from Whittier Presbyterian Church"

Jan. 5, 2001

As the Christmas season comes to a close tomorrow with Epiphany (and I haven’t even got my Christmas cards mailed yet!), one last Ann Weems poem, “The gifts of the Magi.”

 O Lord, I’d like to go to the stable this night!

I’d run

   Even through the dark

            To lay my gifts at your feet!

 Lord, why couldn’t I have been there?

I needn’t have been a king,

   Perhaps just a shepherd child

            or someone sent from the inn

            to check on the progress of the birth…

Or are you waiting this night in other stables

   for me

           to bring my gift?

Are you waiting for me to run

   even through the dark and cold of the night?

The Christian calendar makes its rounds, slightly off-kilter with the secular calendar.  So too should our Christian lives be slightly off-kilter.  I once had a conversation with a friend about the music of Thelonius Monk, how he seemed to see/hear the world from a slightly different angle, as though walking through life with his head bent and seeing/hearing things differently than most of us.  That strikes me as a good image for how we might be listening/looking for God’s presence as we walk through this world.  May God bless you with a sense of the divine presence in your life.

Grace & peace

Geoff