Community, Gratitude and the Constancy of Kindness.

I wasn't sure I liked th poem below when I first read it. It's in Marva Dawn's Truly the Community p 215. It seemed overstated, an ideal rather than a relationship, a tone of too good to be true, and too sweet to be wholesome. Until I got to the last four lines and the too good to be trueness was proven to be true. Grace is too good to be true, resurrection the kind of impossibility that gives miracles a bad name, and Hilarity...Well it was the word hilarity that clinched it - this is a poem that asks us to think of caring, friendship, community not as human projects, but as the outcome of love incarnate, new creation through resurrection, and real community a grace enabled gift that creates new conduits of grace. Many of which flow towards us in the taken for grantedness of genuine love that is about presence, action and the faithfulness that makes the presence constant and the actions reliably fitted to those blessed to receive them.

With Gratitude

You said

"Call us, anytime you need us",

and I felt at home in your words.

I poured out my grief,

and you hugged me.

I told you my fears,

and you prayed that I would sleep protected.

I expressed my confusion,

and you helped me sort out the parts.

I tried to face my ugly self,

and you kept on caring.

I gave you my pain,

and you gave me a kiss.

How can I thank you?

How do I express this awareness

that I have found a home in your love,

that I've been adopted by your grace?

It's like the Resurrection, promising life

and healing and Hilarity.

It's just that Easter

is incarnated in your care.

The photo of beach cobbles was taken on Inverbervie beach - this is one way of taking them away and enjoying them without plundering the beach. There's a random harmony of cobbles washed into relationship with each other.

Comments

[Catriona]

Thanks, Jim, I think I like that - it could have been mawkish mush but it isn't... wishing you and yours holy hilarity this Christmastide