"What will come of him, This child who holds my hand in a crowd? The prophets foretold much suffering. Is it wrong that I long to pray for you to change your mind?"
The Great Love of Advent

"What will come of him, This child who holds my hand in a crowd? The prophets foretold much suffering. Is it wrong that I long to pray for you to change your mind?"
"He opens up the skies with blazing light, declaring He has come and we have a choice."
I wrote this poem in 2018, imagining the moment when Mary, the mother of Christ, arrived and baby John leapt for joy in his mother's belly. I wrote it long before anyone had ever heard of Covid-19. The world was already in pain, though, grieving death and injustice on the streets and in the courts...
As a child, we never celebrated Christmas. Well, let me clarify that. We had a Christmas tree and all kinds of tinsel. We also received Christmas gifts and sang about Santa Claus. But we never celebrated Jesus. It was a purely secular holiday for us. The church tradition in which I grew up believed celebrating…