A Prayer for Prayer

Dear Friend,

Last Monday the friars spent the day at Serra Retreat attuning ourselves to the sounds and rhythms of Advent. In four sessions of conversation, our director – a thoughtful guide with a delightful laugh – led us around the Advent Wreath by having us read aloud and ponder texts from each Advent Sunday and do the same with poems amplifying one or another Advent theme. As you might imagine, I really took to this approach and was eager to review the poems once we got home. So here I am …

I was not familiar with the work of Vassar Miller and I’m so grateful to have been introduced. Her poems embody an unflinching faith, her voice a prophet’s voice, her lines, in the words of one reviewer, taut and clear. For this Sunday I hear John the Baptist in the closing lines of her poem “A Prayer for Prayer”:

Christ, from the pincers, speech and dumbness, never

Absolve me till I am dissolved, but dangle

Me and my word over the flame and fuse us,

A lesser word-made-flesh, enunciated

Clean to the bitter syllable of blood.

It was enlightening for me to learn that Ms. Miller was born in Houston, Texas, and from birth lived with cerebral palsy – no doubt seedbeds of her gutsiness and grit.

“In the desert prepare the way of the Lord!” cries Isaiah. For the prophet/poet the task begins with locating the heart and mind through images, then navigating that “rough” and “rugged” land with a patience inflamed by courage. With the violence and chaos in our world this Advent, Miller’s voice comes as a gift, opening my heart, unlocking my prayer. If she is in fact, in her own way, translating John the Baptist, it’s no wonder he attracted such crowds.

Gratefully,

Fr. Dan ofm