The Bell and the Blackbird

• Posted on May 20, 2020

Dear Emmanuel Community: As our government and diocesan leaders are beginning to ponder and lay out re-opening our common life in the days to come, we will all be discerning when we stay at home and when we enter back into the greater world.  In more normal times, we are always entering the world and then returning home again and again,  We often think little about that movement.  It is just part of our daily life.  However, in these days, every movement out into the world seems laden with risk.  Yet, as humans in creation, that is part of life.  This poem by David Wythe seems to see the “both/and” of our lives at home and in the world.  I have attached a video where I read the poem in the Chapel of the Resurrection.  Can we believe in the time of this pandemic, that “every corner of the world cries Allelujah?”       

Easter blessings, Rev Martha

THE BELL AND THE BLACKBIRD

The sound of a bell still reverberating, or a blackbird calling from a corner of a field.

Asking you to wake into this life or inviting you deeper to one that waits.

Either way takes courage, either way wants you to be nothing but that self that is no self at all,

wants you to walk to the place where you find you already know how to give every last thing

away.

The approach that is also the meeting itself, without any meeting at all.

That radiance you have always carried with you as you walk both alone and completely

accompanied in friendship by every corner of the world crying Allelujah.