Love at last has finally freed me,
Once 7-years’ chance from a death at sea.
        A light of love, unending, outshining pale-star’d skies,
        I find there dawning in the glimmer of your eyes.

                   They can lay my life unto the ground,
but love will take to soar,
For my soul, eternal, shall find your arms once more.

My Christmas Novel. ‘Try to read it every yuletide.
—Starting this one. 

    He was writing what he should have written long ago and had always wished to write but never could. Now it came to him quite easily, he wrote eagerly and said exactly what he wanted to say. Only now and then a boy got in his way, a boy with narrow Kirghiz eyes, in an unbuttoned reindeer coat worn fur-side out, as in the Urals or Siberia.
     He knew for certain that this boy was the spirit of his death or, to put it quite plainly, that he was his death. Yet how could he be his death if he was helping him to write a poem? How could death be useful, how was it possible for death to be a help?
    The subject of his poem was neither the entombment nor the resurrection but the days between; the title was “Turmoil.”
    He had always wanted to describe how for three days the black, raging, worm-filled earth had assailed the deathless incarnation of love, storming it with rocks and rubble—- as waves fly and leap at the seacoast, cover and submerge it— how for three days the black hurricane of earth raged, advancing and retreating.

Two lines kept coming into his head:
“We are glad to be near you,” and “Time to wake up.”
    Near him, touching him, were hell, dissolution, corruption, death, and equally near him were the spring and Mary Magdalene, and life. And it was time to awake. Time to wake up and to get up. Time to arise, time for resurrection. 

In regards to the shooting last night in Aurora, Colorado, it’s a sombre reminder of the frailty and sacredness of life. My prayers go out to the vicims, their families, and to the culprit.

These tragedies, for me, hit home pretty deeply. To think, if I only grew up in the same place I was born, not only might I have attended Columbine (though far after the shooting; I was only a child then), but I’d have been only minutes away from the gunshots of last night. And not only that, through my life I’ve considered a lot joining the ministry YWAM in Denver (the sight of another, more forgotten, tragic shooting that took place between those two, involving a gunman targeting Christians). All of these, would have occurred all around me.

Perhaps it’s foolish to even ponder, but every time these tragedies hit, I can’t help but think, had only my parents made different life choices when living in Denver, I or someone I’d have come to know, could have easily been present at one of these. It all kind of leaves me with a sense of a sharper bond to the victims involved that I can’t often shake; “had life gone diferently, could one of them been a friend of mine?”  Makes me think of the lines of John Donne’s  ’For Whom the Bell Tolls’;

“No man is an Island, entire of himself.
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main
if a clod be washed away by the sea, 
Europe is the less,…
any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls
it tolls for thee.”

O God, if Orpheus’ voice were mine, to sing
to Death’s high Virgin and the Virgin’s King,
till their hearts failed them, down would I my path
cleave, and naught stay me, not the Hound of Wrath,
not the grey oarsman of the ghostly tide,
till back to sunlight I had borne my bride.
  But now, wife, wait for me till I shall come
where thou art, and prepare our second home.
These ministers in that same cedar sweet
where thou art laid will lay me, feet to feet,
and head to head, oh, not in death from thee
divided, who alone art true to me.

Alcestis, Euripides