Thursday October 14, 2021https://kuc.org/wp-content/uploads/joy-23.jpg

Katie Snipes Lancaster

Scripture
Beloved, I pray
that all may go well
with you
and that you
may be in good health,
just as it is
well with your soul.
3 John 1:2

A Look at Joy
Nowhere is it the same place as yesterday.
None of us is the same person as yesterday.
We finally die from the exhaustion of becoming.
This downward cellular jubilance is shared
by the wind, bugs, birds, bears and rivers,
and perhaps the black holes in galactic space
where our souls will all be gathered in an invisible
thimble of antimatter. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Yes, trees wear out as the wattles under my chin
grow, the wrinkled hands that tried to strangle
a wife beater in New York City in 1957.
We whirl with the earth, catching our breath
as someone else, our soft brains ill-trained
except to watch ourselves disappear into the distance.
Still, we love to make music of this puzzle.

(Becoming by Jim Harrison from Complete Poems. 2021)

Prayer
We wear out,
O God.
and yet, with the
wind, bugs, birds, bears, rivers,
with the very invisible galaxies just beyond sunset,
we make music here, an echo of love
reverberating a joy as yet unseen.
Reveal that joy, O God.
Amen.