02381 – Can I Choose My Neighbors?

If I could make my neighbors up, I could love them in a minute. I could make them in my own image, looking back at me with deep gratitude for how authentically human I am being to them—and they to me!—reading poetry to each other, admiring pictures of each other’s...

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02349 – Created for Joy!

I sometimes forgetthat I was created for Joy.My mind is too busy.My Heart is too heavyfor me to rememberthat I have beencalled to dancethe Sacred dance of life.I was created to smileTo LoveTo be lifted upAnd to lift others up.O’ Sacred OneUntangle my feetfrom all that...

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02038 – Good Can Come from Evil

To show you … how out of evil there can come good, in those five years I read every book in the black school library. I read all the books I could get from the white school library. I memorized James Weldon Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen and Langston...

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02018 – Love Came Down at Christmas

Love came down at Christmas,love all lovely, love divine;love was born at Christmas--star and angels gave the sign. Worship we the Godhead,love incarnate, love divine;worship we our Jesus--but wherewith for sacred sign? Love shall be our token,love be yours and love...

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01554 – Not Just a Visitor

When it's over, I want to say:all my lifeI was a bride married to amazement.I was the bridegroomtaking the world into my arms.I don't want to end up simplyhaving visited this world. from New & Selected Poems

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00825 – God’s Glory

Glory is to God what style is to an artist. A painting by Vermeer, a sonnet by Donne, a Mozart aria—each is so rich with the style of the one who made it that to the connoisseur it couldn’t have been made by anybody else, and the effect is staggering. The style of an...

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00717 – Worship Requires Our Whole Being

In worship we are ascribing greatness, goodness, and glory to God. It is typical that we put every possible aspect of our being into it, all of our sensuous, conceptual, active, and creative capacities. We embellish, elaborate, and magnify. Poetry and song, color and...

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00539 – Saints: Not Just the Legends

All Saints Day and All Souls Day are the feasts of every saint and of every soul who has died and gone home into the eternal love of God. All of them and therefore not only those already celebrated…but also the silent, unknown ones who have departed as if they had...

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