A couple of weeks ago I posted Denise Levertov’s poem Annunciation. Several readers suggested another of my favorite Levertov poems, “On the Mystery of the Incarnation,” and today seems the perfect day to share it. Since the killings a week ago in Newtown, her poem has become all the more meaningful, as it confesses that we only really appreciate the mystery and beauty of the Incarnation – God becoming human in Jesus – when we recognize just how much we don’t deserve, yet simultaneously need, such a gesture of love. I could say more, but won’t. Her poem speaks for itself. I would invite you, though, to read it slowly, and...

This is probably my favorite retelling of the Christmas story. The folks at St. Paul’s Church in Auckland, New Zealand do a fantastatic job with the video, music, and all the rest, and you have to love the brilliance of the idea of letting children tell the story. Plus, their New Zealand accents are adorable, especially when they say “baby” (I suppose it would have been over the top if they’d thrown in “dingo” as well. ☺) Watching it a week after the events in Newtown made it all the more poignant. I hope you can be encouraged wherever you are by this simple retelling of a beautiful story and feel, once again, the love of Jesus...

I love words. I love what you can do with words. I love playing with words, shaping ideas with them, communicating things that matter to me through them, and affecting the thoughts and feelings of others with them. For all these reasons and more, I love words. But not always. As I’ve said before, I don’t always love words when they come as poems. When words come in poems, they don’t seem to follow the rules, or at least they operate by different rules, rules I haven’t mastered and don’t feel competent at. That’s, in part, why the Saturday poetry post has been important to me. It’s a way to stretch, to push myself to work a...

I’m going to omit our usual Wednesday TEDTalks episode for a week or two to make a little more room for holiday cheer. Today’s feature…a modern day – and rockin’ – little drummer boy named Sean Quigley. Sean, a native of Winnipeg, put together a very fun – and very well made – video of his version of the “The Little Drummer Boy.” What’s kind of amazing is that he plays all the instruments as well as produced the video. And his exuberance as a drummer is, well, seriously fun. As he said in an interview with the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corp) last year shortly after the video went up and went viral, “Drummer Boy...