One Time Jul14

One Time

I will be spending the coming week with the good folks who organized and are participating in St. Olaf College’s Conference on Worship, Theology, and the Arts. One of the guest faculty is poet Christian Wiman. One of the first poems I’d shared at this site was his “Every...

Every Riven Thing – A Poem for Friday Mar09

Every Riven Thing – A Poem for Friday

Given this Sunday’s Gospel reading from John 2, where Jesus makes manifest that God will no longer be contained in the Temple but is now, in Jesus, on the loose, I thought Christian Wiman’s poem Every Riven Thing was appropriate. But this isn’t simply a tribute to the God present in nature; it is testimony to the God who appears in brokeness. As Wiman says in an interview with Radio Open Source: Riven means broken, it means shattered or wounded or unhealed, and I think that notion is very important to me and my notion of God and of religion: that we are broken creatures, very broken creatures. And I don’t think of God as...