Thick and Getting Thicker

in the shadow of Renee Good’s murder — say her name

Does it make any sense to go on at length about how cute Bambi, the “young prince of the forest,” is—as the trees around him are going up in flames or as the hunter who shot him tracks him down?

First, I want to thank all 101 of you for your willingness to check in, from time to time, on “Poetry & Theology.” I am encouraged by your attention.

Second, the forest is burning, and there’s a man with a gun over there. Which kind of makes it difficult to stay focused on making poems and/or reflecting on the teaching (didache / di-da-kay) and power (dunamis) of a teacher from the first century. True, the Teacher was a poet, too, and partial to peacemaking, and his world was equally if not more burdened by the threat of imperial violence or empire-sanctioned violence, but that past is not our present. So how to be here now, in the thick of our burning moment—and then carry on in the spirit of the Teacher, in step with his didache?

And how to slow one’s dash from (or into) the conflict long enough to consider the beauty of the winter birds congregating around one’s feeder—or of a young man tenderly caring for his aging rescue dog? Yet how crucial, for sanity sake, to look away from the frenzy of the worsening world and settle one’s gaze, even for a minute, on the larger reality of an earth brimming with extraordinary vitality and wonder. A substack that helps me see such sights belongs to Alexander Verbeek, a European writer very cognizant of our conflagration: check out daybreaknotesandbeans.substack.com.

Today, that’s all I got.

Oh, yeah, there’s also what I read this morning in the Gospel of John about the aforementioned Teacher violating Jewish taboo by talking theology with a “half-breed” Samaritan woman and then healing the child of a desperate lackey of Herod Antipas—two stories of transgression and love. They helped.