Praise God in the swirling mass of shapes and sounds—this cosmic expanse of spiraling galaxies, shrouded planets, streaking comets, sprinkled and strewn about like wild flowers. Praise Holy Mystery, enshrouded, fecund, actual—creator/creation, distinct yet inseparable.

Praise God in the rust forming over my old Rambler, its wonky front wheel spinning off into the ditch at the end of its working life, now oxidizing in place, the wet air corroding, the freeze-and-thaw pitting, dismantling, and grass rising to encompass and retrieve the rest.

Praise God in the bud. That dart of love aimed at honeyed glands, the glowing breach, the nectar’s release, like a clarion call in some dewy dance hall. Bright tip splits the light of vernal sun and venal night, bud-scale breakdown, leaf pirouette, and shimmy of green.

Praise the Holy in my hometown. Its gravel streets, its Caterpillar grader leaving a raised ridge down Railroad and Main where three towering silos shelter grain, cast shadowy dreams across the coming season. Praise Reg and George, Lydia and Julia, and the beer-stained terry-cloth tables and flecks of tobacco and claps of laughter and the evening coming on like smoke and fresh hope.

Praise God in the mystery of our grass-like lives, brief as a wind gust, with storms of pain and arid tracts of sorrow. Praise the soaring, disabling dawns that reach for eternity, last a second, leave a scar of joy.

Praise God in the pulse of jellyfish, their cellophane bodies, like spirits, guided by currents unknown; praise the honeybee awakening at the whisper of an unfurling blossom; and the scribe awakened to intractable reality, disclosing and furthering human consciousness.

Praise rebel and mystic, prophet and painter, builder and blaster, praise every detonation that cracks our cultural languor and spiritual inertia. Praise the poet that shatters my calcified consciousness through an unflinching head-clearing instress of truth.

Praise the equation: God IS Love. Praise Love, the essential nature of all that is, and all that is changing and emerging. Praise unfinished God, sailing with us into the wind, close-hauling, tacking, sighting the quay.

Praise God with lungs and limbs, volition and action; praise every newborn rave of elation and every late-day waltz of contrition. God is Love; Love is God in evolution.

Let the heart be moved again:
by the green hills, the grass whistles, willow huts,
and pillow forts of our childhood—our spirits flaring
through our skin like beams of unassailable possibility.

Let the heart be moved again:
that first kiss under starlight, this shaft of mote-filled light
streaming through a crack in the garden shed, these songs
of white-throated sparrows, black-capped chickadees.

Let the heart be moved again:
by the symphony of a wide river in a warm rain;
on lamp-lit bridges our upturned faces, diaphanous,
expectant, unfinished, relentlessly longing.

Let our hearts converge anew:
in the mystery of the ever-near and the ever-more, in
the incomprehensible depth of our interrelated lives,
incarnate, divine, dying and rising, transforming.

Let our hearts converge anew at such a time as this:
these evening years, this darkening age, these unstinting losses,
our deep separations, borne of fear, borne of violence,
our current breakdown making way for a breakthrough.

Let our hearts converge anew in the cosmic reality of spirit
and matter, entangled in Love, through Love, by Love, the sum
of Love: to mop a floor, to feed the poor, our true business—
being less for the sake of another—our surging wholeness;
and to all, beauty and dignity, to everyone a name and a history.

We bummed cigarettes from each other. Blew
smoke rings across the Yorkton Regional loading dock.
Had nicknames for each other.
I was Jake, you were Schnitz.
We rode the same Yellowbird school bus. Our farms,
either side of the Yellowhead Highway, were mere miles apart.
I was skinny, you were short, but built like a Cockshutt tractor,
with the quickness of a Dodge Charger.
In the church basement, you drew up a chair beside me.
What should have been familiar—your sturdy bearing, blue eyes,
ready-to-laugh sideways smile, hair, still swept to one side,
thinning, greying, but signaling blond—at that moment, escaped me.
Forgive me.
I think you actually had to say your name.
Something about not being recognized feels like a shrug.
I knew the moment you felt it. You covered it, laughed, come on!
We carried on as adults, reminiscing.
There are expectations we carry with us. One is: how it will be
when an old friend, 40 years in, sees you again.
And what could I have said to remove the sting?
Funny how some things, seemingly minor, don’t allow undoing. And
the more personally rooted, the more impervious they are to words.
I couldn’t bridge it. And all our foolish-laden, yet gilded history
receded like dust in a prairie wind. Friend,
I want you to know I occasionally revisit that afternoon at the funeral.
It goes like this: I’m in the church basement waiting for you,
as I’d picked you out while I was giving my eulogy.
And when I see you carrying a chair over to my table,
I spring up and go to you, and we embrace in that guy way,
slap shoulders, and I say, Can I bum a smoke?
and you laugh that raucous high-school-laugh of yours.

For twenty-five years (according to my journal), I have started my day by reading Psalms. Every month, loosely obedient to St. Benedict, I make my way through the 150-song psalter.

I read the old King James version (mainly) and try to read in the monastic way, not unlike the way my uncle Harold did at the breakfast table: slowly, reverently, audibly.

It’s a good way to start the day. It’s a crap way.
I love the Psalms. I hate the Psalms.

I hate them for exposing my motives, my secrets, my resentments.
I love them, for they fathom my darkness, my fear, my desire for security.
I condemn them for their paternalism; I delight in them for their humanism.
I spurn them for their violence and vengeance in the name of God;
I understand them for the same.

Whatever you throw at them will stick. Fire any kind of emotional missile at them, it’s absorbed. Tell them your hateful, vengeful thoughts, every cruel wish, they’ve heard it all before, and worse.

Wonder at their beauty, their quintessence of phrase, their turns of tone,
ride their crescendos of hallelujahs over the hills of praise, then,
plunge into some fiery abyss, choking on their burning words.

You want a ruthless God, a hungry-lion God, a John Wick, Mad Max God? He’s here in all his jealous, furious, warriorlike might, slaying your captors, your enemies, while the dogs lick blood from your shoes.

You want a tender, merciful, consoling God? She is here, holding you, reminding you of your worth: her full attention on your naked, breathing body, her loving thoughts of you, more than all the grains of sand.

You want a heartbroken God? Lead a thankless life.
You want a happy God? Be kind, feed the poor.
You want a joyful God? Open your ears to the cries of the world.

You want an ear for your anger? a hiding place in a harsh night? a blunt reminder of the brevity of life? a target for your curses? a room for grieving? green grass for beauty? still waters for serenity? want to fling taunts, hurl barbs of doubt in God’s face? want to return, hat in hand, and be welcomed as though you’re God’s own child? Done!

These are purgative prayers that cut an X in your thigh,
suck out the venom surging toward your brain.
These are praiseful poems that arrest the self-idolizing ego, then
call out: come, with your torn and battered and wildly contradictory faith.

Read these poets through the lens of politics and shudder at their insight.
Read these poets through the lens of culture and wonder at their modernity.
Read these poems through the lens of earth-care and grieve the groaning of our planet.
Read these poems through the eyes of Christ and enter his wounds, his suffering love.

In every abyss, every cry, every agonized why? in every shout of joy, in all of it, the Psalms simply say, God is.

Take them as you will, they care little for your arguments, your intellect, your ontology; they only report an entanglement with an I Am within and beyond creation. An entanglement that speaks to your heart, your oh-so-human heart.