Robin sings loudest out on the Shaganappi,
high in the cottonwoods, her shrill celebration of dawn lifts
my soul out of its shoes to touchdown on the helium-green turf.

I lift my eyes in admiration, I lift my coffee in a toast of devotion,
my mind turns to reverence, my instinct is to genuflect.
Everything in me bows down.

It’s Sunday, but my church is with the robin.
It’s Sunday morning and robin-song is my opening
hymn, my sermon and benediction.

Robin is not drunk on honeysuckle, as you may think;
she is filled with the spirit of first-light, the spirit of awe.
Robin cries life in the emancipating dawn.

My mind is the fluff of dandelion, my thoughts, a hive of bees,
but Robin is my rumination, her rhymed refrain,
my veneration, and I stand in quiet exaltation.

One sees with the eyes, comprehends with the mind,
reflects with the soul, still, seeing and comprehending
and reflecting are replete with mystery.

One loves the immediate surround or doesn’t love at all.
One disowns the prison of things, leaves all idolized needs,
to follow the river to its source, or forever thirsts.

It’s Sunday, but it’s Sunday every day.
Praise, and every day, bow down.

Those days, I was rotten with virtue, and God was on my lips and Jesus in my heart, and I walked like a man lending a hand to the Holy Ghost; the Trinity, always, just happy to see me.

These days, I stammer and halt to reach for the word “God.” Battered as it is, and left for dead by taut materialists and moon-eyed metaphysicians, or tailored and slick-polished by Peale-esque positivists, dewy TV-preachers, or militarized by a garrison of fundamentalists and anvil-eyed God, Guns & Country zealots, or leveraged by Father-God paternalists, as though the “Word became flesh” to reinforce male supremacy.

But yesterday, walking an aspen trail along the Elbow River, a deer leapt in the shallows and we stood blinking… the deer’s slender hooves unsteady on the gravelly bottom, some mystery twitching between us, some intense presence, a single shock of grace;

and in that bewildering, disabling, stoppage of time, I saw the fusion of this doe and those river stones, the aspens and the heavens, and me, a mere atom disappearing into it all and rising more intimately, more fully myself;

and God was in and on the breeze and whispered through the cinder-thick walls of my ignorance, (my unconscious devotion to the banality of my ego); and meaning flooded in, the truth of love and charity, flooded in; and faith was self-evident and God, too obvious, too present, to need a name.

Everything changed. And nothing changed.

I asked my heart, is this enough to hang a faith on, and so a life? This “spot of time,” this mystic clearing, that will surely recede and fade in the rolodex of weeks and scroll of time.

Let it be. Then. This is my faith, my tenuous discipline to keep alive an ember of memory, to breathe on daily, failing often, yet knowing that forgetting is poison, and breathing is faithfulness to the next grace coming.

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.