Praise today

Recently my spiritual director gave me a wonderful collection of spiritual sayings and poems that are in the form of an almanac, to be dipped in to...the perfect response to my recent lament that I have found it hard to pick up a book, any book, and read it straight through. There are half-read, corner-folded-down books scattered through my life - home, office, car - and yet this small book has offered me some amazing words of hope in just the right sized bite.

Here is the offering today:

Praise What Comes

surprising as unplanned kisses, all you haven’t deserved
of days and solitude, your body’s immoderate good health
that lets you work in many kinds of weather. Praise.

talk with just about anyone. And quiet intervals, books:
that are your food and your hunger, nightfall and walks
before sleep. Praising these for practice, perhaps

you will come at last to praise grief and the wrongs
you never intended. At the end there may be no answers
and only a few very simple questions: did I love

finish my task in the world? Learn at least one
of the many names of God? At the intersections,
the boundaries where one life began and another

ended, the jumping-off places between fear and
possibility, at the ragged edges of pain,
did I catch the smallest glimpse of the holy?


“Praise what Comes” in The Light of Invisible Bodies by Jeanne Lohmann