"Where the Pictures Came From"

Angels are seldom overheard.  But try.  Go listen.

They might be remembering.
They might be whispering about the night
they seeded the sky with embers
and it caught.

All over the place, the sky took fire.
Astronomers, on various corners of the earth,
reported a shower of burning embers.

This was the night --the angels will tell you--
when they clambered over the poles
and raced each other through the tundra,
and swam a hundred mountain lakes,
shaking the water off like seals, 
and kept on going.

They knew they were wanted.

It had to be night, they'll tell you,
because the night is so simple, so all one thing,
even when burnt with embers.

And God had poured himself so flawlessly
into a human heart
that nothing less simple than night
could venture an explanation.

The angels got there, they will tell you.
They ran up the hill, singing a song the color of darkness,
chanting like sea bells
in places of no horizon.

They stood in a circle on the floor of a cave,
and drew pictures on its walls
to entertain the visitors.

And rocked in their song
an infant of one hour's age,
who was as old as God.

--Sister Miriam Pollard, Cistercian Santa Rita Abbey, Sonoita, Arizona

A Light Unto my Path ~ Meditation

John the Baptist uses an image that is puzzling to us but that would have been powerful indeed to his original audience.  Speaking of the coming Messiah, he says, "His winnowing fan is in his hand.  He will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn" ....

  A threshing floor was a flat piece of ground on which stalks of harvested grain would be laid and subsequently pressed or crushed, so as to separate the edible wheat from the inedible chaff.  A winnowing fan was a kind of pitch-fork that a farmer would use to throw the mixture of wheat and chaff into the air, so that the wind would carry off the lighter material and leave the heavier substance behind.  This act of separation was indispensable to the preparation of good bread.

The Messiah, John the Baptist, is telling us, will perform a similar work on our minds and hearts.  He will separate the good from the bad, the loving from the wicked, the godly from the self-absorbed.  Most of us allow the better angels of our nature to exist alongside our inner demons, and the result is a spiritual hodge-podge.  When Christ approaches us, he comes with his winnnowing fan, which means he will toss things around a bit! This helps to explain why the Lord says he has come with a sword and why the author of the Letter to Hebrews insists, "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God."

~Very Rev. Robert Barron