Because Stones are Stones

lectionary poetry for the first Sunday in Lent

We are just over a week into Lent now. I am posting this on the first Thursday, and we are beginning to turn our attention toward the Second Sunday in Lent. I have been working on that poem in the cracks of my days. I will share it tomorrow.

These past two weeks have been good and very full. The kind of full that is woven with grace and fatigue in equal measure. I would be grateful for your prayers.

I also shared something over at Letters to a Young Priest this week. It is a small creative reflection on a Lenten practice I have taken up this year. The practice is not mine. It is a combination of wisdom given to a dear friend, also a priest in our diocese, and a practice suggested by my confessor on returning daily to my belovedness. It has become steady ground under my feet.

Each morning, I pray through the baptismal vows slowly, letting them name who I am before they name what I must do. And on Fridays, I return to my ordination vows and sit with them in depth. Not as nostalgia. Not as pressure. But as beginning again.

If you would like to read that reflection, you can find it here:

Beginning Again: A Lenten Meditation on Baptism and Priesthood

And below is the sonnet for last Sunday, lingering with Christ in the wilderness, where stones remain stones, and hunger is not answered by distortion, but by trust.

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Because Stones are Stones

The tempter names the hunger in his bones
and points toward desert scattered into bread.
If you are Son, then prove it. Shape these stones.
Relieve the ache. Let want itself be fed.

But Christ stands still before what God has made.
The stones are stones because the Father wills.
Bread, too, is good. No gift need be betrayed.
Yet truth is not bent by our urgent thrills.

Creation is not clay for anxious hands,
nor proof to press from every barren seam.
The devil offers what mis-shapen stands,
a stone dressed up to masquerade as dream.

For later he will say with quiet breath
the Father gives not stones where life is pled.
Here hell hands stones to mock the pangs of death.
But stones are stones. And hunger must be fed.