A little more structure is also emerging, along with content. I split the more structured and metrically formal hymns from the less structured and more whimsical and, ok, generally non-rhyming verse. They are now on separate pages. I think prayers will stay in the verse space tho, unless I post them here.
So why do all this? Perhaps it is that in a world full of reactivity, injustice, anger and bitter rhetoric, it seems a simple and peaceable thing to do this, create this odd pile of essays and rhymes, memories and tusslings with the holy: whether or not any one chooses to turn them over and examine them.
One of my favorite hymns is "Come thou fount of every blessing". The second stanza starts like this:
Here I raise mine Ebenezer;
hither by thy help I'm come;
and I hope, by thy good pleasure,
safely to arrive at home.
Years ago after singing these words together in church one Sunday, someone on the way out the door asked me what the heck an Ebenezer was. I had no idea, so I looked it up and got back to her. "Ebenezer" refers historically to a large stone raised as a reminder of God's deliverance by the priest Samuel following some particularly nasty battles. it means literally "stone of help".
Piling up stones as markers of reliance on the Holy One is about the most basic spiritual activity there is, rooted somehow in our wordless longings to mark the sacred Way, our unspeaking acknowledgment that there is a power much more ancient and enduring than our fleeting thoughts or struggles.
The little ebenezers I raise are ironically verbal. They are mere word pebbles: take them for what they are, and not too seriously. Receive them as my odd tiny efforts to pile up stones honoring the One who was before words and even before stones, and who will be... long after these pages have passed away. What is here is here to try not so much to name the unnameable as to mark the places where we meet again and again,the One from whom we come, to whom we return.