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Allegiance or Admiration?

21 Jan 2020

Third Sunday After Epiphany

I am generally protected by my choice of media from the glamour and gossip side of the news. I don’t consume all that much of it and what news I read and hear is limited, mostly, to the websites of the established newspapers or the carefully worded renderings of NPR. But on occasion a story that is clearly the domain of the grocery store magazine rack makes its way even to the most serious news outlets. Such has been the case with “Megxit,” the leaving behind of the British royal family by Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan Markle.

There is just something about royalty that worm its way through even the most disciplined journalistic standard. Perhaps it comes from our childhoods where all the best stories are replete with kingdoms and palaces. There just aren’t that many fairy tails, ancient or modern, about the deliberations of democracy.

Perhaps our curiosity about formally recognized royals is also born from the truth that we are all in fact kings and queens of a kind, with power over a realm all our own. As the philosopher and spiritual teacher Dallas Willard has put it, “Every last one of us has a ‘kingdom’–or a ‘queendom,’ or a ‘government’–a realm that is uniquely our own, where our choice determines what happens.”

[ Posted in Lectionary Reflections | Tags: Epiphany 3, Year A ]

Mere Prayer

Second Sunday After Epiphany/Winter Ordinary Time

Winter Ordinary Time (or the Season of Epiphany as some traditions have it) is a good time to pause, following the great feast of Christmas, and the celebrations of Epiphany and Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan. We have a few weeks to consider the implications of God becoming one of us, and to make that part of our Christian life together. Today’s scriptures help us to begin Winter Ordinary Time. READ MORE

Tania Runyan, “Angel at the Nativity”–Lectionary Poem for Epiphany 1A

With the dawn of a new church year, The Englewood Review of Books is curating a weekly series of classic and contemporary poems that resonate with the themes of the lectionary readings. Here is one of the poems for this coming Sunday (Epiphany Week 1– More poems for this Sunday can be found here)

Angel at the Nativity
Tania Runyan

(to accompany the lectionary reading: Psalm 29)

(Editor’s note: With the nativity fresh in our lectionary memories,
this poem is a fitting link between that and the Psalm for this week. )

Oh, God, I am heavy

with glory. My head thunders
from singing in the hills.

This night will come once.
Enough bright lights.
Enough shouting
at the shepherds in the fields.

Let me slip into the stable
and crouch among
the rooting swine.
Let me close my eyes
and feel the child’s breath,
this wind that blows
through the mountains and stars,
lifting my weary wings.

Published here with the permission of the poet.
(c) Tania Runyan, 2010.
Published by FutureCycle Press, Lexington, Kentucky, 2010.

Tania Runyan grew up in southern California, where she studied creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. She went on to receive an MFA from Bowling Green State University and an MA in Secondary Education from Roosevelt University. After working in educational publishing and teaching high school English, she began her own tutoring business and now works with students on reading, writing and college admissions testing and applications. She is also an editor for Every Day Poems and the poetry editor for Relief Journal. Runyan is the author of the poetry collections Second Sky (Cascade Poiema Series), A Thousand Vessels, Simple Weight, and Delicious Air, which was awarded Book of the Year by the Conference on Christianity and Literature in 2007.