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Pentecost Sunday
Franciscan priest Murray Bodo has written the following lyric for Pentecost Sunday. Pentecost was the moment when the disciples understood, in a visceral way, that the God of love dwells in us as He/She dwelt in Jesus. Like John Donne, the Bodo plays with the pun “sun/son,” capturing the miraculous reversal of life and death as we understand them (“the sun rising at sunset”). Searching for “a horizon to free my mind from prison,” the speaker experiences “a crack of light happening.”
The final line reminds me of Mary Oliver’s conclusion in “Crossing the Swamp,” amongst my favorites of her poems. After wading through “pathless, seamless, peerless mud”—her own road to calvary, one could say–she describes herself as a “poor dry stick
given
one more chance by the whims
of swamp water— a bough
that still, after all these years,
could take root,
sprout, branch out, bud–
make of its life a breathing
palace of leaves.
Bodo, meanwhile, detects, “out of the dry, barren heart/ the shoot of something green.”
Still Movement (Motets I-V for Pentecost Sunday)
By Murray Bodo
You have gone the way you came
burning in and out of the dark.
My eye searches for a horizon
to free my mind from prison.
The day, gray with backward growing,
the sun rising at sunset.
And you return the way you left,
a crack of light happening:
Out of the dry, barren heart
the shoot of something green.
