Parson's Prayer...

What if I'm not ready?
Not ready for December,
and carols and Rankin-Bass?
I'm no Scrooge, lord knows,
or a foolish virgin (actually, scratch the virgin part)
its just my ivy's
not feeling that holly...
at least not yet.
If someone said well ready or not, its coming
I'd be tempted to shoot their partridge
and that's not christian, lord knows.
So help me, help us get ready. Amen.
  

4 comments:

  1. You should read this book called Touching Wonder, it's helping me find some Christmas spirit.

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  2. Lol, Mike. I was thinking that tis time for John to pen another Advent type book.

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  3. Nice post, John. The lightness of your prose only barely masks the plight for most of us...we're not ready and maybe not exactly sure how to get ready.

    Yet, I'm betting Mary, Joseph, the world wasn't ready either. "Ready or not..."(Lisa, hide the partridge!)

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  4. WH Auden's "For The Time Being" has quickly become a Christmas favorite of mine. It gets at the expectant hope we're supposed to feel yet often collides with our distracted-mindedness. You can find an excerpt of the poem here: http://www.southerncrossreview.org/44/auden-oratio.htm. It is the most famous part of the poem and also the easiest to find -- it took me the better part of 2 years to find the full poem.

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