A Poem for Advent
(Found here ) For my Mother at Advent I shall teach my children as you taught me: through patient example, gentle conduct, and shared symbols, gravid with mystery and grace. I recall how in Advents of my youth, you taught us to make small mangers, simply fashioned of paper and cardboard, and to lay within them, each night at prayer, a single piece of straw for every act of kindness we had given Christ that day, “So that,” you said, “He might have one soft place in this harsh world on which to lay his head.” Such memories illuminate my way even now, although the time when others attended to my happiness is gone. Yet only now I understand the gift you gave us in such homely traditions, for when I come to rest at night, having kissed the foreheads of my sleeping children, I lay down not only on this, my bed, but on a great cushion of softest straw which, through acts of kindness more numerous than I can rec...
