someone calls us by our name

This morning we stepped out and were brought back in time to the depth of winter - breezy and frigid after a very windy night. Yesterday snow fell, accumulating rapidly; the sun poked through later for a while, then a squally sort of snow returned for the rest of the evening. Everything got covered. But the forecast has us in the fifties and sixties the rest of the week - then spring comes on Sunday. I am peering into my closet to make sure I have things to wear for these warm days.

I liked Malcolm Guite's Advent guide so much, I have his Lenten one, The Word in the Wilderness. He wrote a beautiful meditation last Friday on The Song of Wandering Aengus (Sam Neill again - I love his reading!)   He speaks of the key line of the whole poem: "And someone called me by my name", and how our Christian vocation is a calling of us by name - a call out of nothingness into being, a call out of darkness into light, and "all our lives, all our journeyings, 'through hollow lands and hilly lands', are a response to that call."

I finished a terrible pile of mending, terrible because it was around too long, not because it was so hard to actually do. Procrastination is always bad. Now to get back to "real" sewing.

I went out to a hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread.

And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.