Luci Shaw > Quotes

“I think of these desert years of mine, not of my choosing. Maybe if it were all smooth and comfortable, if my pride and professionalism were defining life for me, God's steel-quiet, penetrating word would have been lost in the babble and sheen of success.”
― Luci Shaw

“Mary's Song

Blue homespun and the bend of my breast
keep warm this small hot naked star
fallen to my arms. (Rest...
you who have had so far
to come.) Now nearness satisfies
the body of God sweetly. Quiet he lies
whose vigor hurled
a universe. He sleeps
whose eyelids have not closed before.
His breath (so slight it seems
no breath at all) once ruffled the dark deeps
to sprout a world.
Charmed by doves' voices, the whisper of straw,
he dreams,
hearing no music from his other spheres.
Breath, mouth, ears, eyes
he is curtailed
who overflowed all skies,
all years.
Older than eternity, now he
is new. Now native to earth as I am, nailed
to my poor planet, caught that I might be free,
blind in my womb to know my darkness ended,
brought to this birth
for me to be new-born,
and for him to see me mended
I must seen him torn.”
― Luci Shaw, Accompanied by Angels: Poems of the Incarnation

“Anticipation lifts the heart. Desire is created to be fulfilled - perhaps not all at once, more likely in slow stages. Isaiah uttered his prophetic words about the renewal of the natural Creation into a wilderness of spiritual barrenness and thirst. For him, and for many other Old Testament seers, the vacuum of dry indifference into which he spoke was not yet a place of fulfillment. Yet the promise of God through this human mouthpiece (and the word "promise" always holds a kind of certainty) was verdant with hope, a kind of greenness and glory. A softening of hard-heartedness, a lively expectation, would herald the coming of Messiah. And once again, in this season of Advent, the same promise for the same Anointed One is coming closer.”
― Luci Shaw

“Paul gives us an astonishing understanding of waiting in the New Testament book of Romans, as rendered by Eugene Peterson, 'Waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, don't see what is enlarging us. But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy.' With such motivation, we can wait as we sense God is indeed with us, and at work within us, as he was with Mary as the child within her grew.”
― Luci Shaw

“Risk should not reflect a celebration of foolishness but a freedom from fear.”
― Luci Shaw

“I pray my soul will welcome always that small seed. That I will hail it when it enters me.
I don't mind being grit, soil, dirt, mud-brown, laced with the rot of old leaves, if only the seed
can”
― Luci Shaw, Accompanied by Angels: Poems of the Incarnation

“You choose words like matches, striking them to see what happens next.”
― Luci Shaw, An Incremental Life: Poems

“I find that as soon as I put words and ideas onto paper in my notebook, or type them into my computer, they begin to gather to themselves more images, more words and ideas. As I write I have the sensation of being at the center of a small vortex of enlarging connections, as in the poem above, and my pen or my fingers on the keyboard move faster and faster to keep pace with them.”
― Luci Shaw, Breath for the Bones: Art, Imagination and Spirit: A Reflection of Creativity and Faith

“How, then, to find the courage to speak with such authenticity, with words muscular enough to ring the doorbell of the listener's mind, admitting the rigor and the glory of the holy through the open door of the down-to-earth, the commonplace, the very ordinary.”
― Luci Shaw, An Incremental Life: Poems

“Too Much to Ask
It seemed too much to ask of one small virgin that she should stake shame against the will of God. All she had to hold to, later, were those soft, inward flutterings and the remembered surprise of a brief encounter - spirit with flesh. Who would think it more than a dream wish? An implausible, laughable defense.
And”
― Luci Shaw, Accompanied by Angels: Poems of the Incarnation

“As we meet and enter the dining room of truth and grace, let us join and feed together on holy food, prepared and provided by our welcoming Host.”
― Luci Shaw, An Incremental Life: Poems

“Look at a garden, almost any garden, and it will look back at you, breathing an essential loveliness in your direction.”
― Luci Shaw, An Incremental Life: Poems

“How to justify our existence? Fragments, we hurtle, alone in the expanding, out-rushing universe of cold stars, wayward comets.”
― Luci Shaw, An Incremental Life: Poems

“It seemed too much to ask of one small virgin that she should stake shame against the will of God. All she had to hold to, later, were those soft, inward flutterings and the remembered surprise of a brief encounter - spirit with flesh. Who would think it more than a dream wish? An implausible, laughable defense.
And”
― Luci Shaw, Accompanied by Angels: Poems of the Incarnation

“In the mouth of a truth-teller, speaking with the integrity of love, every word, painful or profound, turns hallowed.”
― Luci Shaw, An Incremental Life: Poems

“We cannot truly welcome light until we've lived a darkness deeper than what nightly covers the land with its dusky blanket.”
― Luci Shaw, An Incremental Life: Poems

“There is nothing in the universe about which art cannot be created.”
― Luci Shaw, Breath for the Bones: Art, Imagination and Spirit