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Wrestling With God

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"As though we'd quarreled,

my son moved out of home,

out of Nazareth to live in Peter's house

in lovely seashore Capernaum twenty miles

from me and family."

(Hammer, Spike, Mary)

In his fourth book of Poetry: WRESTLING WITH GOD, Father Kilian McDonnell, OSB, monk and theologian at Saint John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota uses "the idiom of the common people" to speak for those who "love and adore their Lord" yet "limp away from the wrestling match" as they try to understand the mysteriously infinite ways of GOD.

Insight into Mary's bitter-sweet life is one of the poems in the first section titled: "STEPPING INTO THE RING." Father Kilian McDonnell gives voice to one of the sorrows which surely the mother of GOD was well acquainted. As JESUS fulfilled his destiny, did Mary ponder the prophesy of Simeon?

"and a sword will pierce even your own soul--

to the end that thoughts from many hearts will be revealed."
(Luke 2:35 NASB)

Within the second section: "TWO COUNT," Killian takes us through Abraham's lament of "Every Promise a Fang."

"I bind Isaac on the altar of Moriah,

but you stay my hand. We return to Beer-sheba heavy with knowing

God. I wait, wary."

Father Kilian shares a glimpse of sad reality in "COUNT THREE," as his friend and fellow monk, mathematician Father Florian Muggli, OSB, struggles with Alzheimers.

"I stand

in freedom, watch you stretch a palsied

hand, stroke shiny knobs,

open doors to your antiseptic dark

that covers the math of limits

and the infinite. The study of functions

to lift a rocket, gauge

the arc to the moon, ends

when your spoon cannot

calculate the distance from carrots

on the plate to your mouth."

Even as we love and ardently worship YAHWEH, surely all of us experience times of wondering what GOD is doing and why. Speaking the words we often fear to articulate, Father Kilian leads us through the valley of wrestling to a place "On the Highest Ziggurat" where we realize that

"If I climbed the highest ziggurat,

I could not touch your lowest mystery."

My sincere appreciation to Kilian McDonnell and Liturgical Press for supplying a complimentary copy of WRESTLING WITH GOD for review. Connie [...]

I don't generally read poetry but I loved this -- every poem. I read it on a silent retreat and was captivated by it. I'm looking forward to reading more of Father McDonnell's poetry.