The joy of Christmas, more and more understood within the traditions of the feast of the incarnation, brought a brooding meditation over several years, leading to a series of poems of varying lengths in celebration of the experience and the thought of Christmas. Most of these poems came during the period 1987-2004 with a recent addition lured from my pencil by the work on this book. This last appearing poem is perhaps an epilogue on the devotion of Christmas.

In an endeavor to find a fresh way into the scriptural text upon which I would be preaching, I began to develop an imaginary world populated primarily by wee folk. I found the characters I developed and the way that they evolved in my mind and on the page served me well as a consideration of how I sensed things happening in the scriptural text at hand. I want to make these stories and the world they represent newly available; and so I bring them to book form fifty at a time.

The cover drawing was done by Anne Sullivan, the author's daughter.

The drawing is the...

Faces and actions of people and animals; the flair of nature and the subtleties of interaction; the way life arrives for me to observe and live, to hear and sense, to engage--that is what spawns my poetry. Those poems selected and chosen from a past, with a few more contemporary in their lure to me and my pencil, are drawn together in this collection as a sampler of my engagement with life. I hope you find them engaging and inviting so that you may entertain the actions of the poem as it writes itself upon your mind, creating there your own experience of life, readying for the open...

My poems have helped me see things for years now. Looking back on poems written, I discover I see things anew, not only the remembered incidents (when that happens) but also the vision created in my mind by the poem itself. These poems, collected from parts of my life run past now, are glimpses that offer glimpses of what is seen and what that seeing seems to mean. I find the poems best swerve me in becoming the creators of insight and perspective. These have been giving that gift for me.

The Bible Studies I chose to do came in answer to the request of my first congregation out of seminary. I consistently sought to present a serious, somewhat scholarly approach to the interested among my parishioners. I would take a book in the bible to study, assume it was written or edited to be read from the beginning and make sense to the reader in that format. I attempted to discover for myself and my group what the book sought to convey. In this volume, the study of Galatians (1981) and 1 Thessalonians (1989) followed that pattern exactly. The Pastoral Epistles (1989) treated the...