Children, there was a girl. She lived in a small village On a tall dry mesa the size of ours. She did what you do. But her ears heard more than sounds. You hear me talk And know I am bigger than my words: They come from inside me. This girl heard a word, But it wasn’t inside her. She was inside the word. She stayed as still as the Stone canyon walls, And let herself be spoken. That word, which made The desert and the sky, The mesas and the arroyos, The rain and the girl, That great word of our...

For centuries, Christians have prayed special verses called "Oh Antiphons" during the week before Christmas. Each verse begins with the word Oh and uses images from the Jewish Testament to ask God to come into our midst as "Emmanuel," God-with-us. Tessa Bielecki beautifully introduces the context for the antiphons here and presents the antiphons here in a form that can be prayed either alone or with others.  My own idiosyncratic take on the antiphons, using animal images for Christ, grew out...