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  • Fr. Dwight Longenecker

Annunciation


Here in a bright alchemy, history

collides and combines with eternal things.

The mundane is infused with mystery,

and the dust and mud and blood have wings.


Here every moment of time is pregnant

with meaning, every tick of the clock fecund

with potential, and every tock significant—

eternity bulging in every second.


And so in this one afternoon in Spring

as the light infuses the golden stone,

the girl startled looks up from her weaving,

and gasps in fear. She thought she was alone.


But another being, as high and clear

as the cosmos hovers there. All awhirl,

the spirit spirals down from another sphere

to magnify with light the little girl.


Here the seen and unseen began to dance.

The timeless took the time to enter time.

Here all things gained a new significance,

and the divine and human began to rhyme.


Here flight was grounded— here the spiritual

and the physical began to enmesh.

And here omnipotence began to wrestle

with the bloody reality of human flesh.

Fr. Dwight Longenecker is Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. A graduate of Oxford University, he is the Pastor of Our Lady of the Rosary Church, in Greenville, SC, and author of twenty books, including Immortal Combat, The Romance of Religion, The Quest for the Creed, and Mystery of the Magi: The Quest to Identify the Three Wise Men. He contributes to many magazines, papers, and journals, including National Catholic Register, Catholic Digest, and The Stream. His latest book, Beheading Hydra- A Radical Plan for Christians in an Atheistic Age, is published by Sophia Institute Press. Visit his blog, listen to his podcasts, join his online courses, browse his books, and be in touch at dwightlongenecker.com.

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