Leadership Monthly

Reflection Column

A Celebration of Joy and Gratitude

When the song of the angels is stilled,

when the star in the sky is gone,

when the kings and princes are home,

when the shepherds are back with their flocks,

the work of Christmas begins:

to find the lost,

to heal the broken,

to feed the hungry,

to release the prisoner,

to rebuild the nations,

to bring peace among the people,

to make music in the heart.

“The Work of Christmas,” Howard Thurman, The Mood of Christmas

Howard Thurman first penned this poem in 1973, my senior year in high school when I was pretty much wrapped up in my own future plans and none of my English/Literature/Religion classes included works by African American theologians and poets.

We most often see this poem at the time of Epiphany, the Feast that signals the ending of the Christmas Season. It is significant for me on the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord, which before 1969 was the traditional close of the Christmas Season. February 2 is the last day I display my mother’s Christmas Crib; it was the day my maternal grandmother gave birth to her. Mom would have been 99 this year.

The persons mentioned in the poem are more than once-upon-a-time characters in a Christmas Pageant. They still exist today – kings and lords, and heads of state by many names; shepherds and all people on the margins who eke out a living providing for those who benefit from their labor while trying to house, feed, clothe, and shelter their families on what remains; the lost, the broken, the lonely, the hungry, the prisoner and all the people of the Isaiah 61:1, Luke 4:18, and Matthew 25:31-46. Included among them are Mary and Joseph, who with the child, Jesus, became refugees seeking temporary asylum in a foreign land, and who are today reflected in so many families the world over. More than ever before the call to rebuild nations and bring peace among them rings louder and clearer.

When I first put pen to paper, I thought I might write something about Valentine’s Day and in the end, it is just that. It comes in these questions taken from the last line of Thurman’s prophetic poem. Who hears the music play in my heart and in whose heart do I hear it sing? Can my heart’s song and yours blend together with the heart songs of others to produce enough harmony to break through the dissonance of the world? “One mind, one heart, one will,” said St. Angela. Let us pray, let us sing, let us love.

Angels Three

by Sister Teresita Manner

I stepped into the garden
And there I saw three butterflies
poised on flowers red.

I called the largest
Michael, Prince of butterflies.

He landed on my fingertips and fluttered instead
Of tasting nectar from the roses.
Two in lusters yellow and of bronze
I named them Raphael and Gabriel.

Angelic so they seemed.

The three, trinitied in color floated skyward.
Nested in flowers red,
Peace-filled, in the silence, winged
there in GOD’S garden of my heart.