Reflection for Wednesday of Holy Week

“Small Prayer in a Hard Wind”

by Christian Wiman

“As through a long-abandoned half-standing house
only someone lost could find,

which, with its paneless windows and sagging crossbeams,
its hundred crevices in which a hundred creatures hoard and nest,

seems both ghost of the life that happened there
and living spirit of this wasted place,

wind seeks and sings every wound in the wood
that is open enough to receive it,

Shatter me God into my thousand sounds…”
 

“Small Prayer in a Hard Wind” by Christian Wiman from Every Riven Thing. © Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010. Reprinted with permission from the author.

Photo Credit: Kady Dunlap, black and white photograph, used with permission.