It could be that the wildest, strangest things in the Bible were the places where it touched earth.
(Marilynne Robinson, Lila)
Our minds jump too easily: from cradle
to grave – a Cross upon a hill. And yes,
this is where it tends. Yet first the stable
is where God, first time in wounded ages,
touches directly the things of earth.
Then He will walk, as He will tell others:
Rise and walk. He will learn life’s shape, the girth,
as we all learn, by taste and touch and years.
Lullabies do no justice to this. It
fragments and fractures. Yet it also meets
where deepest, frailest longings fail to fit
the structure of existence, gives hands and feet
to all that we have heard yet have not seen,
and binds together every break that’s been.
The Consolations of Writing 