63. Bach, breastplate, bird

Thank you, Bach, for writing the "Toccata and Fugue in d minor," and you, Felix Mendelssohn, for popularizing it, and writing in a letter that it was "learned and yet for the people."

Thank you, Scottish preacher George Mattheson, for your poem "O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go," and you, English organist Albert L. Peace, for writing the tune we sing it to, and thank you, memory, for whatever brain mechanism cues up songleader Ray Higgs singing it in my head more than 35 years ago in the congregation that formed me.

Thank you, synchronicity and coincidence and the other names you go by, for putting the prayer known as St. Patrick's Breastplate in my reading yesterday (as Marilyn McEntyre praised prepositions in Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies) and in my hearing today (as a benediction spoken from a few feet behind me causeth me to imagine Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ around me).

Bless you, people who look people in the eye when you are being served, whether you are beholding the neighbor bearing the bread of heaven or the waitress at Waffle House bearing a plate of scattered hash browns.

Thank you, little bird in the little tree, for your sweet postlude, offered freely and joyously in, from, by and through the organ of your body.

Whom or what would you like to thank today? 

Christmas Eve morning, 2012, awaiting a pilgrim.