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Articles by Marci Rae Johnson
Jesus Shops for Groceries to Contribute to the Writer’s Retreat
Jesus Shops for Groceries to Contribute to the Writer’s Retreat By Marci Rae Johnson Posted in Poetry on September 8, 2022 1 min read
Love & Inebriation - The Curator
Love & Inebriation The spiritual person is drunk with the wine of love. -Olivier Clément By Marci Rae Johnson Posted in Poetry on October 13, 2022 1 min read
Holy Unction with Suicidal Ideation
For the time being, stand on top of the highest peak without jumping. Release your holy rage into the air, the perfume of your hair like a prayer. Apply 2 drops of Hope to the rim of the ears – to the other organs of sense: the eyes for light, the mouth for the weeping & wailing & gnashing of teeth. There is no spirit but that which you can see: the wind in the thousand grasses, clouds like contrails from the wings of birds. The river a path for sorrow.
Winterscape with Hair Gel and Citrus
Chicago 2020 Each day you wake to the same gray sky, snow covering the grass like scarves the women wear at church to make their beauty more bearable for the angels and the sons of men. The city sleeps even more than it usually does during winter— lights dimmed, the empty skyscrapers monuments to a life we’ve nearly forgotten, now. Time slows. Stops.
Where's Waldo of Eternal Damnation
Where’s Waldo of Eternal Damnation The Butt Song from Hell One section of Hieronymus Bosch’s massive triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, depicts a hellish chorus singing a song painted on the buttocks of a sinner. -io9 i.
Water & Fire, Mid-Atlantic Ridge
I balance on the edge of these 2 continents: desire & detachment, hot & cold a constant pulling away, one from the other. In the center, the smooth black sand that hides the rupture beneath. Restless separation trigger & release to eruption of smoke & flame. The cold sea resists the heat.
Thusness - The Other Journal
The miracle is not that I have walked out onto the lake in the fading light, the sunset on the water a path, wavering, though unbroken. Nor that I have been healed of my blindness by the mud from the freshly planted soil in the garden. Raised from the place where I had been brought low.
Eiseley, Darwin, and the Weird Portentous
This post was made possible through the support of a grant from The BioLogos Foundation’s Evolution and Christian Faith program. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of BioLogos. Loren Eiseley was born in 1907. He died in 1977. For many years and until his death, he was the Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and History of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
“Advent begins in the dark."
from “Loving the Dreadful Day of Judgment” Alone, alone, about a dreadful wood Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind, Dreading to find its Father lest it find The Goodness it has dreaded is not good: Alone, alone about our dreadful wood… The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss. Was it to meet such grinning evidence We left our richly odored ignorance? Was the triumphant answer to be this? The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss. We who must die demand a miracle.
Over the Rhine: "Let it Fall"
“Let it Fall” lyrics Bio As Over the Rhine, Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist have released a fistful of lush, literate, and critically acclaimed CDs and were voted by critics and peers to Paste Magazine’s list of 100 Best Living Songwriters. Their most recent (and fifteenth) studio album, Meet Me at the Edge of the World, came out in 2013. The two live in rural Southern Ohio, where they own a farm that inspires their songwriting.
Liz Vice's “Refugee King”
Lyrics: Away from the manger they ran for their lives The crying boy Jesus, a son they must hide A dream came to Joseph, they fled in the night And they ran and they ran and they ran Ooh No stars in the sky but the Spirit of God Led down into Egypt from Herod to hide No place for his parents no country or tribe And they ran and they ran and they ran Ooh Stay near me LORD Jesus when danger is nigh And keep us from Herods and all of their lies I love the LORD Jesus, the Refugee King And we sing...
from the “Annunciation” section of For The Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio by W.H. Auden
Joseph, Mary, pray for those Misled by moonlight and the rose, For all in our perplexity. Lovers who hear a distant bell That tolls from somewhere in their head Across the valley of their dream… Pray for us romantics, pray.
And Yet - Image Journal
I was going to meet Miep Gies. I was going to meet Katie Couric. Life looks different now from the way that I thought it would then, at age nine. And yet here I am. There was the New York City of my dreams. My mother’s mother was from Philadelphia, and my mother has fond memories of driving through the city after visiting relatives in PA. There was the Today show of my dreams. My mother’s mother, my mother, and her sisters visited its set in the 1990s. Live from Studio 1A, in Rockefeller Plaza.
Augustine’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective Writers
The following is adapted from a commencement address given at the Seattle Pacific University MFA in creative writing graduation in Santa Fe on August 9, 2014. IN THE RAPIDLY CHANGING, cutthroat literary marketplace—where it’s easy to get published but harder to make any money or sustain a career—my usual commencement address, based as it is on old-fashioned rhetorical devices like carefully elaborated arguments drenched in a heavy sauce of gravitas, just won’t cut it anymore.
Web Exclusive: A Conversation with Melissa Pritchard
The spring issue of Image includes Melissa Pritchard’s story of the peculiar and incendiary real-life historical figure Pelagia Ivanovna Serebrennikova, born in 1807 in Arzamass, Russia, one of the eastern churches’ Holy Fools, figures whose wild behavior embodied Saint Paul’s description of the early Christians: “we are made a spectacle unto the world…. We are fools for Christ’s sake.” We asked Melissa how such a story came into being.
Pigeons and Turtledoves
THOUGHTS OF ETERNITY have always terrified me. Sometimes at night I would try to trick myself into imagining it, the experience of never-endingness, and think myself into a cold sweat, starting from the horror to which I had brought my mind. Most often, my late wife Emily was able to sleepily talk me back down, but sometimes I would have to get up and move around a bit.
Ithaca - Image Journal
Alone, what did Bloom feel? The cold of interstellar space, thousands of degrees below the freezing point or the absolute zero of Fahrenheit, centigrade or Réamur: the incipient intimations of proximate dawn. —James Joyce, Ulysses WHAT parallel courses did Leonard and Sammy Two follow prior to meeting?
Aubade - Image Journal
Audio: Read by the author. https://imagejournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Aubade_Dechane.mp3 Do not go, little hour. Salt pinched from the sea of Time—do not go. My kiss prayed all night against your gray arrival, but now my Jacob mouth clings to you, breaking light. This silence before love pulls itself apart, against the current of its own longing, is the most terrible silence I know. My mouth is a lake with a hole in its bed.
Such Are the Rituals
Audio: Read by the author. https://imagejournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Brian-Clifton-Such-Are-The-Rituals.mp3 When I tilt the cup it drains like a face. Outside in the yard my children strut like grackles. My wife decapitates a toad with the lawn mower. Red juice spills over my hand. Washing dishes, on Shabbos, I erase what we did together as a family.
Daybreak, Winter
Now light fills the tree outside our window— tree whose fruit, when it comes, only the birds, and just a few of them, want to eat, tree that turns stiff and dry midsummer, rushing the season, so we fear the city will come and butcher it, though so far it’s been spared because in spring it still swarms with thousands of petals, white as moths done with hunger, white as tiny brides flittering in the breeze, asking, “Will I be happy?
Pastor Eaten by Crocodiles While Trying to Walk on Water Like Jesus
Deacon Nkosi, a member of the church, told the newspaper, “The pastor taught us about faith on Sunday last week.” Crocodiles can’t survive in the sewer no matter what your grandmother says as she phones from Florida where the rain has flooded even the first floor of her fantasy retirement village lifestyle rec- reation room pool court shuffle off to Buffalo board & your mistake was that you lacked a boat to focus on as you stepped out onto the surface which you thought had hardened but your...
Comfort and Dis-ease
When I was in college my theology professor, lecturing on the Kingdom of God, turned to me and asked, “So, Stina. When you are older and own a home and have a perfectly good kitchen and dining room and so on, I want to know: Will you spend thousands of dollars updating it? Redoing it?” When I was the invincible age of twenty-two, the thought of having thousands of dollars to spend on anything—let alone owning a real home—seemed a million years away.
Elements of January
(1) A light came on in the gray goose-traveled dusk You went in and sitting at the low table’s ragged edge you ate what the old woman brought oatcakes and Stilton cheese that smelled of roots from the same dairy that had been her grandfather’s in the war when you were just born We never starved in the country she said That night the radiator failed and the high-ceilinged room became a winter barn You remembered one scene from the gallery hard ice with children skating and in the foreground a...
Writing with So Great a Cloud of Witnesses
LAST MONTH MY BEST FRIEND, Jeff Deal, and I made a road trip from Charleston, South Carolina, to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to visit my older son Zebulun, a cavalry scout with the 101st Airborne.
Where the Very Stones Were Green
Audio: Read by the author. https://imagejournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Margaret-Mackinnon-Where-the-Very-Stones-Were-Green.m4a After the Battle of Culloden in 1746, Bonnie Prince Charlie was a fugitive in the Scottish Highlands for several months. He died in Italy in 1788, suffering from drink-related ill health. Say there was a boat, once, in the glitter of the sun. Imagine a sky. Water-patched lowlands. And didn’t they sing, didn’t they all sing?
Gravity and Grace: The Art of Richard Serra
RICHARD SERRA’S Torqued Ellipse I and Torqued Ellipse II (1996-97), now permanently installed at Dia:Beacon, remind me of Simone Weil’s axiom that “All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by the laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception” [see Plate 1]. These lines, from the opening of her book Gravity and Grace, offer a fitting description of the intuitive pull and moral weight of Serra’s art. PLATE 1. Richard Serra.
Parkland - Image Journal
Audio: Read by the author. https://imagejournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Bruce-Bond-Parkland.m4a After the killing, evangelist Jim Bakker saw God in camouflage with a hunting vest and semiautomatic rifle, and he read the dream the way some do a murderous flood or autocrat or anomaly of crows, as a manifest of blood and righteousness to fill each eye with its accursed share.
Jagged Prayers - Image Journal
I whispered prayers for you long before I knew we were neighbors. As I read your stories, your pain felt familiar in my body, a sharp strain under the curve of my shoulder blade. I read between the lines, disguised as fiction, and saw this was a pain you knew intimately. I felt compelled to pray for you. My prayers were small—just a few words, mend, nourish, mercy, floated upward. They felt absurd once they left my lips. I didn’t know you. I am just a reader, a fan of your books like so many others.
Dynamic Constructions of Persistence and Faith: An Interview with Essayist Sonja Livingston
Memoirs about discovering faith often include a sharp turning point, with clear before and after periods. In Sonja Livingston’s latest essay collection, The Virgin of Prince Street: Expeditions into Devotion—published this fall by the University of Nebraska Press as part of its American Lives series—faith feels more like a long, slow undertow. Her journey is nestled in the quotidian, which makes it easy to relate to. For every dramatic conversion moment, after all, there are many gentle nudges.
We Are All Small Things: A Conversation with Chigozie Obioma
Nigerian writer Chigozie Obioma has been hailed as the heir to Chinua Achebe. He was born into a family of 12 children in the southwestern part of Nigeria, where he grew up speaking Yoruba, Igbo, and English. His first novel, The Fishermen, published in 2015, was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. His second novel, An Orchestra of Minorities, was one of the most anticipated of 2019.
Poetry - Image Journal
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25 last-minute book gifts to stuff in your favorite reader’s stocking
I suffer from bibliophilia and I’ll admit I often prefer to spend time with books rather than people, but that’s not a problem . . . is it? One thing I love almost as much as the books themselves is recommending them to people, so here I've selected 25 of the best titles I've read this year (out of the 104. So far. There are still a few weeks left of the year, you know).
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