Central to this surpassingly strange past year has, for me, been a deep faith that goodness will, in the end, triumph.

My great friend, Philip Conkling wrote a poem inspired by this image, Faith, a few years back.

Faith

Faith is our mate alone
Searching for an eastward light,
Straining for the whistle’s moan
Certainties in the dead of night.

Faith is the harbor rounded
Beyond the roiling, last long beat,
A solid hull the seas have pounded
Soon, soon, our sail’s complete.

 Faith is the ember’s fire
Alight in windows from ashore,
The single steeple’s spire,
The open hearth beyond the door.

Faith may be a simple thing
A tune you knew from birth to sing,
Or hard-gained through blinding snow,
It does not matter how you know.

Here’s my story behind Faith:

A frigid morning, with northwesterly air gnawing its way down from Canada gave us the sort of pure, crisp daylight that had me out and about in Camden. Down at the harbor, I looked into town and up to the hills behind. It all struck me as a quintessential New England scene, with very few visual clues that this is contemporary, not a century or more ago.

There’s nothing overtly theological about this image, but the whole issue of faith – as opposed to “religion” - is one that engages me, and in my mind’s eye the masts and spars spoke directly to faith and to the seafaring history of the town, as well as to our immense and present good fortune in living here.

And here’s an image that I made a couple of days before Christmas. There’s more light in this one, which to me means more hope.

I also want to share two quotes which I ran across recently. Both fill my heart with hope and light….and faith. I cannot think of a better way to say goodbye to the past year and turn our light-seeking eyes to the next.

To both of which I can only add, Amen.

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