In January 1947, the great Southern American writer Flannery O’Connor, while still a young student, began keeping a prayer journal, really a small collection of prayers. I’ve been rereading this lovely little volume, A Prayer Journal, in my own journey on prayer. She was twenty-one years old when she began the writing. She was a student at the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop. We learn from these youthful prayers how passionately she wants to become a great writer. Will God help show her the way, she asks? We also learn that she wants to love God as fully as she can, a desire not separate from her desires about vocation. Can these two deep desires live side by side, she ponders?

This week I begin a new chapter. I’m downright exhilarated. I’ve found freedom, not temporarily free, but permanently, to the end of my life, and beyond. Have you ever felt that way? Life sometimes comes to a pivotal moment. You get to begin again.

They tell us we are not reading much anymore, at least not in the longform. We turn to our phones and computers to read and listen to the latest news and commentary. Each of us is in the driver’s seat to select the best that is thought and said, as Matthew Arnold once helpfully encouraged. I’m guilty. I start my day waking up in the constantly renewing information and misinformation from The Free Press, daily from The Plough Daily Dig, Substack, Poems Ancient and Modern, Christian Art, the digital NY Times and WSJ, and on and on. All of this in shortform to which we are rapidly complying.

Let’s take a little different angle today. How about if we turn to a few good poets? Let me explain. I am trying to see things more clearly these days. I feel enveloped by fog, too many things to handle, too much uncertainty, too much anxiety all around. Maybe these poets can help me notice the little things. Maybe that’s the way to cut through some of this fog. Maybe this is part of God’s plan from the beginning.