Love Sweeter Than ..

Your love is sweeter than the honey dripping upon the lover’s tongue,
Sweeter than wine that wakens the palate to new delight.
Your love is aroma and taste penetrating the heart.
It is the roof growing higher,
And foundation of my world,
Glimpsing heaven and begging it nearer.

Your love is sweeter than my life.
It is invitation and enticement,
Known and unknowing,
Higher than happiness,
Straining to the Holy.

Your Love is the beginning and end of Life.
Falling on the world,
Drop by drop,
Yet, like a river in flood,
Endless and eternal,
The crossing of Now and Forever
Meeting in my bossom,
Drawing me free from myself,
Into You.

In Your thirst
You are all poverty,
Hungry,
And yet all supplying,
Giving and spent,
Still full in Your Emptiness.

Your Love is sweeter than this life,
Holy with promise,
You ring my heart with longing
And satisfy my depths and queries.
With Truth, You show me the heaven of Your Heart,
And bid me “Come.”

© 2016 Joann Nelander

Full of Grace

In my imperfection
I offer you the perfect.
Full of Grace,
Take up my cause.

Gracious God,
You have prepared grace
And holiness of life
For all men ,
Yet we are not ready
For Your wonders.

We delay.
We play with idols,
And take for granted
The universe that engulfs us,
As though it founded itself
And raised its own pillars.
We swim in a sea of plenty,
As though it is infinite.

Fool that I am,
May the Wise Virgin,
Trim my lamp
To light my way.
Holy Vessel of all graces
Waiting in your labor
To bring us forth,
And give us the Divine Life
Held in your treasury
For the Day
The Promised One will descend from heaven
Into my soul,
And carry me,
With all your children
To that place of safe repose.

The imperfect, washed clean,
In the waters of New Birth,
Rising perfect with resplendent Light,
As swaddling and infusion,
From El Shaddai,
God of the Great Breast,
And the womb of the chased Virgin,
Immaculate,
Which brought forth Christ
In the unity of Trinity,
Receive again bodies
As splendid as our divinized souls.

Joann Nelander