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My spirituality was shaped by this secular artist’s powerful spiritual questions.

The Christian Thunderbird is once more taking flight.

With wise men, a mom, countless sheep,
and infinite nights of stars,
songs like bushtits swirl off in old leaves,
a twittering lost afar.

What more can anyone know
scanning our muted sky
than how wanting we are, and how a strange glow
could quicken our breaths passing by?

Francis Spufford’s novel imagines the lives they might otherwise have led.

What exactly is it about the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ that says “tiara romance”?

Just after eight on a warm October morning,
under a white canopy, the sun comes smoking
through the redwoods into the eyes and paisley
mask of a young woman front-and-center.

She is bent over a quiz on Moses, Man of the Mountain,
a novel by Zora Neale Hurston, and her dreads
drop into empty space as she leans
her head to one side.  Only nine of thirteen students
are here so far, their motivation starting to fade
at the end of four weeks online and one week out-of-doors.

The Hindi service is at nine o’clock,
the Gujarati is at ten. I pick
the later one so when it’s done I’ll stick
around when people have the time to talk.

And sure enough, my presence in the church
this summer morning raises smiles and nods
from immigrants from India laying odds
this older, gray-haired stranger’s on a search.

They’re right. This church is where my father’s parents
had worshipped God with somber Nordic joy
in Methodist Evanston, Illinois.
Methodist still, this church’s declarants