Flowers of the Field

Our Mission

A space for poems and devotionals that celebrate, or investigate, both earth and heaven.

As our home page states, we hope to explore the
boundary between sacred and secular. I also like the words verge, edge, margins, fringes, frontier, threshold, and approach, for the word boundary. Where does the forest slip into the field, the sea bound onto the shore, the heaven dust its fingerprints upon the land? Sometimes, when I stand at the beach and look out at the ocean, the line between sky and water merge.

These are metaphorical descriptions of what is even harder to demarcate, the line between the eternal and the temporal. How does heaven break into the everyday? How do everyday things (a crockery dish, a conversation, a crowded street) suddenly brim with sensations of the beyond?

The ezine title Flowers of the Field is meant to bring Biblical echoes to mind. In Isaiah 40, the Lord declares that all flesh is like flowers that fade. In Matthew 6, Jesus says the glory of the lilies of the field surpasses the glory of Solomon. We are given this world, and the beauty of this world, as something to be enjoyed for a brief time. Art—visual, written, sung—captures something of this earth’s glory, and in its best moments, helps us see into the spiritual world that surrounds us.

In my writing practice, I keep Jesus’s parables in mind. His way of speaking was to tell stories about the field, about the folks who made decisions, both good and bad. He did not ask us to go into a mystic trance, but to understand the commonalities of life, and to see in them testimonies of the kingdom of heaven. I am not afraid to write about earth as I think of eternity.

Therefore, we look for poems and brief devotionals that celebrate this world, but that also offer us some transformative essence. Perhaps that’s not an easy target to describe nor to hit, but I trust many writers will embrace the challenge. We look forward to reading your best work.