If you don’t know about Malcolm Guite’s excellent little book of sonnets on the church year, Sounding the Seasons, you should remedy that. Guite is an Anglican poet-priest who has a knack for making the sturdy, permanent truths of the Christian faith as lively and relevant as they really are.

Guite opens with an extended selection of sonnets on Advent, including seven that match the great “O Antiphons” of the final seven days of Advent. Here is today’s sonnet, “O Radix,” celebrating the Root of Jesse:

All of us sprung from one deep-hidden seed,
Rose from a root invisible to all.
We knew the virtues once of every weed,
But, severed from the roots of ritual,
We surf the surface of a wide-screen world
And find no virtue in the virtual.
We shrivel on the edges of a wood
Whose heart we once inhabited in love,
Now we have need of you, forgotten Root,
The stock and stem of every living thing
Whom once we worshipped in the sacred grove,
For now is winter, now is withering
Unless we let you root us deep within,
Under the ground of being, graft us in.