We romanticize suffering because we know the weight of looking at it honestly will crush us. It’s why we have best-selling books about the London Blitz whilst barely taking in the sight of the dusty 3-year-old Syrian toddler covered in blood and dust. Eyes close to reality, lids pulled down by the gravity of the…
Category
Spirituality
It’s OK To Be You
In a rare show of super-vulnerablity, I’m posting the following on my personal Facebook page because I think it’s important. So if I’m posting it there, I might as well post it here. 🙂 There are many different ways of being human. It’s just plain arrogance that causes some christians to decide what ways…
Convergence-Emergence: Same Shit, Different Decade
[blockquote type=”center”] “Reconciliation can be understood as exchanging places with ‘the other,’ overcoming alienation through identification, solidarity, restoring relationships, positive change, new frameworks, and a rich togetherness that is both spiritual and political.” Radical Reconciliation: Beyond Political Pietism and Christian Quietism (p12) [/blockquote] It’s been 14 years since A New Kind of Christian. 10 years since…
Incarnation and Solidarity – What Do They Even Mean?
The world is dark and heavy, and it has been raining or misting here in this corner of Virginia pretty much since Thanksgiving. The humid air holds the light. It reflects the orange glow of the streetlights, and if I imagine hard enough, it looks like the haze of a soft Christmas snow. How does…
Day 28 – Tribes and Sides
Is the road to hell paved with a vivid imagination? I’m sitting here watching my kids dressed up in Halloween costumes, at our secular homeschool co-op, blending in with the other costumed kids. My oldest is reading Harry Potter next to me and I’m wondering if this was the slippery road to hell everyone said it…
Day 22 – Dancing On Fear
Bumped from the archives to continue the theme of fear – and wow. We’re coming up on the 25th anniversary this year. “The wall was an edifice of fear…For 28 years, East Germans could not even approach it. On Nov. 9, 1989, people danced on it — and the world looked different afterward” —…
On Being A Witness
Silence Between Mountains
Time just hangs without any markers to define it. Day after day after day. For 6 long days. Moses on the mountain, Peter on the trail. They are both preparing for ‘the wider truths, the shadow side, the strange worlds beyond time’*, unaware of the how and when. Exodus 24 and Matthew 17 merge into…
A Three-Faced Liar
This is the human part of the story. There is nothing divine in being betrayed by a friend, denied by your pupil, or deserted by your companions. Jesus now knows the exposed, intimate hurt betrayal brings. All of a sudden everyone knows his friendship with Judas isn’t what they thought. There is a force as…
The Beauty In the Betrayal
“in beauty there echoes a spark of our source” – Sleeping At Last, “Bad Blood” Samuel prepared a table for David, afraid. A table of anointing in the presence of jealousy and danger becomes well-worn poetry. “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.” The bread has been baked, the grapes…