Tonight I realized how much laundry had to be done and my mind immediately started looking for other things to do. My newsfeed on FaceBook kept informing me that a good portion of my friends (most of them burners) were either confirming or canceling their RSVP to attend a Passover celebration that some someone was holding somewhere. It turned out the someone was a indeed a fellow burner with whom I had many mutual friends and the somewhere was his house. So I did what any self respecting burner and experienced procrastinator would do, …I invited myself over.
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It’s Not About the Chocolate: Grace and self improvement in the season of Lent.
It is Ash Wednesday and throughout the day and the week my friends and I will be bantering back and forth about what we intend to give up for the season of lent. The list will inevitably include more and less brave endeavors. After many years of self-discovery, I now try to keep my personal commitments, ahem, modest. Lately I have begun to think that our lenten choices are beginning to feel more and more like new year’s resolutions than spiritual exercises: quit smoking, exercise, skip dessert, drink less, eat more broccoli… And if I happen to loose a couple pounds along the way, so be it. Self control and discipline…
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Why I Burn Art and Still Go to Church. “Faith For Reasons”
This is another entry in the Faith for Reasons series, more entries can be found here: Faith for Reasons. I am back from another Regional Burn in central Texas (FreezerBurn!) and boy is my art tired. My bedroom is clobbered with explosions of shiny red costumery and camp-stuffs, my laundry pile smells of smoke and sunscreen lotion, and there is, of course, glitter. Even for this short winter burn, for which I had made no particular elaborate plans, the hours I spend going, coming, and restoring order once I am home will far outweigh the hours I actually spent on the land. If you know at all what…
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Making Sense of It All. How Advent confronts us in the wake of tragedy.
When tragedy hits, we ask why. It is visceral, perhaps even instinctual, and almost involuntary. For the past 48 hours I have mostly sat quiet in my house, mostly alone, listening to people process an unthinkable event, a moment of real evil. How did this happen? How could this happen? Thankfully one of my friends just said it outright, “How can there be a loving God in a world like this.” We want to understand, we want to explain, at least in hopes that we can make this happen less often. We dwell on the moment, on the suffering, and ask ourselves, “How can this make…
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What are you waiting for? What Advent can do to fear at the end of the world.
I am an overly cautious driver to begin with, so when I know I am in the Texas hill country at night, and I have already seen 3 deer carcasses that day and five times as many deer warning signs, It is all I can do not to slip in a paranoid hawk-like state seeing antlers around every bend that actually just aren’t there. In this country you have to anticipate Bambi if you want to make sure you keep safely on the road without a set of antlers wedged in your grill. But, as I mentioned, I am an overly cautious driver, which means I do not merely adjust…
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Holding Carlos’ Hand: How to let grace cross your threshold on world AIDS day.
For some people AIDS finds it way into our lives because of friendships. For me, there was one friendship which found its way into my life because he had AIDS. That friendship changed the face of God for me forever. In 1989 I was working on a movie when I met the first people I had ever met who were living with AIDS. That fall the university I attended gave me the right connections, permission, and $500 to start a ministry volunteering at a local hospice, Ariel House. It was there I met Carlos.
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Five Counterintuitive Things to do to Perfect Thanksgiving.
Be Alone. Thanksgiving is a good day to be together and it is an important day to be alone. The pressure of guests and kitchen can make it difficult to really find the deeper levels of gratitude without a little silence or at least quiet. Be especially kind and help make sure your spouse, friends, kids and others get time to leave the house and go for a walk. Be present today to yourself and to God so you can be present to others.
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The Grace of Forgiving and not Forgetting: We are at the mercy of each other’s memory, for All Soul’s Day.
The flip of the switch between October and November is not just one, but a string of three different holidays of utter significance. Of course Halloween is the best known and, second only to Christmas, the most expensive of U.S. holidays. It is followed immediately by All Saints Day from which all hallow’s eve gets its name. But it is today, November second, that is my pick of the three: All Soul’s Day. The day, if you play along, is a day that offers a peculiar grace, and a fierce one. It is the grace of forgiving, and not forgetting.
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Ethics 101: other people exist,… and sometimes they are right.
Over the course of the past couple days I have had some fun experiences that have reminded me of some very basic things I think will make the planet a better place. The first of which I have said before, but I learned it in a new way in life recently and in fact at work yesterday: Other people exist.
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Shouting at the Bishop: Why agreeing to disagree is not a Christian response to the culture wars.
A few years ago I found myself protesting a certain national politician’s photo-op tour of a shelter for people who had been displaced to my city by hurricane Katrina. This particular visit seemed a little more self-serving and crass than usual, so much so that it had folks from all-kinds of political persuasions hrumphing a bit. I was certainly hrumphing. In fact, not that this was the first time, but I made have made a weeeee bit of a scene. Well, actually I am quite sure I did as I received a pretty direct smack down from the Bishop in the very next diocese-wide newsletter.
