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Tag: hope

Then I Looked Up: The shocking revelation that plants and souls like to grow.

This year's first.

When I moved into this place its outside looked very much like my inside did.  The branches of the tall trees drooped to the ground as if to hide the house everyone knew was there.  The house kept dark. The yard looked very much like a bad case of male patterned baldness, only growing around the edges.   The backyard was in no better shape.  It was waist high in un-welcomed greenery and while I am not absolutely positive I think some of that greenery was, how shall I say, questionably legal leftovers from the previous tenants.  Toward the south was a fairly ominous twisting of dead limbs that once was a tree and now became a kind of outdoor dandruff, flaking down  little by little when provoked by even the smallest breeze.   Yeah.  My heart looked like this house.  Things were growing where they shouldn’t and things refused to grow where they were needed.  So when I started purging the untamed overgrowth, I became nervous I would never get the good stuff to live where I wanted it to.

Tohu-Bohu

Help Me Get This Sadness Out My House. A Story About Rubber Gloves and Grace.

Years ago I got caught in a pretty debilitating depression.  I let things snowball to a point I felt I had little or no refuge left. Every part of life looked bleak including my own bedroom.     On weekends I would lie in bed all day and look at piles of laundry, fast food wrappers, stacks of unopened bills and just junk.   Blech.  It literally made it hard to get out of bed in the morning (or sometimes in the afternoon). One could sprain an ankle on the way to the bathroom.  At one point it became difficult for me to imagine that the room would ever be clean. I would lie in bed and pray, “please, someone come and get this sadness out my house.”  To my great surprise, one time, someone did.

Tohu-Bohu

Ashes, Ashes. We all Fall Down.

For some time it has been rumored that the children’s rhyme, “Ring around the Rosie,” was a creepy rhyme born during the era of the Black Plague.   That may be more the stuff of legend than of history, but it also makes a little sense.   For when faced when imminent and pervasive death, humans, and children in particular, have interesting ways of coping.    These little mechanisms also shine  a little light on why it is such good news to have an Ash Wednesday to take pervasive death and darkness and turn it on its head.

Tohu-Bohu

How to be a Valentine: A Note on Martyrdom.

Today is a feast, a gift and remembrance, of an occasion I have yet see Hallmark really nail with one of its watercolored limericks:  there once was a man so in love with God that he was beheaded for performing marriages in opposition to war.   In defense of hallmark, that is a very hard picture to paint with water colors…

In the third century, Emperor Claudius had declared marriage illegal in order to encourage more young men to volunteer to be soldiers.  Valentine, a celibate priest, opposed both the aggressive violence of the empire as well as the notion that the state alone held the reins of marriage.   The priest knew how central marriage is to the life of the Church and couldn’t stop marrying people just because Claudius had other plans.

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On the eve of hope, into such a world.

 

Today I listened to even more stories hard to hear, Stories that were never meant to have to be told. I am reminded there are places where life is still taken from the young, children are unwanted or used, and innocence can be traded for cigarettes and bags of chips.

It is this very world into which every child is born. This life, with all of its risks and violence, is where every human body has to live. We like to think we do our best. Not everyone does. Some tearthrough the landscape of life like a wildfire out of control. This is the world into which every baby is born.

It is in this molested, abandoned, cockeyed world that Mary has her baby. God was born into all of our danger like every child and in fact even he didn’t make it out alive, …at least as far as we could see at that time. Perhaps that is as far was we can see now.

God knew the mess Jesus was getting into and Jesus came anyway. There is no darkness God refuses to touch, or to be touched by. There is no darkness into which the light is not willing to shine.

Let this be our last night of waiting.

 

related post:

Yeah, Actually, Mary Did Know.

 

29 Days of Hope

Actually, Yeah. Mary Did Know.

annunciationI love the songs that capture what horror it must have felt like to be a teenage girl who God had chosen for, well, anything.   I feel both a sense of honor and terror every time I think that there is good on earth God would have me do.

So songs like “Breath of Heaven,” by Amy Grant and “Mary Did You Know,” by Mark Lowry tap into our sense of how overwhelming we would have been and how overwhelmed we are right now.  Through our eyes we can only imagine such a call to be suffocating, full of fear.  This, however, is not at all like the song Mary actually sang.

29 Days of Hope

Ninja’s Teeth and the Relentless Love of God.

When I was just out of college I was pretty hell-bent on changing the world. Hopefully I still am but back then I was far less patient to see the results of my efforts. I had moved to the heart of Los Angeles to study a year of urban studies as well as fulfill an internship at the First Church of The Nazarene on Third & Vermont. I was ready for adventure, but not for the hard work of everyday care and concern for other who sometimes annoyed me.  Nevertheless something clicked at the county hospital one day when I tried to help “Ninja” get his teeth fixed.

Tohu-Bohu