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…
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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.
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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. …
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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…
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Actually, Yeah. Mary Did Know.
I 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…
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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.