Quote of The Day

The required cheerfulness that characterizes many of our churches produces a suffocating environment of pat, religious answers to the painful, complex questions that riddle the lives of hurting people.

- Tullian Tchividjian: Glorious Ruin: How Suffering Sets You Free

I Didn't Go to Church Today

by Ogden Nash

I didn't go to church today,
I trust the Lord to understand.
The surf was swirling blue and white,
The children swirling on the sand.
He knows, He knows how brief my stay,
How brief this spell of summer weather,
He knows when I am said and done
We'll have plenty of time together.

Questionnaire

by Wendell Berry

How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.

For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.

What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy

In the name of patriotism and
the flag, how much of our beloved
land are you willing to desecrate?
List in the following spaces
the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
you could most readily do without.

State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security;
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.

An Embarrassment

by Wendell Berry

"Do you want to ask
the blessing?"

"No. If you do,
go ahead."

He went ahead:
his prayer dressed up

in Sunday clothes
rose a few feet

and dropped with a soft
thump.

If a lonely soul
did ever cry out

in company its true
outcry to God,

it would be as though
at a sedate party
a man suddenly
removed his clothes

and took his wife
passionately into his arms.

VII

by Wendell Berry

I know I am getting old and I say so,
but I don't think of myself as an old man.
I think of myself as a young man
with unforeseen debilities. Time is neither
young nor old, but simply new, always
counting, the only apocalypse. And the clouds
—no mere measure or geometry, no cubism,
can account for clouds or, satisfactorily, for bodies.
There is no science for this, or art either.
Even the old body is new—who has known it
before?—and no sooner new than gone, to be
replaced by a body yet older and again new.
The clouds are rarely absent from our sky
over this humid valley, and there is a sycamore
that I watch as, growing on the riverbank,
it forecloses the horizon, like the years
of an old man. And you, who are as old
almost as I am, I love as I loved you
young, except that, old, I am astonished
at such a possibility, and am duly grateful.

The Long March

Lent is upon us.

The long march to death and destruction.

Not resurrection - not yet.

This is a march to Gethsemane, to sweating blood and crying tears.

A march to the lash - to a crown of thorns.

A march into a crowd that defines you by who they themselves are.

This is the long march into a crowd you want to love and help that waves palm branches on Sunday and cries "Give us Barabbas!" on Friday.

This is the march to the cross and God himself forsaking you.

When all goes black as the grave and all hope is lost.

Make no mistake - lent is a march into oblivion.

If you haven't read "Hinds Feet on High Places" by Hannah Hurnard, you might consider it.

This song from Rent of all things comes to mind:


http://youtu.be/IYhPO9-oLQk

Years ago I had a vision of a man trying to walk through the narrow door to heaven - only he had all this luggage (baggage). Suitcases in each hand and under each arm . . . and he couldn't get through the door unless he dropped the baggage.

He had to let go of his fears, his doubts, his grudges, his judgements - he had to lay it all down.

But once he dropped his baggage, the doorway narrowed - and he couldn't squeeze through in his suit and tie - off came the watch, the shoes, the coat and tie, the shirt, the pants . . . all of it . . . the posturing, posing, the manipulating and politicking . . . the only way through the doorway was to be utterly naked - vulnerable - without pretense or agenda.

And the door lead to the grave.

Its into utter darkness and forsaken-ness that we must go. We must lay ourselves down on the cold stone slab of our own ending - place our being into the hands of God and beg for our own destruction if that's what pleases Him.

And God will turn his back. Make no mistake about that. He will leave you there - cold and alone and consumed by your own doubts until the flame of your fear eats up all the oxygen in the tomb and withers and dies in on itself.

And then death will come.

And surrender.

And peace . . . finally . . .

And there we will lay - cold - alone - and yet . . . at peace - having discarded all our dogma - leaving no room for anything but the Christ who is laying cold and lifeless next to us.

Close your eyes . . . let it go . . . your unending has come . . .

what's that noise?