March 2010
31 posts
lent || honest as an oak
Functionally I have always thought it helpful, and even better, to give yourself over to and commit to that thing that demands your attention. At times it has been persons, sometimes things or ideas. And functionally, I think I have been living my life the way a drug addict might, going from one high to another. These highs, that are found in those realities that demand our attention, last about...
lent || childlike beautific visions
Some have called it a beginner’s mind. I think it is an openness to the open road. It is the element that we tread in as we rest and reach to the futures we imagine. Maybe imagination is the space I am describing. It is the interplay of our dreams, our passions and constant attentiveness to the now ever present moments, at lunch or walking with someone, that elicit a smile and an assurance...
lent || gestalt
People are not parts. So often we separate ourselves and others into sectioned things, as if something emotional was not physical and vise versa. When we see the person as one whole and the world in some way connected or affected by this wholeness, we stop using the language of conceptual thought and commit “to the kind of intelligence that perceptively reads the gestalt of things.”...
lent || lovebirds
Love is a series of discoveries. A life. A walk. And even a narration. M. Scott Peck defined love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” He then works from this to say that we do not fall in love without falling out of love. Love is not a feeling. It is a risk of: loss, independence and commitment. Love...
lent || embodied imperative
So with open hands, we as people trust, that the last word is yet to be spoken and that the possibilities for restored relationships with enemies just may be embodied. But, seldom do we as people “bridge the gulf between practice and profession.” It is precisely this seldom-ness that expresses the kind of utter defiance that rests just below the surface of praise that has been purified by pain....
lent || texture
Moments feel like something.
They have their own colors.
They fit some place.
Visually we can place them.
But also textually they have a home.
A place to rest in stylized harmony.
The new iPad came out and the keyboard works like an iPhone. The keys make an artificial sound when you touch them. You really can’t feel the keys, they tell you what to feel, how to react. My friend Michael...
lent || psalm 95.11
God’s “rest” and the “land” are interchangeable ideas both with participatory assumptions.[1] The land, as has been discussed, requires Torah to be lived in faithfully and Torah assumes a land. The idea of land as rest reminds us of the first inheritance of land by humans, the Garden of Eden.[2] God has created the whole universe and humans come on the scene the sixth day. God takes his Sabbath...
lent || love it friend
There is this idea that to love everything is to assume the divine in all things. This requires knowing yourself enough to rest at the boundaries of self, knowing who you are in relation to God’s beloved world. This takes a new way of thinking, and as Friar Rohr has said, “we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.” I am learning that this is an exercise in rhetoric. Both my roommate and I were...
lent || open hands
Every good Jew in the time of Jesus knew that you prayed with open hands, understanding that it was God who gave when we asked. To live with open hands is to trust in the possible, the unknown, to lean toward something outside and bigger than your present situation. Jesus taught this way from what I can remember, saying things like: ask seek knock. And even what has been come to be called the...
lent || vive jesus
Jesus is what a life filled with God looks like. And his name is drawing my interest and thoughts. The name literally means God saves or God heals. This is the stuff of God-restoration, peace and that calm resolve when everything rests. The resting mostly happens in you because you can’t control the outside. You can’t be someone else and you can’t change anything, until you are...
lent || waking up
The other night before I made preparations to go to bed I walked around town. Circling the town like batman, just walking. I left a friends house, and had started my definitive mix, knowing that I would feel wrong to stop in the middle of the medley that, well, in some ways defines me. It tells my story: my pains, longings and firm pillars that have been etched into the fibers of my humanity. Each...
lent || inbetween
I wrote a song a while back about this idea of being between things. Abraham Heschel talks about living between two historic poles: Sinai and the kingdom of God. A pastor friend was writing on displacement and being ‘midway’ through something. And so, this idea of inbetween has been in some ways haunting. It is a restless place. But what has me perplexed, yet a bit relieved, is the...
lent || critics & rainbows
They talk, but mostly they shout, in an effort to bolster their own sense of rightness and self-love. The are among those shouting at Jesus while he hangs on a cross, unsure of the religious reality they claim as the very reason for their being.
The one who goes through the ache and pain and abandonment has had their identity resolved. They are done trying to prove anything through relevance....
lent || abstract
I was sitting at the GRAM around this time last year looking at a Frank Stella trying my darnedess to figure it out. I was just finishing a class that surveyed the history of art and the Grand Rapids Art Museum just so happened to have an exibit that featured Stella, who I had taken an interest in. My sister Erin and I stood facing these huge works of art that were suppose to tell the story of...
lent || to many gears
Its the clear sigh of days gone by and the unrelenting wispies in your eye. They are cute and free but just then they started to be, barriers in seeing the person that sits right in front of you. Your distracted and your looking past them like you have some place to be other than where you have planted your feet. Thats when it hits, and everything flips, like the tables in the temple that are...
lent || the common
There is a stark separation between the world poor and the population on the other side of the spectrum. And maybe ‘sides’ is not the best way to describe the situation?
This guy Volf points out that we are some how caught up with the other. We are all caught up in the same plight and when we don’t see this we miss an integral part of being human. Those on one side feel, not...
lent || chairs & stages
One friend said that church is more than a chair. Another friend said that teaching is more than a stage. But what if church and teaching had nothing to do with chairs and stages to begin with? What if our starting point is wrong and our epistemology was rooted in aesthetics rather than reality? Working from those two questions I do not expect to now ‘define reality’ or even answer any...
lent || high-fives & the color blue
They have almost nothing in common, however, in the past three weeks I have been confronted by their interconnectedness. I was crossing a bridge, walking home from a friend’s house, wearing a shirt that I bought years ago. It is the most comfortable shirt I have and… its blue. The stitching is dark blue and it has a perfectly smooth lining fabric that embraces you with love every time...
lent || high & low
By day I was on top of a mountain that overlooked my home and by night time I was sitting at the beach watching the tide role in. At the beach, welcomed by the comfort of some great beach chairs that my friend Janna owns, we sat at sand level as giant waves threw themselves to the shore reaching out to touch our toes. I think we moved back three times, but the surf would have never touches us if...