My favorite night activity at Camp Skyline was Christmas in July. It involved a gift exchange, Christmas music in the gym, Christmas colors and crafts.
Often I operate on the assumption that the earthiness of the born Christ is contained in that day. The below Buechner quote challenges that—God has chosen to continually make himself vulnerable to us even now.
And how do we respond. And how do we let this change us.
Those who believe in God can never in a way be sure of him again. Once they have seen him in a stable, they can never be sure where he will appear or to what lengths he will go to or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of man. If holiness and the awful power and majesty of God were present in this least auspicious of all events, this birth of a peasant’s child, then there is no place or time so lowly and earthbound but that holiness can be present there too. And this means that we are never safe, that there is no place where we can hide from God, no place where we are safe from his power to break in two and recreate the human heart because it is just where he seems most helpless that he is strong, and just where we least expect him that he comes most fully.
For those who believe in God, it means, this birth, that God himself is never safe from us, and maybe that is the dark side of Christmas, the terror of the silence. He comes in such a way that we can always turn him down, as we could crack the baby’s skull like an eggshell or nail him up hen he gets too big for that. God comes to us in the hungry man we do not have to feed, comes to us in the lonely man we do not have to comfort, comes to us in all the desperate human need of people, everywhere that we are always free to turn our backs upon. It means that God puts himself at our mercy not only in the sense of the suffering that we can cause him by our blindness and coldness and cruelty, but the suffering that we can cause simply by suffering ourselves. Because that is the way love works, and when someone we love suffers, we suffer with him, and we would not have it otherwise because the suffering and the love are one, just as it is with God’s love for us.
Frederick Buechner, The Hungering Dark
Categories: Uncategorized
with his summer cut…not much of the mop left
Categories: Uncategorized
Paul and I visited the Cy Twombly Gallery of the Menil Collection in Houston a couple of weeks ago. It was quite the experience. We both were taken in by the magnitude of his work and the presentation of it. Below is an excerpt from menil.org and some photos I took — as you can see, it is also my header of the moment.
Emerging from the New York art world of the early 1950s, Cy Twombly brought a distinctive approach to painting and sculpture that evaded precise affiliation with the predominant movements of the twentieth century, including Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism. Inspired by ancient Mediterranean history and geography, Greek and Roman mythology, and epic poetry, Twombly created—sometimes on a grand scale, in multiple-panel works—a sometimes-inscrutable world of iconography, metaphor, and myth. The breadth of Twombly’s imagination and his interdisciplinary approach to subjects traverse vast distances, resulting in works that are at once baroque and spare, modern and ancient.
A collaboration between the Menil Collection, the Dia Foundation, and the artist himself, the Cy Twombly Gallery reflects not only the de Menil family’s commitment to working with key contemporary artists, but also to a standard of presentation that provides visitors an intimate, unmediated experience of an artist’s work. The works on view in the Cy Twombly Gallery comprise a veritable retrospective of the artist’s career that includes a number of large canvases, sculptural works, and suites of paintings and drawings.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: expression
I try and fill this silence. But it is persistent. The crickets out the window mesh with it nicely—they soften it. The TV clangs against it. The silence at once attracts and threatens me. It seems safer in the noise. But I force myself to turn off the TV and face it. I inhale and breathe it in.
I resist it. I feel sorry for myself. I look at others with roommates, with friends and am sharply jealous. I resist it.
I hope that the silence will befriend me—or rather that I may be brave enough to befriend it. I hope that as we grow more familiar with each other, that my comfort will increase, and maybe I’ll even gain some wisdom from it.
Categories: Uncategorized
Flying on planes has always been a bit existential for me. Of course, this effect can be enhanced by springing for the $7 cocktail or weakened by fatigue in the early morning.
It has something to do with being alone with myself, having space within myself. This space within myself, in my mind and in my heart, is ironically fostered by confinement within the plane–a seating area too small to do most things I deem productive and/or necessary. It has something to do with the anonymity that seems to characterize the use of public transportation. It has something to do with the vibration, the hum, of the plane.
This particular evening it got me thinking of how blessed I am. Perhaps a word used too loosely, at least by me anyhow–it has become a word used when I am trying to escape my self-pity or when I am trying to describe how I should feel about my life, though sometimes it is not reflective of my true feelings.
But tonight I feel the weight of the word. Tonight my thought process seems worthy of its use. Tonight my thoughts settle on a peace and a knowledge that I am undeservedly taken care of.
Categories: Uncategorized
I’ve just finished reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s Leaving Church. Here is a passage I found insightful:
Many years ago now, when I was invited to speak at a church gathering, my host said, “Tell us what is saving your life right now.” It was such a good question that I have made a practice of asking others to answer it even as I continue to answer it myself. Salvation is so much more than many of its proponents would have us believe. In the Bible, human beings experience God’s salvation when peace ends war, when food follows famine, when health supplants sickness and freedom trumps oppression. Salvation is a word for the divine spaciousness that comes to human beings in all the tight places where their lives are at risk, regardless of how they got there or whether they know God’s name. Sometimes it comes as an extended human hand and sometimes as a bolt from the blue, but either way it opens a door in what looked for all the world like a wall. This is the way of life, and God alone knows how it works.
Although we might use different words to describe it, most of us know what is killing us. For some it is the deadly rush of our lives; for others it is the inability to move. For some it is the prision of our possessions; for others the crushing poverty that dooms our children to more of the same. Few of us can choose our circumstances, but we can choose how we respond to them. To be saved is not only to recognize an alternative to the deadliness presseing down upon us but also to be able to act upon it. Even those who have no choice but to be carried toward safety on stretchers will eventually be given the chance to take up their mats and walk, and even those whose legs still will not work can discover how agile a healed spirit can be.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: faith
The Economist’s recent write up on Brad Gooch’s biography of Flannery O’Connor, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor:
Until now her life had remained hidden behind the hard surface of her fiction. One of the strengths of Brad Gooch’s biography is its elegant pooh-poohing of her claim that ‘experience is the greatest deterrant to fiction’ and that ‘any story in which I reveal myself in completely will be a bad story.’ In fact, her constricted view of the world was integral to her artistic vision.
Categories: Uncategorized
February 12, 2009 · 1 Comment
Categories: Uncategorized
