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Holy Week
The days have unspooled quickly in this early part of springtime. My interior life has been not in turmoil but in flux, an almost palpable ebb and flow, and through all my misgivings and doubts and ragings and grim, silent musings, I have felt like some sort of antenna, unmoored but still grounded, with invisible signals popping and whizzing around me during my hours. A good friend, who roves across much of the same rocky spiritual landscape I do, recently mentioned in passing how he just might be holding onto a hope that he will one day believe again. That sentiment sang in me like a tuning fork when a…
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Approaching The Realm of the Ides
Today, the sun is pouring out of the sky onto the greening grass and the resurrecting branches of the trees. The weeping willow out front looks as lush as it usually does in high summer, and the peach trees are decked with lovely pink blossoms. This being early March, I know that a killing frost or two will arrive and dull down the lively colors, but for now, it is an enjoyable sight. The breeze is somewhat stiff, which keeps a chill in the air if I’m not in direct sunlight, but this is nothing compared to what we had a few days ago. On Thursday, a strong windstorm system…
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The Value of Moments
This morning, this gray and dripping morning, I walked in a neighbor’s corn field, thick-grown with silage for his cows. Except for the soft sighing in the tops of the trees in my woods behind me, the silence was deep and cyclical, like a tide, like a black spot in space between two stars. I stood in the chest-high corn plants and listened, and heard nothing but breeze, and I listened again, and inexplicably, a song came into my head, a song I have neither heard nor thought of in years. I walked on through the corn and then at the perimeter found some bear scat. A calf watched me…
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Wednesday In Holy Week
I overheard someone at work refer to one of their mutual acquaintances as having “a missionary’s heart.” The phrase got me to thinking about missions and my experience with missionaries. In my experience in the Protestant world, few things are more heavily lip-serviced and more lightly performed in real life than “missions.” Pretty much every church has a bulletin board or display with photos and profiles of “their” missionaries. There are regular fund-raisers, coinciding usually with the missionary and his/her family making a personal appearance before the congregation to give a report on how things are going in their particular mission field. I also saw a fair number of “mission…
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Gray Matters
Perhaps it’s the weather. The humidity holds everything close to the ground, makes everything sit on the skin and hang in the senses. My thoughts are that way these days. I’ve been thinking about patterns in my life, especially my perception of myself and my strengths and weaknesses through the years. It’s not very pleasant to honestly face certain truths about myself, and one of those truths is that I spent most of my life believing that I was a lot smarter than I really am. Encountering a few really brilliant men in person didn’t show me the contrast right away, but the perspective provided by the passing years has…
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“Where The Holiness Is Palpable…”
I’ve been reading Frederick Buechner’s novel The Storm and enjoying his reverent craft to a high degree. I’ve also been listening to some of his talks while driving to and from work. An interview conducted by Walter Brueggemann is one of my favorites, and I’ve included the third section of it below. In the interview, Buechner talks about his experiences within and thoughts about the church, and he makes the perceptive point that “the mystery is missing” in the physical structure of today’s church buildings, noting with sadness the sterile, brightly lit religious structures of today. His words about holy aesthetics reminded me of the fine essay In Praise of…