The Work of the People: Films: Become Weaker:
'via Blog this'
Monday, August 29, 2011
Monday, August 22, 2011
The Voice of Justice
The Voice of Justice on Vimeo
An excellent example of how easily we become confused between the sly riddles of temptation and the offer of true hope.
HURT
An excerpt from a book that I am reading on the development of adolescents (or "middle adolescents") in high school. The book is titled HURT:
"The loss of meaningful relationships with adults has been the most devastating to developing adolescents. Because mid-adolescents have not had enough life experience to understand fully the accompanying sense of loneliness and isolation they feel, few could articulate their experience specifically as 'loss' in my study. But the reality of the experience oozed out of nearly every student. And in discussion with mid-adolescents across the country, not one disagreed with this bleak assessment. When feeling safe enough to admit, every student I talked to acknowledged that loneliness is a central experience. In decrying the panic in the lives of young girls in the midst of contemporary culture, Mary Pipher provides a wake-up call with her poignant summation of how parents are viewed by adolescents: 'To paraphrase a Stevie Smith poem about swimming in the sea, "they are not waving, they are drowning.'" And just when they most need help, they are unable to take their parent's hands.' They feel this way about all adults who are not there for them."
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
know the worth
At the end of over forty-five years of ministry E. Stanley Jones wrote:
"You don't know the worth of your Christian faith until you have compared it with others and subjected it to life....I've put my faith out before the non-Christian world and have said: 'There it is...if you can break it, break it. For I cannot live in a paradise if it turns out to be a fool's paradise'....So the keenest minds and the most philosophical of the world have smitten upon my faith, night and day for over half a century. Result? Broken? There are scars on my faith but underneath those scars there are no doubts. The song I sing is a life-song. Not the temporary exuberance of youth that often fades when middle and old age set in with their disillusionmnets and cynicism. No, I'm eighty-three and more excited today about being a Christian than I was at eighteen when I put my feet upon the Way....Now by seasoned, tested, corroborated experience I know that this is not a way, but the Way."
Thursday, July 21, 2011
mary oliver
Here is an article written by Mary Oliver titled "The First Requirement for Writing Poetry." Oh drat! I have probably bored you already. That title has so many reasons to stop reading. The word first is like when a teacher or pastor says "But we'll get to that later," which makes the listener assume it will be a very long discourse. First makes you assume there is something else to follow. Requirement is no less friendly a term. Requirement is not an easy house guest. It always seems to ask you to cater to its needs and then judges you when they are not met, whether or not you have agreed to their terms (The very reason men don't read instruction manuals or road maps). Writing and poetry is also a sale stopper. It is the scary territory of mixing discipline and mysticism. Poetry is not satisfied repeating the old jargon. Poetry is always squinting its eyes to see clearer. It would stand on its head if it helped. Poetry finds the unwritten lyrics to the tune everyone is humming.
Anyway, imagine the essay below is describing our rendezvous with God. It hurt my heart to think how cheaply I treat my relationship with him. But let us now wait at that same spot for renewal..."The First Requirement for Writing Poetry" by Mary Oliver
"If Romeo and Juliet had made appointments to meet, in the moonlight-swept orchard, in all the peril and sweetness of conspiracy, and then more often than not failed to meet — one of the other lagging, or afraid, or busy elsewhere — there would have been no romance, no passion, none of the drama for which we remember and celebrate them. Writing a poem is not so different — it is a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind. They make appointments with each other, and keep them, and something begins to happen. Or, they make appointments with each other but are casual and often fail to keep them: count on it, nothing happens.
The part of the psyche that works in concert with consciousness and supplies a necessary part of the poem — a heart of a star as opposed to the shape of a star, let us say — exists in a mysterious, unmapped zone: no unconscious, not conscious, but cautious. It learns quickly what sort of courtship it is going to be. Say you promise to be at your desk in the evenings, from seven to nine. It waits, it watches. If you are reliably there, it begins to show itself — soon it begins to arrive when you do. But if you are only there sometimes and are frequently late or inattentive, it will appear fleetingly, or it will not appear at all.
Why should it? It can wait. It can stay silent a lifetime. Who know anyway what it is, that wild, silky part of ourselves without which no poem can live? But we do know this: if it is going to enter into a passionate relationship and speak what is in its own portion of your mind, the other responsible and purposeful part of you had better be a Romeo. It doesn’t matter if risk is somewhere close by — risk is always hovering somewhere. But it won’t involve itself with anything less than a perfect seriousness.
Various ambitions -- to complete the poem, to see it in print, to enjoy the gratification of someone's comment about it -- serve in some measure as incentives to the writer's work. Though each of these is reasonable, each is a threat to that other ambition of the poet, which is to write as well as Keats, or Yeats, or Williams -- or whoever it was who scribbled onto a page a few lines whose force the reader once felt and has never forgotten. Every poet's ambition should be to write as well. Anything else is only a flirtation.
And, never before have there been so many opportunities to be a publicly and quickly, thus achieving earlier goals. Magazines are everywhere, and there are literally hundreds of poetry workshops. There is, as never before, company for those who like to talk about and write poems.
None of this is bad. But very little of it can do more than start you on your way to the real, unimaginably difficult goal of writing memorably. That work is done slowly and in solitude, and it is as improbable as carrying water in a sieve."
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
SPENT
SPENT
I encourage you to try your hand at this very realistic poverty simulation game. In you frustration you might think exaggerates the difficulty of living a low-income life. Hang with me a day and you'll hear a few words that might check your heart. Today I thought about the audacious claim we often make about knowing the heart of the Father. He likes the guy in the ditch. The uncomfortable people. Is that our heart or do we just like holding the banner? Are we prepared for God to fulfill our prayer, "break my heart with what breaks yours"? In God's mercy may he help us shed our masks.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Saturday, July 16, 2011
who am I?
Here was a poem written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer during his days of confinement under the Nazi's during WWII. He would be be hanged a few short weeks before the war ended:
Who am I? They often tell meI stepped from my cell’s confinement
Calmly, cheerfully, firmly,
Like a squire from his country-house.
Who am I? They often tell me
I used to speak to my warders
Freely and friendly and clearly,
As though it were mine to command.
Who am I? They also tell me
I bore the days of misfortune
Equally, smilingly, proudly,
Like one accustomed to win.
Am I then really all that which other men tell of?
Or am I only what I myself know of myself?
Restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,
Struggling for breath, as though hands were
compressing my throat,
Yearning for colors, for flowers, for the voices of birds,
Thirsting for words of kindness, for neighborliness,
Tossing in expectation of great events,
Powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance,
Weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making,
Faint, and ready to say farewell to it all?
Who am I? This or the other?
Am I one person today and tomorrow another?
Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
And before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still like a beaten army,
Fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?
Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am Thine!
D. Bonhoeffer
March 4,1946
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)