Wednesday, November 29, 2006

MONET


here is something beautiful for you...as we enter advent, remember to see the beauty in the seemingly normal circumsances of life - nativity bursts forth everywhere. peace to you...

Monet Refuses the Operation

Doctor, you say there are no halos
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water
so long apart, are the same state of being,
fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen Cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the House of Parliament dissolves
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent the world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighed shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor, if you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.
-Lisel Mueller

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

HOW I FEEL


have you ever seen an image and known that it is a picture of how you feel? this is how i feel...

Thursday, November 23, 2006

THANKSGIVING FOR THE JOURNEY


All I can say to today is THANK YOU...in a whisper, in a kiss, in my tollhouse pie - thank you, thank you ,thank you, a thousand times thank you. I am overwhelmed with blessing...mystery and blessing, joy and uncertainty...this is my thanksgiving...

MY LORD GOD, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.
-Thomas Merton

Thursday, November 16, 2006

TWENTY SOMETHING


i turned 29 this last week...30 is approaching like a freight train, due in 11 months from now...i feel like someone who has just been told something unbelievable - like they won the lottery (only not good like that)...and they just stare and say, "yeah right." i literally feel that way - yeah right...i'm NOT going to be 30. sure, my high school 10 year reunion was this summer, but i'm not good at math so that little number 10 doesn't scare me...but 30...30????? and yet, look at me borrowing trouble...maybe i won't ever be 30 at all....

hmmmm....i guess turning the big 3-0 wouldn't be that bad compared to the alternative.

Saturday, November 04, 2006

FED UP


i'm fed up...with church as usual...
  • i'm fed up with programs that consume so much time that the average lay person does not have the time for God to lead them into the ministry God wants them to do...
  • i'm fed up with pastors so bereft of the Holy Spirit that they plagiarize from the pulpit rather than seeking God (and the leadership that affirms and supports their deciet)...
  • i'm fed up with the same revolving door fights that stall us as Christians - which music to sing, whether the pastor wears a suit, whether we should draw people in the doors or go out the doors and MINISTER in the name of Christ Jesus, etc.
  • i'm fed up with the way the church acts like a business - if you've done your time, you get the "promotion"...
  • i'm fed up with the idolization of church tradition (i.e. we ALWAYS do this every year...)
  • i'm fed up with creating little consumeristic Christians by making kids think that church is all about being attractional and not transformative...

i'm fed up...and yet i know that God loves His people and that God calls me to love them above myself...but God is doing a NEW THING and i want to be a part of it....maybe then i won't feel so fed up all the time...