Scripps Sundays

  I go among trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water. My tasks lie in their places where I left them, asleep like cattle. Then what is afraid of me comes and lives a while in my sight. What it fears in me leaves me, and the fear of me leaves it. It sings, and I hear its song. Then what I am afraid of comes. I live for a while in its sight. What I fear in it leaves it, and the fear of it leaves me. It sings, and I hear its song. After days of labor, mute in my consternations, I hear my song at last, and I sing it. As we sing, the day turns, the trees move. -Wendell Berry  Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here, And you must treat it as a powerful stranger... -David Wagoner,  "Lost" 

  This is so very beautiful...  and this piece below was written by one of my former colleagues at SPU:  In 1840, the composer Robert Schumann wrote a  lieder  (art song) for his soon-to-be wife, Clara (herself an accomplished musician). He took his lyrics from the poet and linguist Friedrich Rückert. The result was a piece called  Widmung  (“Dedication”), considered to be one of the most lush and profound love songs ever written. It went like this: “You are my soul, you are my heart, You give me joy, or pain impart, You are my world – The world I gladly live in. You are my grave, My very heaven! …Your eyes transfigure me and raise me high. …[You are] my very soul, my better self!” Schumann and Rückert lived and worked during the period of European culture we call “Romantic.” The meaning of the word “Romantic,” of course, has changed over time. Originally, it denoted something “ancient-Roman-ish,” evoking bygone, heroic, and mythic things. Tempestuous ...

Loving is always risky, because we cannot enter into it without being changed. Altered. Transformed. In the face of this, we might well ask,   Do I really want this?   Do we really desire to be so undone? Loving is never just about opening our heart. It is about being willing to have our heart become larger as we make room for people and stories and experiences we never imagined holding. It is about being willing to have our heart become deeper as we move beyond the surface layers of our assumptions, prejudices, and habits in order to truly see and receive what—and who—is before us. It is about being willing to have our heart continually shattered and remade as we take in not only the brokenness of the world but also the beauty of it, the astounding wonder that will not allow us to remain the same. Blessing That Meets You in Love It is true that every blessing begins with love, that whatever else it might say, love is always precisely its point. But it should be noted that thi...

since you got to hear this amazing human this weekend,  I wanted to share one of my favorite things he has written....    N either I nor the poets I love have found the keys to the kingdom of prayer and we cannot force God to stumble over us where we sit. But I know that it's a good idea to sit anyway. So every morning, I kneel, waiting, making friends with the habit of listening, hoping that I'm being listened to. There, I greet God in my own disorder. I say hello to my chaos, my unmade decisions, my unmade bed, my desire and my trouble. I say hello to distraction and privilege, I greet the day and I greet my beloved and bewildering Jesus. I recognize and greet my burdens, my luck, my controlled and uncontrollable story. I greet my untold stories, my unfolding story, my unloved body, my own body. I greet the things I think will happen and I say hello to everything I do not know about the day. I greet my own small world and I hope that I can meet the bigger world that day...