prayer

******
prayer
...........

contemplative prayers for blogsurfers:

God, Loving Parent...slow my clicks....preserve my attention....help me to click links that push me to find more of You in places i do not know, as well as in the places i expect....

....and when my blogsurfing becomes a way to hide from faithfulness...inhabit my wrist and my fingers, drag me across the screen like a reticent arrow, a protesting tracking ball and....

help me to click the red EX which allows me to return to people, commitments & work...

...thank you for the shocking eruptions of sabbath on the net....

selah~

spirituality

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spirituality
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"According to the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr, spirituality is not for people who are trying to avoid hell; it is for people who have been through hell. In many ways, spirituality is about what we do with our pain. And the truth is, if we don't transform it, we will transmit it."
- Al Gustafson

thanks to bob. who i don't know, but appreciate just now.

analysis, anyone? (co-author: Jaelyn)

Early this morning (6:30ish a.m.)Jaelyn woke up. The following is her co-authored account of the events leading up to her early rise:

Jaelyn dreamed that when she was little and she was playing in a big dollhouse with Emily Livermore -- they were playing INSIDE the dollhouse, and all of the sudden, there were big scary things outside of the dollhouse. And all of the sudden, Daddy came up to the dollhouse and he was kind of scary because his hands had turned RED like a monster. So she woke up and called for her Dadddy. Who came running up the stairs, and she burrowed out of her big yellow quilt and threw her arm backwards and up over the neck of her Daddy and pulled him close.

The End.

chick publications

do you know about chick tracks? my grandmother used to leave them everywhere, so, if you've read them, there's a good chance that you read one of the ones she left laying in restaurants, public restrooms and phone booths.

bemis loves to drop them off in the office, knowing that i collect artifacts of incredible "christian" kitsch.

She dropped off Trust Me yesterday. The first three pages crack me up. (and i don't mean *crack* in *that* way)





i don't mean to give away the ending or anything here, but the kid gets hooked, sells drugs, goes to jail, gets raped, gets aids, dies. Seriously.

but what cracks me up is the depiction of the underworld that sucks this kid in.

what draws this kid to this unlikely group of friends, drawn from the cast of an MTV reality show?

it convinces me that the audience that this book is *really* supposed to hit -- is the kids Grandma. Who sees her good little kid being sucked in by "the wrong crowd."

and of course its supposed to reinforce all of her ideas about who the wrong crowd is, what they do, and what the destiny of her good little grandkid will be.

My grandmother used to take great delight -- secret-agent-identity-delight -- in covertly leaving these books everywhere. It added a great deal of drama. Of course she also passed them out by hand to everyone she met.

My grandmother was a bright, educated thoughtful person. She read the classics, knew great art, had impeccable taste. So why jack chick?

Fundamentalism baffles me more the further I get from it. Which, I suppose, is the point.

kill bill

spoiler: don't read

at the beginning of the movie, Uma / Beatrix says -- I'm going to kill Bill.

throughout the whole movie (and i'm referring to both as one, because that's what they should've been/are -- though i probably wouldn't have gone to see a 4.5 hour movie), she works toward the opportunity to kill Bill. (although it gets less clear about how/why she had to kill the entire Deadly Viper Assasin Squad in order to get to Bill. Why didn't she just start with him?)

In the previews she says, you bet i'm going to kill bill.

so how!? how?! how in the world -- does the major dramatic question which continues to keep us interested manage to be: will beatrix kill bill?

it seems a little bit brilliant.

my grand theory of the universe is falsifiable

which, i guess, according to my training, makes it a good theory. if grand theories of the universe can ever be good theories.

so what is my g.t.o.t.u.?

i've already shared it here a couple of times, but i've honed the wording a little bit. i'm still waiting for the stream of comments to barrage me with reasons it isn't true or instances where it isn't true, but so far nothing. here it is:

People make most of their decisions because they believe their choices will salve their greatest wounds.

that's it.

it's a theory of human motivation. which seems essential to any of us who ever want to inspire / persuade / understand / study / enlighten / enliven / liberate / titilate / entertain / educate other people. right? can't do any of those without understanding motivation.

but i was saying that i discovered its falsifiability.

children.

i know that i'm constantly blogging about my children which makes me categorically unhip. parenting just reeks of anti-cool, but....

i gotta say...

children don't have to live in response to their greatest wounds, because their greatest wounds haven't emerged yet. They're able to live much more in the immediate present. I already sense that Jaelyn is developing a sense of how the world responds to her -- and embedded in that sense (for all of us) is an understanding of the world's limitations, betrayals and cruelties: the incipient wounds which will scar us throughout our development....

but its nice that they're not poured in concrete yet.

i have a related question, too. is a person's level-of-reflectiveness affect how aware they are of their wounds (and therefore how stable their wounds are)?

peace~

teaching/friendship

my brother the bishop has a thread about who teachers should teach to -- the "get it"s or the swine. i think if the choice is to be made (?) the swine have it in the Kingdom of Heaven....

but i've been thinking a lot recently about some of the costs of teaching -- but its really not just about teaching -- its more about mentorship / discipleship / person-development. whatever...

that process of investing yourself into someone who you have hope for.

so i've just been reviewing some of the complications of that paradigm for living. implications that maybe i couldn't see while i was still living like a gypsy -- but feel more and more valid the longer i live as a farmer:

1. when you invest in relationship -- you end up caring about that person in ways that are not always shared.

this tension is particularly keen if the mentee / student/ disciple sees your relationship more as a process of the institution / body / community that you've been formally matched by.

2. when you've become friends inside the institution -- staying friends outside of the insitution demands a different set of expectations.

this is almost the flipside. some of my most rewarding relationships with students from malone are those with alumni. however -- as soon as the person leaves the context that's afforded us the opportunity to develop relationship -- our continuing relationship has to fit into the fabric of my "non-work" life.

3. when you choose to go about your teaching / discipling / mentoring with the people you work with -- those relationships end up spilling over into your "non-work" life.

so that the concrete choices that you make about each day / each hour -- end up affecting your family, your "non-work" friends (as if it were possible to have those!), and then all the other family and friend relationships you have far away.

am i complaining? no! clearly, a profession that allows me to be relational in meaningful ways is one of the luckiest gifts in the universe --

but feeling the strain of these tensions lately has alerted me to this (newly discovered by me) domain of institution / identity strain.

the rigidity of institutional life is much to blame here. people's default assumptions about time and relationship are structured not only on genuine need and desire , but also based on the structures of time and space that the institutional clock provides. its this clash that makes for a tension between the-way-it-is and the-way-it-ought-to-be....

hope your day is filled with flashes of the-way-it-ought-to-be....

peace~

things we hear mostly inside of our heads.

1. the sound of a towel drying your hair after the shower or a swim.

you hadn't thought about it, had you? but its a sound that's very singular, and relatively enjoyable -- particularly when you think about how *yours* it is.

possibly those with very short locks will not have the same delightful experience.

2. the sound of your own voice.

i mean really -- is it surprising that people are delusional? given the unreasonable amount of influence that we have upon ourselves?

peace~