Hope in Relationships

Perhaps the truest and best hope we can have in and for any relationship is that someday the other will say, "My life is better for having known you."

Simply Sounds of Birds

Neither symphony nor cacophony,

simply sounds of birds in day's first light

awake, awake, among leaves in the wind.

Ah, to be as a bird in this plein morning ...

Baptism: Death and Resurrection in Christ

Reading in Colossians 2:6-15, especially verses 12 and 13 ...

The divine, salvific mystery is that God exchanges Christ's death for our death, such that our death is no longer our own but is Christ's. We must make no mistake about this. We die. Indeed, apart from Christ we are already dead spiritually. This side of the second coming, ineluctably and certainly, even if we are in Christ, we will eventually die physically as well. Yet in this God-acted mystery of salvation, which we experience sacramentally in baptism, we no longer die in ourselves; we die in Christ. God translates us from that death which is our death to that death which is Christ's, which becomes our life in the mystery of Christ's crucifixion and resurrection.

Summer Rain

Summer rain --

against the inscrutable screen

of beech and big-tooth aspen,

fractal leafing seeming endless --

silvers the massed cloud down

to earth, to soil and pavement,

and all creatures here below,

of life sore beauty-parched.

This Late May Morning

On this late May morning

in the hour before dawn

southwesterly-born breezes

gust the massed honeysuckle,

its supple vines and flowers

barely seen but amply sensed

in air so moist, intoxicating

swirling toward the surging day.

More on the Powerlessness of Jesus

Arrested and brutally interrogated by the secular and religious leaders in Jerusalem, about to be pushed off the precipice into the abyss of crucifixion, Jesus knows he is one with the true creator and ruler of the whole congeries of elements of which the abyss is perversely made by all pretenders to the ruler's power; and then he lets himself be pushed.

The Powerlessness of Jesus

Reading closely the accounts of the arrest, suffering, and death of Jesus in the gospels, one can only be struck by the utter powerlessness of Jesus in the face of the forces against him. If this was -- is -- God's method to overcome evil and recreate the world in truth, beauty, and goodness, it is astonishing, stunning. Give self up completely. Give up every claim to privilege, right, power. To love, only to love, utterly and absolutely to and through the end, no matter the end.