A Single Layer

I'll tell you what gives me more joy than anything else I can think of: creative communities. I don't mean formal communities with logos and schedules, though those are nice enough. I mean when you find out that Benedict Cumberbatch is friends with Tom Hiddleston who's friends with Zachary Levi who's friends with Nathan Fillion who's friends with Joss Whedon. Just imagine that dinner party for a moment. Now you see what I mean. Yesterday afternoon I was in a room of people, most of them friends, some of them strangers, reading through "The Merchant of Venice". Each person read a different role. And the whole thing was brilliant. I found myself looking around me at the other readers with a particular appreciation, because I was in the midst of my own convergence. The creative community had happened. Not a single person in the room was "famous", but every one of them was graced with a good measure of talent—and a few of them with the kind of t...

I wrote this responsive prayer for our service yesterday as part of a 40 day series on the Lord's Prayer our church is going through. My mother asked me to post it here. I do what she says. Lord Jesus, teach us to pray: For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. This is your world. You hold the past, present, and future in your almighty hands. Because the veil was torn and the Spirit has come, we are always—even now—standing in the presence of our God. All of creation bends to you—and would we hesitate? The rocks sing your praise, and the waves rest at your feet. How often we forget! Lord Jesus, teach us to pray: And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. All around us—and within us—we find excuses to ignore your persistent presence.   We settle for easy dissatisfaction in things that are not of you. We have stepped too far over that line that runs through each human heart. We’ve compromised to keep ourselves from sufferi...

Let me tell you a little bit about my life right now. It's quite lovely, actually—I have a perfect apartment, good friends, precious family, and I ate delicious sweet potato gnocchi today. But it's not particularly cheerful at the moment. It seems nearly everyone I care about is going through their own personal gauntlets, and I am left to pray. Which is a good place to be left in, but not easy. I have made this observation elsewhere, but I'll make it again here. Something happens when you crack open the door to grief. You become almost physically aware of the feelings that are due things. That which is delightful suddenly strikes you as the most beautiful thing in existence. That which is sad can set you to honest weeping. I find a certain sanctity in this. After all, Jesus wept. In the midst of all this, I've been personally "suffering" a lot of Stupid. My wallet was stolen a month ago, and for a pile of reasons, it's taken all that time to get acces...

Right as my hope comes crashing down, I pray I might be hopeful still from every angle. I pray hope overcomes dreams with better things, And the sight and the shiver, the taste and the sound Go out from me, and come back new. Clean my memories, build them with better wings, Root my feet to the earth and wake me up well, For I have dreamed many dreams, and not one of them true.

I've been called upon several times in last few weeks to defend my love for Advent. It seems people fall into two camps: those who relish the festivities (the warm fires, the Christmas music, the trees and lights), and those who are overwhelmed by the busyness—or worse, the memories of loss—that the season makes unavoidable. We're called to rejoice though we are sad, rest though we're busy, and step into the celebration of something very old with all the eagerness of children, for whom it is still very new. It's a hard season of contradictions. And those are the very reasons for which I love it. I love it the way I love inclement weather. Because it forces you to look up from what you're doing and take steps to meet it. I live most of my life in a contented little fog, almost absurdly present in this particular moment and no other. It's hard for me to step into the past or the future without some kind of catalyst. That's why I love stories—novels and ...

This morning I was trying to remember Thanksgivings past. It's a big day, and it only happens once a year, so you'd assume they'd stick in one's mind. But I remember very few of them. I remember last year and the year before, because we had special guests. And I remember the Thanksgiving I celebrated in Scotland, because it was the first time I ever cooked something for the holiday myself, and because we were expats in an island of selective American tradition, desperately trying to find cornmeal in a Tesco (FYI: can't be done). I remember the first Thanksgiving I spent at my sister's house—the other guest was vegan, and the pumpkin pie boiled when it should have baked, and I liked stuffing for the first time and drank a Blue Moon. But the Thanksgivings of my childhood, the ones I think of when I think about Thanksgiving, those I don't remember. They would have been at my Grandmother's house, and the extension would be in the table, and there would...

When you open yourself up to inexplicable joy, you also open yourself up to deep sadness. It's a hard step to take, knowing the lows can get very, very low. But it is better than giving nothing its due. I would rather feel the hurt and the happiness as acutely as they deserve than be cold to everything. Because if you fail to feel what each situation calls for as fully as you can, you lose your capacity for sympathy. And that's a lonely way to live.

Go barefoot. Find all the heavy things. Press stuff. Move furniture... ...and listen to music at full volume.

Can't apologize for not posting much when I've been doing beautiful things. But I will share them with you.

Yesterday I started my morning off with a brief conversation with someone I don't particularly like. I've never had a good conversation with this person before, not once, and when I realized it would be necessary to strike up a conversation yesterday, I gritted my teeth about it. And then we talked, I got what I needed, the person was pleasant, I was pleasant, and not a minute of it was a burden. I walked away surprised by joy and playfully kicking myself for having such a bad attitude about it in the first place. This is a lesson I've been learning over and over again recently. It's been a circling theme, and just when I think I've learned it well, I step right into it again. I begin with a preconception, however justifiably formed, that something or someone is difficult, unpleasant, unjust, a threat to my security. And then I'm proven wrong. I was reminded this morning of the Proverb about "if your enemy is hungry." It can be hard, learning to b...

This past week, I was struck several times by critical comments from people in my community spoken in such a way that insinuated they had a better notion of how things should be done than the way things were. Behind these comments was a layer of cynicism, or as one person put it, a sense of disillusionment. I am no stranger to cynicism. As a generally sarcastic person, I find my sense of humor often crosses over that invisible line between playful irony and biting criticism. It’s something I’m actively working on. One of the most basic ways I’m working on it is with the discipline of silence. Sometimes keeping silent about the way things are and the way things might be is a bad way of going about things. It can allow injustice to thrive. Or, less egregiously, it can allow inefficiency to run rampant. In such cases, so long as you’re speaking the truth in love, raise your voices to the roof! But sometimes we voice our opinions just because we think we know better, withou...

I've been reading through old journals, which will always do it to you. Also, this morning I was reminded of a professor I hadn't thought of in years while moving some books from his class to the office. Found out a couple hours later that he's guest preaching at my church in August. Shortly after that, my roommate from senior year, whom I lost touch with soon after graduation (I graduated before Facebook, you see), found me on a social network I never use and was planning on dumping. It has served me well; I loved that woman, and am so happy to be back in touch. On top of these things, all day long I've been haunted by the smell of jasmine. As though my memories of college are actually messing with my sensory organs. Jasmine is the smell of Wheaton to me, because I wore copious amounts of jasmine oil back in those days. But it's not the memories that are making me smell jasmine again. The jasmine is blooming wildly, at home and at work and apparently everywhere ...

Thomas Merton writes the following in his book Love and Living (forgive all the elliptical breaks): The purpose of education is to show a person how to define himself authentically and spontaneously in relation to his world.... The function of a university is, then, first of all to help the student to discover himself: to recognize himself, and to identify who it is that chooses. ...This inner identity is not “found” as an object, but is the very self that finds. It is lost when it forgets to find, when it does not know how to seek, or when it seeks itself as an object....Hence the paradox that it finds best when it stops seeking: and the graduate level of learning is when one learns to sit still and be what one has become, which is what one does not know and does not need to know.... Education in this sense means more than learning; and for such education, one is awarded no degree. One graduates by rising from the dead. Thinking about this, I only know what he means b...

Driving home from our Good Friday service this evening, I was reminded of the night years ago when I went with my college friends to see The Passion of the Christ in theaters. I was worried about seeing the movie with so many people, because each of us responds to gravity in different ways. I didn't want to be pulled out of the experience because someone couldn't handle grief or awe in silence, and yet I also wanted to experience those things in community. It was a risk worth taking. In the end I sat next to a good friend who understood more than most people how to serve and be served by others in the weighty moments. I don't think we said a word to each other during or after the film, but we certainly felt free to cry. Another friend drove me home, and we were mostly silent the entire way. I know that at some point we discussed it, but I can't remember when. Whenever it was, it was the right time. Knowing the time, and understanding the space surrounding grief is...

Last fall I went to an open mic with my friend Carole Crocco. She sang some songs, they were beautiful. A while later there was another one - she sang, I read a poem, someone made me an origami crane. Last week, Carole opened an open mic downtown with half an hour of just her and her music. The place was packed because, fancy that, lots of people love her! I've had this song stuck in my head ever since. If you're gonna have a song replaying in your brain for a full week, you can't do any better than this.

I can't remember the first time I read Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time , though I have read it since at least half a dozen times. It feels new every time I pick it up, and for that reason alone it belongs in the category of Great Books. It is a great book for other reasons, though I'm not entirely convinced it's a good  book. I don't want to be confusing about this distinction. What I mean by this is that the book contains a lot of faults. There are awkward moments, hiccups in dialogue that should have been scribbled over by a good editor. And the very premise has a certain degree of obviousness to it that's only forgivable because of the book's age - and it's not really that old. But the book has magic. I suspect in part because the author believes in the world she creates - and we do too. Our vision of the universe expands even as we read it. At the moment, I've begun reading the book again along with my book group from Grace. It's th...

It's an interesting thing to give an appraisal of a person based on their Twitter tagline, or the section on Facebook titled "About Me." I always feel a bit stumped by those requirements of a social networking profile. What do you need to know about me that can be summarized into a single sentence? My profession? My hobbies? My sense of self-deprecating humor? My cynicism toward the world at large and profile summaries in particular?  There's a similar section in the profile of a Pinterest user, and regular readers know well that I take my Pinterest account very seriously. So it was with much consideration that I decided to forgo the usual descriptors and opt, instead, for a quotation by George MacDonald.   The line is from the book Sir Gibbie , a novel set high in the Highlands, about a little boy whom no one thinks much of until it turns out that he's very important after all. That's about the vaguest summary of a novel I've ever come up with,...

For those not paying very much attention, we are in the midst of Lent. Among other things, Lent is the season in which we observe a humility that remembers our shortfall, the great distance between what we are on our own and what Christ has called us toward, made us for, and redeemed us into. I've quoted Richard John Neuhaus before, a line that I remember particularly during Lent every year: "About chief of sinners I don't know, but what I know about sinners I know chiefly about me." This comes from his book Death on a Friday Afternoon , which I probably mention every year about the same time I'm reminded of this line. I was reminded of it again yesterday while reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Life Together . He addresses the same question, Who among us is the chief of sinners? with the same answer. It brought me back to Neuhaus today, and I think rather than talking about it more, I'll just give you a small passage: "I may think it modesty when ...