ashes.ashes.we.all.fall.

Ash Wednesday is today. i love going to the service and getting the little cross on my forehead. this is maybe not the real meaning of it that they'll be explaining to us in church this evening, but in my own little world i think it's like a gentle touch-whisper of a reminder that i am a creation of the Creator, a child of the Father, a sister of the Savior, a mind being molded to love Jesus and love like the Christ, a temporary temple of a body that will so soon creak and rattle and decay and turn to dust, and also a glorious soul that will receive a new body free from the temptations and fears and fights and tears of this life. and that we are living in the meantime, the in-between. and that the reality of the One who dwells within us should be evident on our faces and in our speech and through the work of our hands. and that the Word, the living story of the embodiment of Love, is written on our hearts. and that someday we will see the I AM face to face, even if we can only see God's back for now [read Exodus 33]. mientras que esperamos...

i'm always curious what other people are doing to observe Lent.


for my Personal Foundations for Ministry class, we have to make a plan for practicing a spiritual discipline over the next 8 weeks or so. how convenient. i'm excited about it because i was getting inklings and advice about a couple of things i should instigate more intentionally in my life even before i thought about this project. no, friends, it's not fasting. :-P and i don't plan on saying much more than that about it, but would definitely appreciate prayer as i try to stick to this commitment and let the Spirit work through it!

i found this set of poems by T.S. Eliot, entitled Ash Wednesday, written shortly after his commitment to Christ within the Anglican Church. they are somewhat inscrutable in parts, maybe i just don't get a lot of the allusions he's making, but he writes so lyrically, and even where i don't understand it lends an air of mystery that is strangely comforting to me. like language can't contain everything there is or even everything we know, which is such a small portion of everything there is and why everything is anyway.

for someone who loves putting words together and pulling meaning out of them, who worries when words are left unsaid or badly said [which i do ALL THE TIME] or misinterpreted or ignored, it is good to hear, from poem V (five):

"If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word."

[it sounds like a tongue-twister at first, but makes more sense after reading through a few times]

'beauty for ashes', i need to go make a playlist of all the songs that are titled that. [like the one by Shane and Shane, and this one by Jinny Kim...]

chau for now.

this.old.world.

oh this messy spinning world. sometimes it just makes me wanna go home early, like Psalm 90:1 says LORD, in all generations you have been our home. or as a family friend of ours, a Southern preacher kind of guy, used to say to his son when he did something that got on his nerves, "Son?! you wanna meet Jesus early?!! well you just keep on doin that there and you will!" sometimes i think i would really kind of like that. send me to meet Jesus early, Mr. Williams, sir!

but then i get to see a roomful of salt-and-pepper-haired soft-wrinkled faces smile and tear up as my choir sings "swing low, sweet chariot", and i'm glad again that i've got a little (God-knows-how-much) more time left in life to make people smile and cry.

life.together.

i'm reading Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for a class, but it's more like a discussion group and prayer group than a class. and i'm reading my mom's old copy that she must have had in high school or college because it has her maiden name written in the front. it's kind of funny discovering her notes in the margins, and realizing that i tend to react in similar ways to some of his ideas, especially agreeing with things like recognizing the presence of Christ in a special way in people who are poor, hungry, weak, or seem insignificant, and emphatically disagreeing with the assertion that God is not a God of the emotions - he Is, too! he must be, otherwise i'd be a hopeless wreck! (well, i'm still kind of a wreck. but now i have hope! ;-)

we just finished reading and talking about chapter 2. Bonhoeffer insists on some pretty strong ideas about how Christians should go about living in community and having common devotions - rising early every morning, praying the Psalms, singing hymns in unison only, and then having a longer reading from the Old or New Testament. even the suggestions that seem a little extreme for our context today, he has some pretty solid and convicting reasoning to back them up.

also, he liked Gandhi a lot (or his nonviolent ideas, anyway), so much that he almost went and visited him in India. but instead he stayed in Germany and helped found an underground/secret seminary, which is where he wrote this book living in community with the pastor-students. and he was a double agent working for the Nazis but helping Jews. and he was part of a plot to assassinate Hitler...i don't know about the rightness of that, but he was in a tough position and he did not take the decision lightly, and he never made the claim that it was absolutely the right thing to do, and ultimately he didn't go through with it. well, i guess that was because they arrested him and eventually sent him to be killed in one of the death camps. people who knew him in the prison camps said he was someone "for whom God was real and always near." wow. i know maybe one or two people like that, who you can just tell that they are constantly aware of God's presence within them, and everything they say and do just exudes genuine love and beauty. how does one become that person??? i guess i should read on!