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Tag: love

Arm Yourselves with Love Alone

ARM YOURSELVES WITH LOVE ALONE

No,  we will not all survive this. Some lives have already been lost.  Many more are at risk of losing health care, being “disappeared”, met with violence, or starvation. These risks are already at play.   No, not everyone will be okay.  That is a baseline we may have to accept.   

Practicing some level of acceptance allows us to concentrate our power and creativity on resisting what we refuse to accept, the places where we must have courage to change what we can.  

¡Resistance is never futile! Those who can only imagine creating a world by force will always be conquered eventually, sometime hoisted by their own petard, but they will always crumble.  The more tyrannical and ignorant the despot, the harder they fall.  The less they know of love the quicker they become dust. 

But the virtue and resilience of those who know to endure with integrity, even if it costs them their life, will sow the seeds of a beautiful future, a beloved community where character, insight, and wisdom matter. 

There have been peaceful, thriving communities throughout history that have furthered the evolution of the human race as God has desired and empowered us to do.  

We cannot guarantee what will happen to our own fate when tiny men driven by fear and inadequacy seize power.  

We can trust what their fate will be.

And we can shape the fate of the world to come. 

For no tyrant will determine history.  No coward controls our fate as the human race.

There is no greater power than love.  

There is no greater power than love. 

And those who rely on any other power to make their mark on history 

Will be forgotten and eclipsed by the courageous and powerful love we carry in our bodies at all times.  

In my tradition, the resurrection tells us no one can override God’s judgment and no one can kill God. God is love, and so no one can kill the love within you. Even if your body disappears.  

Don’t poison yourself with the power of violence they fetishize, the violence on which their hopes rely.   Instead, arm yourselves with love alone, start now, and you will be crafting the future of the human race.

Only love remains. Remains.  

From Resisting Arrest.  

. Douglas Harrison 

Being Moved

When the Bough Breaks: A fallen limb in a friendship is not a dead tree.

Its is the second worst storm I endured since I moved to Texas, making it the second worst storm of my life.  I had been praying, trying to center, and needing to be present.  The storm hit my house exactly within the first five minutes of sitting down with someone for spiritual direction.  The wind was rattling the windows and tossing bits of the back yard around.  The whole house chilled.    I considered ending our time together because I was able to give the moment only 99% of my attention.  I was being tugged away by one haunting thought.  Will the tree hold?

The Impossible Will Take A little While.

Welcome. Let us Work Toward a Hard Goodbye. — Living well in the discovery and the loss of friendships.

“Well,” Fr. Francis said, “That is a relationship and relationships go through transitions.”   Of all of the things I have been mulling over in trying to make sense of a painful friendship, this one made the difference.  It was so simple, and apparently truthful because it made my gut ache.

Tohu-Bohu

How my relationship with Jesus is, and is not, personal.

When I was young I would go to camp or a youth service where I was told that what I needed was a personal relationship with Jesus.  It made a kind of sense as a lot of things do for children because I was still relying on other people to teach me how to make sense of things. So I agreed, with no regrets.

Buddy Christ
Buddy Christ (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

However, I happen to be the kind of person, and have been since childhood, to throw myself headlong into the task at hand whatever it may be.   So I was bound and determined to have the most personal relationship with Jesus a person could have. This is a dangerous prayer.  The trouble began when I took it so seriously it started to take my life in some surprising if not shocking directions that none of my youth pastors had anticipated.

Faith for Reasons.

“Put a Sock-Puppet in It,” Ancient wisdom that it is better to make a sock puppet than to be one.

This is a guest post of mine on an otherwise lovley and insightful blog, “Knitting Benedict: The Rule…by hand.”  This is one of my favorite blogs to regular.   There is hardly a better way, than I can imgaine, to glean wisdom an ancient book of instruction than by taking small bites of it and chewing slowly while working with your hands on small stuff.  “Work and pray,” says saint Benedict.

I am in the middle of forging a batch of sock puppets. As I do I cannot help but see the contrasts between the kinds of toys I am fashioning and a stern bit of advice from Benedict’s rule: don’t speak unless spoken to.

Tohu-Bohu

How to Drive Out Snakes: Lessons from a guy who wasn’t even Irish.

Saint Patrick
Saint Patrick (Photo credit: elycefeliz)

The story is not so ironic as just surprising because it has been so long forgotten.  St Patrick’s particular story of redemption, the reason he is considered a saint, is so mashed up with corned beef and green beer that when we finally do hear it does seem a little surprising. In fact just like the story of St. Valentine it can actually sound surprisingly subversive.  The big reveal that makes the story so interesting is simply this: St. Patrick wasn’t Irish.  In fact, he had good reason to hate them.

Tohu-Bohu

How to be a Valentine: A Note on Martyrdom.

Today is a feast, a gift and remembrance, of an occasion I have yet see Hallmark really nail with one of its watercolored limericks:  there once was a man so in love with God that he was beheaded for performing marriages in opposition to war.   In defense of hallmark, that is a very hard picture to paint with water colors…

In the third century, Emperor Claudius had declared marriage illegal in order to encourage more young men to volunteer to be soldiers.  Valentine, a celibate priest, opposed both the aggressive violence of the empire as well as the notion that the state alone held the reins of marriage.   The priest knew how central marriage is to the life of the Church and couldn’t stop marrying people just because Claudius had other plans.

Tohu-Bohu

Ninja’s Teeth and the Relentless Love of God.

When I was just out of college I was pretty hell-bent on changing the world. Hopefully I still am but back then I was far less patient to see the results of my efforts. I had moved to the heart of Los Angeles to study a year of urban studies as well as fulfill an internship at the First Church of The Nazarene on Third & Vermont. I was ready for adventure, but not for the hard work of everyday care and concern for other who sometimes annoyed me.  Nevertheless something clicked at the county hospital one day when I tried to help “Ninja” get his teeth fixed.

Tohu-Bohu