Beware the Ides of March

Over Wesley's past three birthdays, we've found ourselves covered in puke (2nd), getting Wesley stitches in his chin (3rd), and this year with Lara in the ER the night before his party. Beware the ides of March, indeed. Lara was hit in Tulsa by a little old lady: Not physically punched,(that would be interesting) but rammed into by the other lady's car. I told the church that was one more reason they could think of Lara as Wonderwoman, since she evidently has an invisible car like Wonderwoman has an invisible jet. Thankfully, she's okay with some burns from the airbag and soreness. But now we're dealing with purchasing another car just a few months after already buying a car. Hooray.

The best tomato soup ever

My church is full of great cooks.  I was fortunate to score the leftovers of Lori Kellner's tomato soup from our "Souper Bowl Luncheon for Missions" and Lara and I relished it all week afterwards.  I ate it for dessert one night.  It's that good.  Impress your friends with this recipe.  

Sherried Tomato Soup

 

6 Tbsp melted butter

1 med. Onion

1-46 oz. tomato juice

2-14 oz. cans diced tomatoes ( I use petite diced)\

3 Tbsp. chicken base ( 4 boullion cubes if need to substitute)

salt

pepper

1 cup cooking sherry

1 cup whipping crème

chopped fresh parsley and basil

 

Saute diced onions in butter until transluscent.

Add tomatoes with juice.

Add juice, base salt, pepper and stir.

Bring to a near boil, turn off heat.

Add in sherry and cream and stir.

Add parsley and basil to taste.

 

• This is the original recipe.
• To this I add 1-2 cloves garlic, minced
• And 1 tsp Italian seasoning and ¼ tsp crushed red pepper

The Face of Grace

I've always been impressed by iconography.  One of the most important icons in my own life is also the oldest known icon of Jesus Christ Pantocrator at St. Catherine's monastery at Sinai.  I think it was my mentor from college, Jay McDaniel, who first exposed me to this icon.  The seperate halves of this face of Christ each convey such different expressions.  When I look at the right half of the face, I see anger, almost a sneer.  McDaniel said that eye feels like a laser boring right into his soul.  The left half of the face expresses compassion and tenderness.   Do you see the difference?  The left half has a softer eye--it is a gaze of love.  

A truth that I have learned from this icon is that grace is both halves of this icon.  Jesus expresses both tenderness and anger.   I think it is conventional wisdom that grace is only that tender acceptance.  The power of a Wesleyan concept of grace, with the dynamic movement through prevenient, justifying and sanctifying grace is that notion that grace is also perfecting.  "Going on to perfection" sometimes involves deep discomfort and difficulty.  That's one reason I think Lent is such an important season of faith.  We are confronted with Jesus as a rebuker, as a wild man, as an angry man.  Often, we are lulled into the false idea that being a person of faith means we are nice to everybody.  Augustine said "Hope has two beautiful daughters, Anger and Courage.  Anger at the way things are, and the courage to try to change them."  

Sum

Here's the book I'm reading. I heard the author speak on a Tulsa NPR station and thought it sounded good. It is 40 vignettes on the afterlife that are off the wall, but also probing. The book fits in one hand pretty well--Lara and I both read it while we feed Julianna. It earns a thumbs up from me so far-the dust jacket says the afterlife scenarios are "never previously thought of," but I know I've daydreamed about a couple of them. Perhaps they're something in the collective unconscious. Am I dwelling on the afterlife? It first came to mind when I tried to think of a good question for the Transforming Theology Conference (a few days ago). I also wrote this little bit in my journal.

Almost Four.

When she returned at fifteen minutes till midnight, we sat on the couch with her legs resting on mine—me finding it hard to take my eyes off my little girl—she told me that my father had told her that he remembered his mother. His mother had died when he was three and a half years old. His older sister was five, and their two older brothers were already in their 20s and married.
I had never given my grandmother’s death much thought as an actual event. It was more of a circumstance. My grandmother had died when my dad was almost four and my dad’s dad had died when I was almost four.
The circumstance became more of a event in time for me when my wife mentioned that my dad told her that he remembered his mother’s death. He and his five year old sister were at home alone with her when she had the stroke that killed her. He said that they had just finished eating cherry pie, and for the longest time my dad and his sister thought that if you ate cherry pie you would die.
Hearing this was odd to me. I had never heard this before. Furthermore, just that weekend, while Lara and Julianna were away and Wesley and I were home alone together, I had the terrible daydream that I died while Wesley and I were home alone with each other with Lara away. What would my child do? Would he try to wake me? Would he panic? Would he try to find my cellphone and start punching buttons? My son is almost four. He is now as old as my father was when his mother died. He is now as old as I was when my father’s father died.

Perhaps Lent has really soaked into my bones this year.

My Dad and the Grapette bottle

This appeared this morning in the "Paper Trails" section of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.

Pastor gives a message in a bottle


LINDA CAILLOUET

THROUGH TIME AND SPACE:

Until last week, the empty vintage Grapette bottle rested on a shelf in Rev. Michael Mattox ’s office.
The pastor of First United Methodist Church in Little Rock , known for his quirky collectibles, was given the bottle in the early 1990s by a member of his congregation, then in Arkadelphia. When he became district superintendent and moved to Little Rock , he packed up and brought the bottle. Later, when he became pastor of First United Methodist, he again packed and moved it.
Then he learned that Billy Parker, the man whose funeral he was to preside over last Saturday in Rison, had on many days in his youth bought nickel bottles of Grapette and bags of peanuts for his high school crush Estelle, who eventually became his wife of 51 years. That’s when Mattox knew why he had the bottle and what he needed to do with it.
“It kept staring at me,” the pastor tells Paper Trails. “I thought, ‘It was a gift to me, and I need to make it a gift to Estelle.’”
He took the bottle from the shelf and filled it with water and daffodils he’d plucked from his backyard. During his sermon, the pastor shared the couple’s Grapette story and placed the flower-filled bottle amid the grand arrangements flanking the casket.
Call it a revelation. Or a reassuring message from the departed to loved ones left behind. Or a God moment.
Just not a coincidence. The date on the bottle? 1946 — the first of the four years during which Billy and Estelle shared the drink at a local store during recess breaks.

Night Rainbows

I submitted another application to the Collegeville Institute writing workshop with author Eugene Peterson. Last year I submitted a midrash on the Transfiguration, and that got me a spot as an alternate (12 are accepted). I had to fight the urge to unimaginatively submit the same thing again, since it got me so close before. But, I decided to expand on a journal entry I made a few years ago.  

Night Rainbows

 I had just gotten my son dressed for bed, and a wave of dissatisfaction crashed over me.   Questions raised at a church meeting about my salary had provoked defensive thoughts about my worth to the community.  What was it that I did for them exactly?  I didn’t render any service but the occasional visit to the hospital or home.  And what exactly did I speak about with people when making these visits?  How the football team was doing, how the grass was growing.  Not exactly the kinds of conversations I was having in seminary. I didn’t produce any product except for some words on Sunday, hopefully helping people deepen their relationship with God—but that isn’t exactly a measurable quantity.  I needed some inspiration, so I prayed for it.

I took these questions with me outside to smoke my pipe in what had turned out to be a cold night.  I lit my pipe and stood there focused on the shed in my back yard.  As I was standing there, it suddenly grew brighter.  The trees cast shadows on the grass.  I looked up in the sky and saw a full moon.  The low hanging clouds were moving rather quickly across the sky, and as they passed, the moon would peek out from behind them and illuminate my whole yard.  The radiance of the moon lit up the contours of each cloud moving across the dark sky.  I felt like I was on the bottom of the ocean looking up at silver gilded hulls of great ships, moving in from the north.  From time to time, Venus or Jupiter would also peek through a small break in the clouds, framing the planet momentarily.  It looked surreal, like a photo negative.  As the moon drew my yard out of darkness and cast shadows of the fence and trees, the moment also drew my mind out of the darkness of self-doubt and worry.  I went inside to get Lara, and she had just finished putting Wesley down for the night.  I asked her to get a coat and come out with me.  She was thrilled by the sight as well, and pointed out that the moon was so bright that as the clouds grew thinner at the edges, you could see the water vapors in little wispy rainbows.  Rainbows at night: Symbols of God’s promise that aren’t restrained to the light of day.  Even on a cold dark night, the moon reflects the piercing light of the sun to the extent that it can be broken into colors by the prism of water vapor.  What a miracle!  I was overcome with joy, and took it as an answer to my prayer. 

The Psalmist who wrote Psalm 65 was overcome with awe and reverence for the work of God in the natural world.  The poet lifts up the mountains and the oceans and all the things that generate a sense of wonder in the human heart.  That night, Lara looked up in the sky and said, “there is proof of God’s existence!”  She was thankful that I had shared the moment with her, and I was thankful that she had shared her experience with me. 

That moment in my first year of parish ministry has reminded me to look for the rainbows even at night.  I have learned that I can either accept the readily apparent darkness, or I can search for those uncanny and unexpected signs of God’s presence in the abyss.  God is like the wind.  Or perhaps a stronger statement that is no less true is simply that God is the wind.  The wind is more noticeable when it is blowing hard and rustling the trees.  We can see its activity by the things it moves: The leaves it blows across the yard, the tree limbs waving back and forth.  Yet we sometimes forget that we take this wind into our body and it moves us too.  It brings oxygen to our blood and powers the spark of life and consciousness.  Our relationship with our Creator is as basic as breath. 

So, any moment is “crammed with Heaven,” as Elizabeth Barrett Browning observed.  There have been many night rainbows that I have been too bogged down in myself to notice along the way.  I have been a blackberry picker.  God’s presence takes that acute awareness that Zen monks cultivate toward their own breath.  As Solomon prayed for wisdom, I pray for the attentiveness to “take off my shoes” and acknowledge the presence of God.  I pray for the patience to look at the world around me in wonder.  I pray for strength and insight to jettison all the burdensome mental cargo that makes me unwieldy and slow to shift course.  I pray for the humility to know that even when I see something spectacular, a more profound vision can be attained with the help and companionship of another.  

My question to the TRansforming Theology conference:

I heard about Transforming Theology on the Emergent Village. Looks like a bold plan, and I look forward to seeing what comes of it. At the invitation of Tony Jones and Tripp I submitted the following question to be posed to the people.

New project designed by Phillip Clayton

Lenten Discipline

I thought the MethodX description of the Ignatian examen was good. I'm linking it on the church website to give the people another option for Lenten practices. I remember learning about the examen from Andy Drietcer at Claremont. We used this book called "Sleeping with bread." That book's hard to forget and beautiful.

this video made me happy

I hear echos of Sgt. Peppers--do you?


I heard her on my Jem channel on Pandora. It's truly outrageous.

I was listening to a Brahms cd with Julianna yesterday and Prelude and Fugue in F minor. That reminded me of Jem, who I remember Nick Harcourt playing frequently on "Mornings become Eclectic" (why can't more NPR sataions be like KCRW?)

Anyway, I decided to see if "They" had a video that I could share with you, and there are two. One looks like it was made in the indie days, and one looks like it was not.

Jem - They (2005)(TMF){MTV} @ Yahoo! Video

Space Striptease! (Not that I'm complaining--it's a good song!)

Checking in on KCRW clued me in on this: Gotta love Femi Kuti

Katherine Hepburn's laugh

I enjoy little things about movies. For example, I really like the way Toby's character in American Splendor says "nyurd."

Last night, I was also enamored by Katherine Hepburn's little sarcastic laugh in Philadelphia Story. At the beginning of this clip


Long live youtube! And for the record, I consider myself a nyurd!

It's been a while

Sunny and 34 degrees

When it’s dry and cold,

You don’t even get that satisfying

puff of steam from your breath.

Trumpeting from your mouth

like visible soul.

You just walk around clear

Eyed and shocked

At the wonder

Of the cold air crammed

In your chest.

It will probably be a while

That is, before I get back to blogging on a semi-regular basis. I'm sorry, but I have this little girl smiling at me these days, and that takes a lot of time.

Something to dream on

Like a Wild Ass at Home in the Wilderness

That's the working title for a book chapter I am working on.  I'm writing about fidelity in the age of a hypersexualized, consumer driven culture.  The title of the chapter a reference to Jeremiah 2: 24, where Israel is described as a donkey in heat, sniffing the air with unrestrained lust.  I'll perhaps turn to a discussion on sexual fidelity being a celebration of relationship, vs. sexual “freedom” being the enslavement to the animal appetite.  I've been reading Rob Bell's Sex God, CS Lewis's chapter on marriage and sex in Mere Christianity, and a I've read this review of Raymond Ortland's Whoredom: God's Unfaithful Wife in Biblical Theology.   Looks good.  Anyway, that's why you have had no posts.  Does that topic sound interesting to you?  I begin with Jesus' passage to "pluck" (that word is so graphic--I always visualize a fork popping an eye right out of the socket with this noise as my mental soundtrack.) out the eyeball if it causes you lust after another.  By the way, as I was trying to find a link with that sound, I stumbled upon this.  Kinda cool.  I've used it before to get the sounds of pigs feeding for a prodigal son experiential worship setting for the Muskogee district confirmation for a couple of years now.  Well.  Back to the grindstone.  

Make a Smilebox greeting

Is God mean like Captain Hook?

Actually, "is Dod mean like Captain hook," asked Wesley (with his mouth full of Cocoa Puffs) as he thrust his crow's nest from his pirate ship at me across the dinner table.

"No," I said, "God is really nice." (Even though my recent sermon prep. has taken me through Leviticus and Joshua, so I kind of smirked at my own simple answer, considering if I were a Canaanite, I would indeed think God was like Captain Hook, or worse, but hey, the kid's three.)

"Because God loves us?" asked/stated Wesley, more a statement to be confirmed than a question to be answered.

"Yes, God loves us very much."

"But Captain Hook doesn't love anybody?"

"Hmmm.. I don't know. Maybe he loves Smee. But, do you think anyone loves Captain Hook?"

"I don't know."

"Well, maybe that's his problem! Maybe he just wants to be loved."

"Like Darth Bader?"

"Mmmm hmmm, like Darth Vader."

(Wesley wanted to see what Darth "Bader" looked like under his mask, so I cued up the scene from Return of the Jedi, and it opened up a whole world for Wesley about how sometimes villains are good on the inside and just need to be loved. I've always loved the bad guys.)

Excuse for minimal posting in Nov.

I've been enjoying these kinds of things, and that hasn't left much time to write.

Links

Did you know one original use of blogs was to keep track of links and make them available when you were away from your home computer's "add to favorites?"  I'm gonna do that now.  Feel free to connect yo-self.

http://empireremixed.wordpress.com/2008/02/14/to-hell-with-romans-13/

http://propheticheretic.wordpress.com/

http://jonnybaker.blogs.com/jonnybaker/worship_tricks/wt82.html

By the way, I'm finally getting to achieve my dream for the past 6 or 7 years of sitting at a table picking Jonny Baker's brain.  Jealous?  

The final countdown...

That song always gets stuck in my head in times like these.  Sorry for the long hiatus, but we're anticipating the birth of our daughter Julianna Lee any day now, so we've been making lots of preparations, and haven't had time to blog really.  We went to the OB today, and after doing some measurements (which aren't that accurate, but oh well) said that JuLee was about 8 pounds already--he predicted 1o pounds if we got to due date (Nov. 7).  So he let us know that if we wanted to induce, it would go lickity split.  Lara's "readings" are favorable for a quick delivery, but perhaps we're just being overly optimisic.  She had about a 18 hour labor with almost 4 hours of pushing with WG--but every pregnancy is different, right!  

So now we decide if we want to "schedule" her birth or not.  There are definate pros (like getting her out before she is gigantic), but then there's an odd feeling to tampering with nature and the "due course" of things too.  (Of course, we don't feel weird getting an epidural).  So--look forward to photos sometime soon!  Maybe not next week, but maybe so.