Winding About Below The Leaves

They appear for no apparent reason in the woods,
They sometimes bury themselves,
Level with the ground and are difficult to see.

Sometimes several loom up, large and long, hiding below the leaves,
And they twine amongst each other, merging and splitting, appearing and dissappearing, like strange, long eskers or indian mounds.
Streams and roads cut them abruptly, but they don't notice or care.

Up and down they go, following the landscape, but not too quickly: mounding up hugely when the land drops away, digging in when hills crop up.

Trains need gentle grades, you see.
Sometimes I imagine ghosts of the engines that used to run on these old railbeds, chuffing among the trees.

Life is a bit like these railbeds perhaps. Sometimes solitary, other times not, sometimes prominent, other times low and humble. Most raibeds, once abandoned, become part of the landscape, weather away, or are mined for their rock. Some railbeds never fall from use, while others may lie sleeping for decades even a century before someone finds value in them and decides to take that path again.

May your path be level and take you through pleasant places, and may it guide, support and inspire those who come after you, through the landscape of life.

A Threefold Vision

I had a dream
I dreampt I should do three things
And I have done

One solved a problem in my home,
One solved a worry about my church,
And one of them solved a worry about my life.

None of these things got done in exactly the way I dreamed, in reality, each has been different, more complex, and better.

The third one was to build this blog.
In my dream it was called 'Book of Signs', but that name wasn't available, so here is 'Signs, Dreams, and Visions', something I dreamed, and then did.

How do we know if a dream is holy? Maybe if it comes true, better than you imagined.

May we have many such dreams.

Topics

I am glad to look at the list of topics to the left, and see that I speak about 'Love' more than I do 'God', of 'Mission' and 'Stewardship' (and I think good stewardship is mission) more than 'Prayer' and 'Faith'. I think I could have discussed Creation, our Arisen World, Eucharist and Family more, and suspect that I really just failed to mark everything I should as 'Theology', if only because everything written here about love or God is, in my opinion, theology.

God is love, and where love is, God himself is there.

'Good' Friday

I never got 'Good Friday'.

Who are they kidding?

Easter might be 'Good Sunday'

But 'Good Friday'?

'Good'?

It boggles the mind, being nailed to a tree and left to hang till dead.

It sure doesn't seem good to me.

More like nasty friday, evil friday, bad, rotten and twisted friday.
The friday we blew it, got it wrong, put an innocent saint to death because he freaked out the priests.

Unless there is something more going on here.

Unless Jesus died obediently on the cross, when he needent do so, and unless his death did something more, moved something in heaven and earth, proved, demonstrated, saved, redeemed...

But what? I propose that, apart from the resurrection, Jesus' death on the cross was a powerful act. Jesus, God incarnate, came to live with us, and suffered and died like us.

Jesus, was, after all, 'God with us'. And in Jesus, God proved his willingness to be with us through the worst that life can dole out. God did not leap off the cross, step out of the role when it got tough, painful, and mortifying. No, God was faithful to the end.

God IS with us.

What Thursday is It?

Mandatum novum do vobis ut diligatis invicem sicut dilexi vos

It is, in the end, all about love.

Not about the mechanics of sin,
Not about the celestial engineering of salvation.
Not about blind faith, or creeds, or covenants, or even confession.

This day is commonly named "Maundy Thursday", or, if you prefer, "Commandment Thursday".

We are so good at remembering the old words, but we forget the meaning, if we knew it. And we put the emPHAsis on the wrong sylAble. Or in this case, the wrong word.

What is this Thursday commandment?

A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another as I have loved you

If we must use the Latin, it shouldn't be Maundy (Mandatum-Mandate or command) Thursday. It should be Diligatis Thursday.

Or in the Greek, 'Agape':
Today was Agape Thursday;
'Love Thursday'.

It is, in the end, all about love.

Go forth to love and serve each other, every one, and in doing so, know that you serve the Lord.

Our life, it is a struggle

There is work to do here
And in doing it we're blessed

But it is not all fun
And sometimes we get depressed

It tastes sometimes of vinegar
Of sweat
And blood
And tears

And death is often not
The greatest of our fears

Paul reminds us that we're not alone, of the body we are a part

And passing on we are suprised how much of us are heart.

Our life, it is a struggle
There is a lot for us to do

But God blesses us and keeps us
And hereafter will make us new

So lift your hearts and lift your heads and press forward to the goal.
There is great honour in the fight that purifies your soul.

We are all one in God's great scheme, in God no lonely ways.

But myriads of blessings over an infinity of days.

God Must Get Kind Of Dizzy

God must get kinda dizzy
As we shoot across the sky
As we arc across the galaxy
As the stars go spinning by

As we spin and twirl and wobble
As we swing around the sun
And that dang moon keeps on zipping past
Eyeing mankind can't be fun

And God's eyes must be real sharp
If he can pick our small selves out
Us who live in a thin film of gas,
On this rock that whirls about

I mean, we're not even one-tenth a mote
Some dust caught by the light
I couldn't pick us out from among the stars if I were to squint with all my might

And yet God loves us every one
Us mites perched on a flea
And cares for each and every one
However small we be

So let us try so show some care
For those flecks of life like us
Who dwell on this tiny blue-ish speck
Of cast off stellar dust