~ life in all its wonder ~

When King Lear dies in Act V, do you know what Shakespeare has written?

He's written "He dies."

That's all,

nothing more.

No fanfare,

no metaphor,

no brilliant final words.

The culmination of the most influential work of dramatic literature is "He dies." It takes Shakespeare, a genius, to come up with "He dies."

And yet every time I read those two words, I find myself overwhelmed with dysphoria.

And I know it's only natural to be sad,

but not because of the words "He dies."

but because of the life we saw prior to the words.

I've lived all five of my acts, Mahoney, and I am not asking you to be happy that I must go.

I'm only asking that you turn the page, continue reading... and let the next story begin.

And if anyone asks what became of me, you relate my life in all its wonder, and end it with a simple and modest "He died."

…Your life is an occasion. Rise to it.

(from Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium)


image attribution

Stick a fork in it?

*** I started writing this post two weeks ago, and then promptly forgot about it as I prepared for my move. So, my thanks go out to Rachel Held Evans (whose writing is always entertaining, thought-provoking, and refreshingly cordial) for a recent post that reminded me to resurrect my own thoughts.

Riding the coat tails of collapsing Evangelicalism, there has been much discussion as of late on the demise of emerging Christianity. Not only is Emergent dead, the Church, herself, has apparently returned to dust, as well.

It’s sad really, because I was just getting to know the emerging church, and she seemed to have a rather rosy glow to her cheeks, even if her demeanor had grown a bit melancholy.

Ironically, even while some theologians were declaring the death of God as transcendent being in the 60’s, theologians such as John Howard Yoder and Harvey Cox were working to remind us of everything the Church could be, if she would only allow herself.

I come from the Protestant tradition, and we are a fickle crew.

Some of us are only just now coming around to admitting that our brothers and sisters in the Catholic Church might actually be followers of Christ, and we’ve largely ignored the Eastern Orthodox believers all together. And, while we have seemed to release the radicalism of the Anabaptists from our collective memory, we have relegated them to antiquity rather than learn from all they have to share with the Body. It took us awhile to adjust to the idea of a Non-Denominational congregation but, as it began to meet the needs of those dissatisfied with their denominational structures and authorities, we’ve softened to the concept.

This emerging church, however, this blurring of the lines between our neatly defined categories of Christians, is simply too much to stomach. After all, we’ve already protested anything that needed to be disapproved. In fact, we’ve finally managed to fix everything that has happened since the Great Schism, and get back to our golden age under Constantine.

Why on earth do these young people want to mess with a good thing?

We seem to have a natural drive for independence, which has resulted in multiple versions of “church”. However, what we are going to have to understand, that many in previous generations have preferred not to admit, is that we must intentionally seek interdependence.

We must seek community.

I was part of a congregation that had a controlling personality as its “authority”. That person claimed that what set “Church” apart from “not-Church” was the presence of elders, appointed with spiritual authority. Unfortunately, those elders deferred any disputes with the pastor to him, without offering support or protection to the congregation members, and also vowed to support him because it was “his church.” Based on what I have studied and what I have experienced, I can not help but believe it is not proper authority that identifies the Church of Christ, but rather proper community.

This isn’t some wacky idea I pulled out of a hat.

Anabaptists (You know, those other people who were around during the Reformation? The ones who either got out of control or got ignored?) have long acknowledged the function of community as authority, rather than a centralized group or individual figure as authority. Phyllis Tickle alluded to this idea when she attempted to answer the question “Where, now, is our authority?” (for which she was quickly criticized for undermining the doctrine of “sola scriptura”). Mrs. Tickle suggested that authority in the Church arises not solely from an individual reading, interpreting, and applying scripture, but rather from the engagement of the community with the scripture, discerning together under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. (Please see Acts 15.)

I will stand firmly with those who say you can’t simply walk away from church and do Christianity on your own. Christianity is not an individualistic faith, it requires loving and serving and trusting and wrestling in community to grow and develop. I know there are exceptions (for instance, someone locked away in solitary confinement), but we are designed for community.

At the same time, I will question those who claim that Christianity can not be done outside the walls of a clearly defined institutional building.

No matter what is dead,

No matter what is dying,

Christianity as we know it is changing

And the Church can not turn a blind eye and pretend it isn’t so.

There will be expressions of the Church that do not look like what we have called church for hundreds of years. But, make no mistake, they will be the Church. And if these expressions include neighbors becoming deeply involved in loving those around them and sharing the hope that comes from Christ into specific situations with which they are connected in a hands-on way, we are going to be wasting our breath trying to convince the recipients of that grace that what they are experiencing as Church is not real, and that coming into a building and listening to someone with “authority” teach on verses of scripture and then send everyone out to “love and serve” is what constitutes Church.

Hear me correctly, I am not saying there is no longer a place for a congregation that gathers in a specific location, at a specific time, on a specific day, to receive teaching from someone who has been identified as gifted with the ability to discern and communicate scriptural teachings. It does mean, that if those congregations do not begin to value the gifts of the whole Body, to see the building and living out of day-to-day authentic community as putting flesh on the weekly gathering, to invite other voices into the process of discernment, to value the authority of community over the power of an individual, they will slowly cease to have any significant impact in a rapidly changing, global, pluralistic society where historical Christian “authority” is not recognized, but where the love of Christ followers can break through.

There was a time when the Church expanded from private homes to public cathedrals, and there is now a time when the Church is expanding beyond the boundaries of any structure. In an increasingly networked society, the Church is going to have both intimate local expressions and integrating cyber expressions which will serve to challenge and inform one another. Some of these local expressions will continue to gather weekly in a building with a steeple, while some will gather in homes, in bars, in parks, and under bridges.

In fact, some crazy Christians will even go so far as to live together in community, sharing posessions and meals, offering hospitality and serving their neighbors.

The Church is not dead.

But nether is she static.

And as our world comes to understand how interconnected we truly are,

So must the Church.

May we listen.

May we learn.

May we love.

A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.
(John 13:34-35)

~ weightless ~

And I always go to pieces,
and I have it in my mind
that the sky is tall and heavy,
when I could be brave.
~ The Innocence Mission

I reckon Heaven is a place
where everything is weightless, yeah
even heavy things are weightless, yeah
up there we'll never fight at all.
~ Old 97’s

If you ask me, the people who get the most out of life are the ones who don’t ask questions. I wish I was this kind of person. I was at Crème the other morning and heard a girl tell another girl about her previous night’s date and I kept wondering how she could go on about her date without knowing what love is for and what it means. I kept wondering how she could be excited about something when there was no philosophical map that would tell her where she was going and whether or not arriving there would give her a sense of closure and fulfillment. And there is a man who delivers library books to the library downstairs and the other day when he was carrying cartons of books into the library I wondered if he ever got tempted to drive the truck off the Sellwood bridge because he knew it was filled with a million ideas that contradicted each other. There are times when I think an act like that might be righteous. But I don’t know why.

I have a friend who has the uncanny ability to live in the moment. He manages a Bi-mart and has a wife and he doesn’t think about the future and doesn’t think about the past and to me he is like a person floating on his back in a river and only thinks about the rapids when he finds himself in the rapids.

~ Donald Miller
A Million Miles in a Thousand Years (early manuscript)

image attribution

~ proximity ~

"We have these deeper friendships because we've tried to build a life in one place. They sprang up because the stuff of life happened to this cluster of us living near one another, and much of it was too joyous or heartbreaking not to share with someone. If friendship is the key to happiness, then maybe this is the key to friendship, to be enmeshed -- not just tangentially or voyeuristically, but physically -- in the lives of others. That can be hard to swallow in a culture that prizes individualism, mobility and privacy."

~ Tony Woodlief

(SOURCE)

How to Start a Conspiracy

Harold Crick: So, are you a frequenter of the Metropolitan Transit Authority too?
Ana Pascal: No. I'm just late.
Harold Crick: Big flag burning to get to?
Ana Pascal: Actually, it's my weekly evil-conspiracy and needlepoint group. You wanna come?
Harold Crick: I left my thimbles and socialist reading material at home.

Phase one: collect underpants. No wait, that’s how to start a corporation, not a conspiracy. Starting a conspiracy is much easier. You simply have to get people together who share a common goal.

Generally, that goal undermines a currently existing system. If the system is good, a conspiracy can be bad. If the system is not-so-good, a conspiracy can be rather helpful.

I’m plotting a little conspiracy of my own.

But not on my own… that would defeat the whole purpose.

I’m plotting a conspiracy of community.

I’m hoping this community can conspire together to see the Kingdom of God lived out in our little city. The upside-down kingdom - the one where things like love, peace, patience, contentment and hope are valued over things like selfishness, power, anxiousness, greed and despair.

We’re trying something a bit radical.

You see, it takes a bit of a while for some of the new ways of thinking to trickle this far down past the Mason-Dixon Line (and east of the Republic). So the reasoning is, why don’t we get people interested in the missional, emergent, monastic and multi-ethnic streams of the church together in one big (well, ok, not-so-big) conversation? After all, we’re going to overlap in a lot of places, and we’re going to have to figure out how to work through the places we don’t overlap while still keeping our relationships in tact. You know, that whole “by this will all men know you are my disciples, if you love one another” thing?

So, if you are in Central Arkansas, or you were, will be, or want to be, I invite you into the conversation… I mean, CONSPIRACY!

Check out: http://www.community-conspiracy.blogspot.com/ (or click through to the Facebook page)

How I Met Your Mom

Once upon a time, I had a real friend named Kevin. He’s a pretty cool guy. After many years of not seeing each other, we became virtual friends. In fact, he has just returned from a Facebook sabbatical. I get to see his face in a couple of weeks and finally meet his famously (at least among my circle) awesome wife, which got me to thinking about how we met… which in turn got me thinking about how I met several people… which in turn made me decide to turn my memories into a semi-entertaining post (at least for those of us who lived them).

Kevin. We’ll start with Kevin, seeing as he was the instigator. It was a bit of a fateful meeting, but we won’t get into all of that. I had chosen, along with one of my best friends from high school, to attend a small Southern Baptist university near to home. At the time, the idea of living together for four years at the same place where we attended summer camp seemed brilliant. We were a bit delusional, but we were young and impressionable and would eventually learn to make wiser decisions. After surviving our freshman year, we had decided to move in with another friend for sophomore year, shoving all three beds into one room and using her solo room as a living room. In hindsight, overcrowding was probably yet another lapse in good judgment, but again I digress. So, one night we’re hanging out in the near empty student center, I believe with the goal of studying. Instead, we were engaged in a rousing game of “Remember When…” For those of you unfamiliar with the game, which I’m quite sure we didn’t make up on our own, it’s basically where you ask someone if they “remember when” you or they did something you or they are currently or considering doing. For instance, I would say, “Hey, remember when we went to the Student Center to study, but instead we just wasted a whole lotta time?” And she would laugh, and then reply, “Remember when you suggested we study, and I laughed at you?” As she was falling off of the cushion we were sitting on, I would respond “Remember when you fell on your butt ‘cause you were laughing so hard, and I didn’t even help you off the ground?” On and on it would go… we were easily entertained. We were having such a good time, we failed to notice that there were, indeed, a few other people around. One in particular, a skinny freshman boy with long, thin hair, appeared to find our little game amusing, and approached us to make introductions and join in the fun. And that, my friends, is how I met Kevin Still.

Ines. Ines just so happens to be one of my favorite people in the universe, so she’s a very lucky girl. I had been visiting Mosaic on Sunday evenings for awhile, and still attending my home church in the mornings. When our pastor of umpteen years announced his looming retirement, I suddenly found myself wanting to be there on Sunday nights, so I missed a few weeks at Mosaic. In the meantime, they had hired some girl from Tejas to interpret the services in Spanish. Supposedly, she was pretty cool. So, Gretchen and I were headed over to Angelika & Cari’s house to join Angelika, Philip (always the lone male), some girls from India and this new chica for an evening at Electric Cowboy. If ever there was a group that should have found something to do other than Electric Cowboy, it was us. But I like the fact that I first met Ines in the living room of the Taylor St. house on the way to a bar, rather than in the actual worship service. After she FINALLY finished studying so hard, we became even better friends – but I will never forget that first encounter.

Ramon. …or Josh. It’s kind of a chicken-and-egg scenario. Whoever came first, I met through Rob. It was actually a generic Sunday afternoon, and we were having our monthly community meal at church. I can’t remember if I met Josh first or Ramon first, but I ended up at a table with both of them, and one introduced me to the other. By the end of the meal we had concocted a plan to form a “Christian Artists Guild” in Little Rock. We actually had a few follow up meetings with other folks and worked at drafting mission statements and such. It soon fell by the wayside, but at least formed a foundation for a lasting friendship. I can't imagine not knowing Ramon, so the circumstances of our meeting seem almost inconsequential.

Gretchen. A tall, pale girl walks into a rush party and says… well, I don’t remember what she said, but it was likely odd. Or perhaps she was in Ginger mode, in which case she would have presented as a proper Southern lady fit for polite society. I remember that she was only there because her friend was going through rush and wanted her company. Somehow Gretchen survived all three nights of parties and invitations without running for sanity, and even went so far as to accept a Tri Chi bid. I think someone spiked her punch. Every member gave pledge week “duties” to an assigned number of pledges. Gretchen was one of those assigned to me. Her duty was to make a “Top Ten Reasons Why Al Gore Will Make a Great President” poster and deliver it to my dear friend Aaron Black (aka, Mr. Republican). I was in love with Al Gore. I had a framed picture of him in my dorm room which was attacked on a regular basis. She refused my duty. With a straight face, I consistently reminded her that she had to fulfill her duty for pledge week. With a straight face, she consistently refused to submit to my obvious authority. She thought I hated her. I thought she was hilarious. It’s been love ever since…

Pollacks. I had the pleasure of spending this weekend with the prettiest Pollack child, and Lizzie and I were discussing who in the family I knew first. Kathy wins that award. Mosaic had a women’s shopping trip planned for Memphis. I was planning to be in Memphis that weekend, but not to shop. I had a ticket to see Nanci Griffith and the Chieftains at Shelby Farms. A dream concert if there ever was one. A few days before the show, my car broke down. Not possessing the fortitude of many a great get-to-the-show-come-hell-or-high-water movies, I wept. Then I decided to join Ines & Sarah for the women’s outing. So close, yet so far away. Us “young girls” had a blast laughing in our room & venturing out to see “Legally Blonde 2”. Somehow I woke up early, so I went downstairs to drink coffee and read in the lobby. Kathy came downstairs with someone else, and I sat with them for a while and talked with Kathy. I was smitten. She was my new friend. I either met Kendall or Jason next – I taught Kendall in Sunday school (actually, we spent more time sitting outside the class & talking about Lord of the Rings, but that counts in my book) and I met Jason through our Tuesday Evening Dinners ™. Eventually, Kathy introduced me to her sons Marty & Brad. I’m not sure at what point I met Allen. Liz & Thomas came last, but certainly not least. Not one to play favorites, I’ll just say I love them all the same, just different.

I suppose that’s enough stories for now. I’m sure there are plenty more. And then there are those who I can’t recall formally meeting, but with whom I have plenty of other fabulous memories. For instance, Angelika, Meredith, each and every one of my roommates…

deadly consequence of a woman's silence

from CNN:

"I was raped when I was 6 years old," she recalled. Her attacker was a local shopkeeper. Makoni said her mother would not allow her to report the abuse.

"She said, 'Shh, we don't say that in public,' " Makoni remembered. "I had no shoulder to cry on."

Three years later, she witnessed her father murder her mother. In that moment, Makoni said she realized the potentially deadly consequence of a woman's silence.

"I told myself that no girl or woman will suffer the same again," she said.

What have you done for me lately?

I’ve had a few writer/director crushes in my lifetime.


One of the strongest, unmistakably, was one mister Richard Linklater.

Ours was a love-at-first-site kind of relationship, destined to stand the test of time (and questionable improprieties such as Bad News Bears).


In college, while still maintaining an ever growing affection for Richard, I found myself unintentionally attracted to Edward Burns.

or, Ed, as I like to call him.

Eddie, if he has produced a particularly delightful film.

I don’t know if it’s the writing, per se, or the hypnotizing crinkly eyes… but, I digress.


Most recently, I have found myself drawn to Zach Helm with a passion I thought myself incapable of in this phase of my life.

What can I say? He swept me off my feet with his irresistible turns of phrase and an irrepressible zest for life.


But once upon a time, there was another man.

A man who had almost drifted into a faint memory, had it not been for Chris Eigeman weaseling his way into Gilmore Girls and resuscitating long dormant images of socialites, cocktails, and longings for lives of significance.

I first read of Whit Stillman between the pages of Jane Pratt’s Sassy Magazine.

Before converting to Christianity, Sassy was the guide to who I was planning to become… and afterward, it remained a guilty pleasure and subtle reminder of who I could have been, had I not been under the impression that God had an apparent distaste for uniqueness in his creation.

In a tiny corner article, I spied a still frame from Metropolitan and a brief synopsis of the movie that was immediately placed at the top of my rental list.

Barcelona would send me off to college and Last Days of Disco would celebrate my entry into the real world, but suddenly Whit went silent and I allowed my scandalous affair with the bourgeoisie subculture to lapse into an inexplicable youthful discretion.

But every now and then, I think of Whit, and I find myself longing to don pearls and a little black dress while waxing philosophical about the state of the world (which obviously revolves around me).

There are rumors that he’s back in town, and may soon grace us with his presence once again.

I try not to believe them.

I’m not sure my heart, or conscience, could handle it.

But in a tiny corner of my soul, I hold out hope for the return of the expatriate.

Perhaps he will gift us with something to show how his characters have matured - a mirror of my own transformation.

After all, a girl never forgets her first crush.