Tag Archive: death


The one that you feed

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May 5, 2015

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This story has become a strong (repeating) narrative, or metamessage, in my life – coming to mind at particular crossroads between easy, straight paths and narrow windy ones. Seemingly simple points of decision making around how I spend my money and how I spend my time that can feel weighted with symbolic meaning.  These are the resources I have, where do I invest them?  Every day that we live is an opportunity to invest in where our hope lies, to build – with whatever we have – the world we wish we lived in. At times the pull to do what is easy, to do what is accepted and expected can be so strong…

“I have seen too many stars to let the darkness overwhelm me”
– Macrina Wiederkehr

“What in me is dark, illumine” – John Milton

(7 Sacred Pauses)

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What is in a name?

Filed under: the art of discipleship, theopoetics — Leave a comment
April 7, 2015

NZ Nushi Wedding 007In an earlier post I mentioned copying down titles of books of poetry in a bookshop I didn’t have time to read as using them as a springboard for my own writing… here’s a few more hacks:

inside us the dead
inside us the dead
beckon on, beckon on
witnessing, waiting,
whispering:
“what will you do?”
…will you do?
“what will you do?”
…will you do?
“you are the change
you have been waiting for”

treading water
bus, train, work, train, bus
bus, train, work, train, bus

Talitha Fraser

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Thomas Merton on “becoming ourselves”

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February 23, 2015

058 - CopyThere is in us an instinct for newness, for renewal, for a liberation of creative power. We seek to awaken in ourselves a force which really changes our lives from within. And yet the same instinct tells us that this change is a recovery of that which is deepest, most original, most personal in ourselves.  To be born again is not to become somebody else, but to become ourselves.

~ Thomas Merton

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Memorial Trail to Botanical Gardens – Wellington

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September 30, 2014

010Some things… you try and catch a photo of, and you can’t.

You fiddle with the settings, try different angles, to flash or not to flash… and eventually you realise that the moment you are trying to capture, the feelings/sensations you want to remember cannot be caught by a digital imitation.

There is a sacred quiet here in the graveyard.

Birds calling to one another, the rhythmic hum of motorway traffic and constructive sounds of industry form a backdrop to the peace in this place.

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The headstones tilt at varying angles nestled in between trees and ferns, some messy and cracked, some maintained and others washed smoothly illegible by the rains of time.

I am somehow nestled in too here in the grass at the edge. I understand my place in the order of things and perhaps glimpse the rest that will one day be mine.

There is no striving in this place.
Striving is meaningless.
Here, for a moment, I am content to be.

Little black robins dart among the meadow daisies sun-blushed pink tips.

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We are not all going to die

Filed under: the art of discipleship — Leave a comment
July 29, 2014

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I will tell you something that has been a secret; that we are not all going to die, but we shall be changed.
1 Cor 15

I am hungry. I am full. I am empty. I am all these things in You.

These words from Corinthians bear hope for me. They give me a sense of space and flexibility where I have felt rigid and tight. This is the gift of Your grace and I am grateful for it.

We draw lines in the sand and then are constricted by the confines of the smallness of our own imaginations. This is why we require You and cannot trust to our own abilities.  Let me confess I am slow to seek You, You speak but I do not hear, I look but do not see what You would show because I imagine I know. Give me the grace to know all I do not know, humble me to be dependent on You always and in all things.

Is our destination to You outside of ourselves or inwards? Both at the same time? It was clever for cities of old to be built as a maze with the church at the centre.  You would always have a sense that you could not get lost because you’d have some understanding of where you stood in relation to God at all times.  Sometimes near.  Sometimes far.  Even a deadend is useful in that we have learned the way not to go.  Perhaps we find a place along the Way that is comfortable and we do not wish to go any further? Perhaps if we go too far we will not be able to find our way back? …but that is a fallacy – there is only ever forwards.  Our commitment to God needs to be this, that ‘I will keep on moving forwards’.  This page, limited to two dimensions, the image could seem to ascend or descend but it would be better to imagine some sort of Cubist mobile suspended in space and time in constant motion.

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This is our God.

This is why I – and you – can be made new

in every moment, made anew, renewed

in every moment.

 

 

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Christianity and realism

Filed under: influential reading material, radical discipleship — 1 Comment
November 14, 2011

Last night we had “Prayers in the Pergola” reflecting on Armistice day and peace, William Stringfellows article ‘The Marks of Involvement’ was referenced:

“Christians are those who take history very seriously.  They regard the day-to-day existence of the world realistically, as a way of acknowledging and honouring God’s own presence and action in the real world in which human beings live and fight and love and vote and work and die. And Christians know, more sensitively and sensibly than other people, that this is a fallen world, not an evil world but the place in which death is militant and aggressive and at work in all things. Christians know that in this world in which, apart from God’s work in all things, death is the only meaning, all relationships have been broken and all human beings suffer enstrangement from one another and alienation from themselves. Of all people, Christians are the most blunt and relentless realists.  They are free to face the world as it is without flinching, without shock, without fear, without surprise, without embarrassment, without sentimentality, without guile or disguise. They are free to live in the world as it is.”

How are we living into this understanding of reality? We are called to see and understand… perhaps especially those things at which it is uncomfortable to look too closely. We do not live in isolation. In a world where war and violence affect so many – not only today’s fight but the generationally wounded – how can we speak resurrection and hope into that?

 

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