gloriously wasteful.

"O, Lord, art thou gloriously wasteful." ~ George McDonald

a couple of weeks ago i was on a quick road trip to Buena Vista with my new friends, Ashley and Ashley. The valley that we drove through on the way to B V never ceases to amaze me. It's one of my favorite mountain ranges on earth, the collegiate peaks and the landscape never stops speaking to me. but when we were driving away from BV we saw the most incredible sunset. and i was just thinking that it seems so harsh that sunsets are so temporal, they last only for a bit and then they're gone. and what if there were people in their houses just at that time that weren't even watching. they didn't even know and it was happening right outside their windows and it would be gone by the time we could tell them. so fleeting. so beautiful. gloriously wasteful. my friend Ashley said some things weren't meant to last forever, we need to learn to let go. the only time the infinite meets the finite is in this present moment. it's so precious. like a sunset.

let it be

let the beauty you love be what you do. -Rumi.

wow. how often these two are divided - what i love and what i do or at least what i think about doing someday. God, give me the courage to do what i love. whatever the cost.
i will sacrifice my status.
though it was never much.
leave me a vagabond.
leave me outside.
but God my God
leave me love.

solidarity.

the word for this past weekend is "solidarity".

"a union of purpose."
"a fellowship of responsibilities and interests."

i didn't know the guy sleeping at my feet.
but that's ok. he didn't know me.
and i don't know the children.
but i know they are people.
i know they have names.
i know they have faces.
i know they are part of humanity
and i am nothing without them.

this church.

i was reminded of this quote by something my friend, lic, said...

i love this church, this living, pulsing, sinning People of God, with a crucifying passion. Why? For all the Christian hate, i experience here a community of love. For all the institutional idiocy, i find here a tradition of reason. For all the individual repression, i breathe here an air of freedom. For all the fear of sex, i discover here the redemption of my body. in an age so inhuman, i touch here tears of compassion. in a world so grim and humorless i share here rich joy and earthy laughter. in the midst of death, i hear an incomparable stress on life. For all the apparent absence of God, i sense here the real presence of Christ.

~ Walter Burkhardt

i love the last line.

the transcendnce of things

hmm, i met this man at the coffee shop with a fascinating mind. in
trying to find the root of my mysterious attraction to languages he
started in on this grand metaphor of the transcendent quality of
music. he said the magic of a piece of music is not in the note
itself, but rather it's what happens inbetween the notes. yeah,
so, a brilliant musician is brilliant not for what he plays but for
what he doesn't play... he never really finished the metaphor
or the comparison, but i guess what he was getting at was
that both language and music are in this one sense very
mathmatical and formulaic, but really they are mostly
this abstract, unfathomable interaction of ideas. so,
we can learn our scales and memorize our
grammatical structures. but we're really
not touching the essence of these
things. their beauty is
transcendent.
may i speak
less. and
strum
less.
more.