I Am Pro-Life

I am Pro-Person.  If anyone wins the chance of being a human being I am all for them being realized to their fullest extent.  Personhood to me does not mean a fully grown human but it is the spark of hope for all humans, the conception of the human between a man and a woman.  Pro-life is like seeing a person in line at the market.  You smile and wish them a good day.  As a person, you are helping to make the existence of the other person better.  If the person was a different human than me, say a very special person, it would not make my smile any more important or their life less deserving.  Getting the chance to be a human being is the greatest cosmic lottery win, the mega ball of being.  In fact, the whole cosmos in total pales in comparison to the loveliness of being a human, and at its most vulnerable is when it needs all of us to be the most kindly attentive to its chances.  Canceling its chances,  the finality of that is so cruelly inhuman as to not really be worthy of humanity at all and should not be the choice of one human over another.  Life is its own arbitrator, to be or not to be, without any other life placing undue hardship on them becoming all that they can be.                     

Imagine all the millions of really good, really kind people who we have canceled their right to choose.  The personhood of any single person is a debate for the theology and philosophy departments but the fact of a person is so exquisite at every point from conception on, making debate moot.  A human being at two cells miraculously splitting to four is a hat trick left to God, The Divine, and we don’t get to play there.  All cultures put multiple and varied choice limits on the human being, I cannot willfully take my neighbor's ladder nor set the same ladder up in a children’s playground.  But again the choice for me always comes down to giving every human the best chance for being a human, it is the kind thing to do. 

  

 

Five Years Ago and for Eternity

There are deeply liturgical acts that one can do outside the confines of the church building but well within the home God made called earth.  One of these is altar building.  Our family builds altars.  I do not know why we started, but I do have a picture of the first one.  It was celebrating the gift of our first piece of earth we owned, (on loan from God).   The picture is below.  But I regress.  Yesterday, in celebration of a great milestone in our family and a greater need for thanksgiving and praise, we built an altar, For Thou O Lord, to give God praise, honor, and thanksgiving for His miraculous healing of our sweet Mary Elizabeth Benson Carbonell five years ago.  Yesterday was one of the grandest days of our family's history.  We gave God praise, we gave Sissy gifts of commemoration, we prayed, held one another, wept in joy, sang, worshiped, and built an Altar to acknowledge Him.  At sunset, we listened to the song below, raised hands and sweet laughter to our Lord, sang again our anthemed Doxology, anointed For Thou O Lord, and prayed again, the bow on our collective hearts to God.  Amen.  

The Altar, For Thou O Lord.

Our family's first Altar.

Holding The Line

We are knee-deep in the Great Appalachian Mountains, neck deep in abundance, and over our head in Bensons/Carbonells.  We are at the family reunion.  Children galore, laughing hysterically, dogs constantly underfoot, cold streams, warm sun, smokey evening mountains, and goodness abounds; good food, good times, good people, good love, and an ever-increasing Good God.  A family is the most treasured gift, the fortifications of relations, the sturdy wall, the castle on a hill, those that will not vary, will all be steady, hold the line, the ties that bind, got your back…the unbroken circle.  It is also where there is never a quarter given, one's shortcomings, baubles, stumbles, and yikes are cause of the greatest tease fest, the test of all members is; we do not take ourselves too seriously.  God? Absolutely! Love? In every way! Support! Never questioned! Blood? You are always one of us! A member? Lifelong, no exceptions!  But yourself? HA HA HA!  Mercy, Grace, Faith, and Hope is our tale but love, a family’s love is the greatest.  

God is great!

God is good!

Let us thank Him,

For family!

Fatherhood

For never a man has experienced the giving of life in birth.  It must be profound and imminently fulfilling.  However, there is an earthly role more so.  Fatherhood.  Fatherhood means, of all things, an abiding responsibility for the complete wellbeing of another.  It is often run from, denied, and sadly put off for things valued at no more than baubles or trinkets, a trading of the Devine right for the bowl of soup.  As I can never know the ecstasy of birth my lover can never know the meaning of fatherhood.  It is, aside from salvation, the greatest and most important role of humankind, the exquisite burden of responsibility, for the life of those who will always remain in a father's heart, their small child.  However to fully know fatherhood is to know the hood overarches the mother and lover as well.      

Money, Money, Money, Money; MONEY...NOT!

Our money system is showing its faults.  So much of our wealth is made up of only 0&1 and then translated to $ on our monthly statements and we assume wealth.  This type of wealth is not gold but faith, faith that everyone is confident in everyone’s willingness to work, to contribute, to be together.  But it is more fundamental, our wealth is a product of us all agreeing to be one, to turn at the end of each day and say we are one, to be agreeable.  This agreeableness builds strong countries, cultures, communities, and families. Each of these groups is a powerful force for good, combined; an overwhelming force.  That is the fault of our monetary system.  We have begun to dissolve our union, our force for good, and in that our true wealth is evaporating, seeping through our fingers as we shake our fists at one another. 

 

Fair Haven

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge.  The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one’s own homestead.

George Eliot

 

Do We Really Need Seconds?

The earth is mostly a quiet place, gentle and slow, a piddlier much like the Tennessee River in front of me.  Growing is a quiet process, trees, grass, and flowers all come about in no hurry.  We grow slow ourselves, our past a fleeting second but our present slows to a crawl.  An oddity is the frantic nature by which we live in the present, adding more and more in hopes of adding more and more.  It might be in the adding we are actually depleting the awareness of living, the ability to know we are alive which creates in us a very dear gratefulness that we are.  The earth is ancient and its smallest measurement of time is a day, morning to morning.  A day is probably the smallest amount of time we are meant to acknowledge, 24 hours.  That is enough to give us the time necessary to knowingly live the awareness of the sacredness of living.  Seconds, minutes, and hours are too fast for the earth and us.  These time increments we invented to produce a faster pace than the earth allows with its snail-ish pace of days.  A day gives us time, slow enough time to do away with hurry.  A day is the perfect measurement of time and perfectly suited for our living living.  Have a good day.    

     

Falling Down

Fell down.  When was the last time you fell down before God?  If you have never you have missed one of the greatest experiences of life, the knowing of yourself in the presence of God, your most physical act you will have ever lived.   

Rosalee's holy of holies

There is perhaps a holy of holies in this eden of ours we call Fair Haven.  This is hyperbole, but the metaphor is apt in its understanding of the universal nature of God’s grace; if you are looking for holy spaces because the earth is his and all those that dwell therein, you often find them.  So I will continue with my story and hope that you can have ears to hear.  This holy place is our neighbor’s Rosalee making.  It is a ramshackled old hut patched and held together here and there by additions over 30 or 40 years.  A shack done old school, much like your great grandmother's beautiful old quilt made from scraps of cloth cut out of long worn and worn-out old clothes.  This shack is a patchwork of material that was handy at the time.  But the reality is that the shack is actually the veil surrounding the holy of holies.  When you pull back the veil the garden of holy eden opens to you and is filled with the most gloriest of glory filled radiance; God’s actual goodness in flower form; orchids.  Now orchids are enchanting for many reasons but form and color are the most treasured.  I don’t know the fairy tale that brought Rosalee, orchids, and God together but the tale is as filled with miraculous glory as any you might have read.  It is the enchanted forest, the emerald isle, the ancient Eden albeit in the fallen world.  My wife and I have been given the gracious southern gift of “dropping in” any time our hearts need rededicated to the God of all graces…and Rosalee’s eden always brings us back to Him.