584 Million Miles To Love

By the end of today we had beat God, framed Him to a cross and after He had died, lunged a razor sharp spear up through His abdomen just below His ribs perhaps slicing his lung in half and piercing His heart just for proof measure.  We can be a violent lot.  I laid under the stars last night, as is my habit, staring at the Big Dipper as it has moved up in the night sky.  The earth, after traveling some 584 million miles has once again come back to the place it was last year at this time and on that day 2000 years ago.  Same Big Dipper stood witness above us killing God.  I stared and wondered why I was not feeling more, why it seemed just another Thursday night in any old week.  As I lay there in the dark I was Slowly and Gently reminded it was not a feeling I should be looking for but a Love within me that I could not explain, a love for God and His Son Jesus.  A love for others that loved these same Two.  A love even for those I never meet or know, a love that seems to grow in me like some great golden tree with silver leaves that drop among those I meet.  A love that for the life of me I cannot create nor explain, a love that I am unworthy of but is gifted to me anyway.  I had that love, I could feel it.  I stood up and walked back into the house.

Ruben's Decent From The Cross

Choose to Remember Him

Be happy!  Be joy filled!  Choose contentment!  Circumstances are often the defining cause of being.  As events go so goes my way of being.  But there is a choice.  We have been given a mind and better yet a soul and spirit that can dictate to us our mood and demand of our body its expression.  The sun must rise and the cow must graze all the daylong but man, by grace unfathomable, can choose, even in the direst situation, to be hope filled.  Now writing it or reading it does not make it so.  It is a way of living; I choose to live in remembrance of Him.

Mary Magdalene, by Jan van Scorel
shown with vile of costly perfume

Baby Elephants

What is redeemed imagination?  Planting light and growing suns, sowing color and rainbows sprouting all in a row.  Bathing in mink and carrots tasting like doughnuts.  Bears as pets, baby elephants that never grow up and roam your neighborhood.  Living life over again if you wish and over again and again if you want, piano playing learned in a day and talking to dead dads on your cell.  Homes on quiet beaches, flying on carpets and invisibility.  24 hours of perfection in any thing you want, full moons with lovers on trains and great, great, great, grandchildren.  Consciousness of newborns thoughts, knowing where all earths buried treasure is and bodies and minds that never grow old.

On Grace, Rain and Satan; New God For Old Rains

Rain should make us think of God for it need not ever rain.  Dawn, likewise, should evoke a sincere praise, for no one can spin the earth.   But these are old thoughts and this morning makes for me an old God.  What would You do this morning that should remind me you are God, God New, God always creating new?  People I hope to see in heaven?  That’s it?  Ok let’s see.  Pilate, who sold his soul in front of all of us, could be a thankful surprise for how often do I hide Thee when Thou art inconvenient.  Old warhorses (not people), safe and secure, retired from the obedient role of rushing their masters into their shared death. 

Hitler, the one least likely to make any list but surely could find himself, at the last moment, inside Thy Grace.  For if it be Grace and if it be free to all then it can be for any one of the all even the worst one.   

Shall I dare say Satan?  Max Lucado did in Cosmic Christmas.  He was the first man who opened my eyes to scandalous grace.  If Satan, his heinous self, came crippled to his senses, cried out to his maker, “forgive me!” then perhaps scandalous grace would be something far grander than any word we might imagine for it.  His ways and words are not ours and to what degree has this grace been bent to include me?  

Maybe only a degree or two less!

Rothko's Blue and Grey
Hopefully at the last moment he got in.

A Pilgrimage

When I was in graduate schools, years ago in the early 80’s, there was a place spoken of in the most reverent terms, Black Mountain College.  It was an artist retreat deep in the mountains of North Carolina where the great modernist masters of the 40’s and 50’s would go and make art, listen to the great thinkers of the day and delve into the great questions of life.  Artists like Kline, deKooning, Motherwell, Albers, DeStabler, Volkous would be joined by Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, Greenburg and others to grapple with the great philosophical and artistic issues of their day.  The school opened in 1933 and closed in 1957.  It has always been a dream of mine to make a pilgrimage there and to stand on that most sacred artistic ground.  Yesterday I did.  Betty, Chris Nadaskay and I found it yesterday.  The college is now a YMCA boy’s camp but all the old buildings still remain.  We walked through the hallowed halls of the main studio room, a long, lumbering building on massive pillars laid out of the mountains along the valley below.  I had seen pictures of this particular building, old black and white photograph of artist standing, frozen forever in time and in my heart.  Art seemed to hold great promise for a world battered by world war but here I was standing where the hope had long since been abandoned.  There was something profoundly sad about the place even though now it was brightened by the sound of young boys playing gaily in the meadow by the lake.  The promise had not been fulfilled, not panned out, not secured nirvana.  We left the studio, now a dormitory for all the camp counselors.  I wondered if any of them realized what genius had worked where they now slept?  No, their life and the lives of the artists who once worked there were as isolated from one another as the peace was from the high hopes of those same artists.  There was one last task that I had set before me.  We walked out into the mountains that surround the school, deep into the forest still bare from winter until we found a ticket of green mountain laurel and there began the end of my pilgrimage.  Stone by stone we built an altar until its height reached an appropriate point that I felt satisfied that God would know I meant business.  We then held hands around the altar and prayed that God would send a great awakening to Christian artists and the church that would bring souls too bring Him glory.  That at this point and this time we meant to mark the earth in a way that would ask Him for His help in renewing the minds and hearts of the church in the still great unfinished work of peace on earth and good will toward men.

The Altar of The Hope of a
New Great Awakening

Outside The Veil

Black Mountain NC

There are two types of hotel rooms. Those that you can open the curtains and view the dawn secured by height from the eyes of the world.  And then the type that I find myself in this morning, securely locked away from prying eyes and dawn by the second story and the door that opens directly to it. I can hear the dawn that the birds are singing in and I know I am deep in the Appalachians but they are in the holy of holies and I am locked outside the veil.

Giovanni Battista Lombardi, Veiled Women
I have seen this piece at the high in Atlanta and am
always locked away from knowing her by her veil.
A true masterpiece.