trotter – it’s like a Mexican bus!tank – it’s a white truck.
It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.Teddy Roosevelt
For My Mother, On Her Birthday.Once, when I was in my early twenties, either twenty-three or twenty-four, I remember driving somewhere with Mom. I was depressed. I don’t remember what had depressed me, but I was very sad. Mom and I were alone in the car. Mom could tell that I was depressed and was trying to cheer me up, although I didn’t want to be cheered up. Mom said, “I want some ice cream. Do you want some ice cream? I do.” I told her that I didn’t want any ice cream and Mom continued driving passed the restaurant where she had suggested we get ice cream. “Were you going to get some ice cream?” I asked, as we drove passed. She smiled and said, “No, that’s okay. I don’t want any.” I recall thinking, at that exact moment, that Mom loved me more than I loved her and that she knew this and that it did not bother her. I recall thinking that surely this was what love was— knowing that you loved someone more than they loved you and not being bothered by it. It was a wonderful moment. It was the first time in many years that I learned something very obvious and yet very true about love, and I told myself then that I should always remember that moment, lest I forget what love was.
As we have told you many times, the designated time for confession of sin is not here at this Table. If you are walking with the Lord, you will confess sin whenever you commit it, and you will put it right with anyone you need to put it right with immediately. As we all need reminders to do this diligently, we have a time set aside for weekly confession at the beginning of the service. This Table, at the conclusion of the service, was not designed to serve as a time of morbid introspection.But what of those who do not confess their sins appropriately? Week after week, they come to this Table without having prepared themselves to do so. What is happening to them in that case? Though the Table wasn’t designed to foster introspection, it does have a design feature that deals with those who refuse to examine themselves appropriately.Moses warns the people of Israel that God will see to it that their sin will find them out (Num. 32:23). The Bible teaches that this Table is a time of nourishment for the faithful. But for those who are not dealing with secret and hidden sin appropriately, this Table is a time of manifestation. This is why many Corinthians had taken sick, and had died. This Table brings things to light. Heaven and earth meet in this meal, just as they do in the great day of judgment, and this means that God is in the process of bringing all things to light. He does this inexorably, and in accordance with His covenant word.This means that every time we partake of the bread and wine, for those with a double life it is a time of unfolding secrets. That money taken from your employer and never put right, a pattern of hidden homosexual sin, or secret infidelity of other forms . . . all are being brought to light. Regardless of what we think we are doing, every participation in communion is an objective request from us, asking God to bring the hidden things to light. And this is a prayer that God consistently answers, whether we know we are praying it or not, and whether or not we would like it if we found out that this is what He is doing. But this need not be grim news. It is in fact gospel. When God brings sin to light, there is an opportunity for free and full forgiveness.
1 Corinthians 10:16-17: Is not this cup of blessing which we bless a sharing in the blood of Christ? Is not the bread which we break a sharing in the body of Christ?
Many Christians over the centuries have thought of the Lord’s Supper as a kind of continuing or second incarnation. First the Son gets embodied in flesh, but now that He’s gone away He gets embodied in another material. Nowadays, He dwells among us not in a human body but in bread.
This kind of analogy between the incarnation and the presence of Christ in the Supper has produced all sorts of bad habits. If this is Jesus here on the table, we should bow down and worship Him. We should keep the bread after we’re done, and maybe even preserve a bit in a golden chest so we can go back and venerate it later.
One way to say this is that we should not think of the Eucharist not so much as Christmas – as if the Son were born again in bread – but instead think about it instead in terms of Advent. This table marks a triple Advent: It celebrates the past coming of the Lord; it is the coming of the Lord; and it looks ahead to the coming of the Lord. We commemorate the life, death and resurrection of Jesus; we feed on Him by the Spirit; we proclaim the Lord’s death until He come.
When we view it as an Advent meal, we see that this Supper is about Jesus’ absence as well as His presence; it’s about the future as well as the present. It is a present feast, a feast we celebrate because the Lord has come. But it is not yet a full banquet, because the Lord is still to come.
Dr. Leithart gave this as a Eucharist meditation this morning. convicting, inspiring, and beautiful.
via leithart.com
"I just thought of something! If you kicked someone's donkey in the nose, you could say, 'I just kicked your ass in the face!"-jon and jon
i’m gonna put a curse on you and all your children will be born naked
— jimi hendrix
via a year and a bit
“The moment arrives when you say,
‘I don’t dislike this man,
but how did I marry him?’
Something about his wintry voice,
the way he can’t or won’t show his face,
and how small and alone you feel
out here on earth’s curve,
driving day and night,
never reaching a destination,
until you realize you’re running parallel to him,
and you’ll never meet.”
Vanishing Point by Freya Manfred
this is probably the most heartbreaking thing i've read since Of Mice and Men four years ago. absolutely stunning.
via among the pines
to write, one must have been loved. to write well, one must be a lover.
writing about life, now, in the 21st century, is to write about things that have been written about, at best, a dozen times. the better bits of life: the sunsets, the sunrises, the lovers' kisses over morning coffee, they have all been written about too many times to even think about, much less count. but boredom is only done by the bored. it's the trivializing, the quick-to-look-away, the all-too-easily-pleased-by-flashing-things, in short, the cool teenage boys among us, who are the only ones to think that a sunset is a sunset is a sunset.
it's easy to know in your head that each sunset is different. every night a different ray of light hits different water particles at different angles. seems like a ridiculous waste of creative energy and time.
many girls have good legs. it took the wisdom of Solomon to see that the Shulamite's were unlike others girls' because they were carved out of ivory. it took him several chapters to describe them. and you get the feeling that he never really was satisfied with his attempts. he kept going back to the legs with different approaches. and then he gave it up all together. vanity of vanities, indeed.
if you love, you will see. if you want to love, you must see. it's one of those vicious cycles life seems to be full of. if you want to appreciate sunsets, you must watch them. again and again. and to truly watch them, you must appreciate them. you can watch them one way, the way you usually do, or you can watch and choose to appreciate. and, after a few weeks or perhaps, if your soul is still delicate, a few days, you will realize that the sky wasn't quite that shade of pink yesterday, that the clouds weren't fiery like that last week, and that the sun looks more like a drop of God's blood tonight than it did on Monday. when you choose to love something, you get acquainted with it, you understand it, and in the end you know it. even, no, especially in the King James sense of the word.
my father knows my mother well. he knows her like a connoisseur knows his favorite wine, like a student knows his favorite painting, like Adam knew Eve in that time full of blinding wonder and incredulity before he ate the fruit. there is between them all the familiarity of more than half a lifetime spent together and all the nervous joy of newlyweds. my mother once told me that a detective looking for counterfeit currency said, "i look at the real bills all day long so that when i see the false stuff, i know it's different right away." my father knows his wife like that. he's watched her so much, stared so often, lost himself so many times, that when anything changes, he knows.
my Father knows His bride like that, only more. my Father knows His spoken world like that, only more. my Father knows me like that, only more.
if you love it, it will become lovely. but you have to love every good thing about it. every little detail that changes day by day, every little bit that stays constant. and if you do, the whole thing becomes beautiful. that's why our Father is going to win.
The historian Justin says that Agathocles was born in poverty but very early in life parlayed his remarkable beauty into a career as a prostitute, first for men, and later, after puberty, for women, then made a living by robbery before becoming a soldier.
[...]
Having banished or murdered some 10,000 citizens, and thus made himself master of Syracuse, he created a strong army and fleet and subdued the greater part of Sicily.
[...]
His last years were plagued by ill-health and the turbulence of his grandson Archagathus, at whose instigation he is said to have been poisoned (by his eromenos, Menon of Ægista, who poisoned the tooth-cleaning quill)from the wikipedia article. i believe the correct response would be hoots of mocking and not-even-slightly derisive laughter. at least, that was my response.
I think it was Jim Miller who encouraged guilt-ridden, introspective sinners to just “relax…Because you are a lot worse than you think you are.” You know you’re coming closer to understanding the gospel when you’re relieved to see the depths of your own sinfulness. Compassion is not far behind such an understanding.
Q: What’s heaven for you?
A: Me and my wife on Rte. 66 with a pot of coffee, a cheap guitar, pawnshop tape recorder in a Motel 6, and a car that runs good parked right by the door.
Q: What is a gentleman?
A: A man who can play the accordion, but doesn’t.
from an interview with Tom Waits
via StillBeating
Meanwhile, the Internet was doing its best to make LPs obsolete, pushing Stevens further and further from the kind of songwriting he’s hardly attempted since Illinois. “I’m wondering, why do people make albums anymore when we just download? Why are songs like three or four minutes, and why are records 40 minutes long? They’re based on the record, vinyl, the CD, and these forms are antiquated now. So can’t an album be eternity, or can’t it be five minutes?” He pauses. “I no longer really have faith in the album anymore. I no longer have faith in the song.”[...]This fall, Stevens will release a CD soundtrack of The BQE along with a DVD of the footage and a stereoscopic 3-D Viewmaster reel. In the liner notes, he writes, “And then it hits you: If skyscrapers are the ultimate phallic symbols, then the urban expressway is the ultimate birth canal, the uterine wall, the anatomical passageway, the ultimate means of egress, and the process by which we are all born again. The BQE is the Motherhood of Civilization, the Breast of Being, the fallopian tube, the biological canal from which all of life emerges in resplendent beauty, newborn and newly fashioned with the immaculate countenance of a baby.” And maybe there’s something to that. Illinois is what it is—a necessary part of a creative journey that cannot end in the same place it started. Untethered by musical tradition, the expectations of his fans and the prospect of record sales, Stevens changed direction; he was reborn. It happened somewhere on that treacherous expressway, long after he left Illinois.
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, says my soul, therefore I will hope in him.
The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him. It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth.
Let him sit alone in silence when it is laid on him; let him put his mouth in the dust-- there may yet be hope; let him give his cheek to the one who strikes, and let him be filled with insults.
For the Lord will not cast off forever, but, though he cause grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love; for he does not willingly afflict or grieve the children of men.
Lamentations 3:22-33
We Are A Letter For An Entity Unlikely To Respond.
Dear Cat's Eye Nebula,
Now Eva-Marie laughs! You are rivaled. We have met your exuberant colors where we are.
All the best,
Josh and Paula
via the Notorious G.I.B.
Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.
Edith Sitwell
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air....
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark nor even eagle flew—
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
-John Gillespie Magee, Jr
this is a quickly written work in progress. any suggestions are welcome. i just jotted it down this weekend and my brother Kanaan kind of liked it, so i figured it couldn't be all that bad. he's got some taste in such things. anyhow, as far as the last little triplet, i couldn't let it go by without giving props to Big Ty Antkowiak for telling me that Aslan is on the move while i shoveled snow early thursday morning. kinda made my day, and definitely made this poem.
i am an undertaker, shoveling away the dead.
our enemy, our lawless queen of ice and cold
is falling fast, and falling faster into the pit I dig.
Her icy east wind cannot stop my work
our king has come, though he is not here yet,
his breath melts the ice, his eyes warm the sun
i scrape away her minions' bones, i toss them
under the saplings that eat them and grow strong.
i stand ankle deep in my enemies' blood,
and wonder if my hands will ever be warm again.
the king will warm them when he comes, when he
drives away usurpers and warms us all again.
i am a feeble man, i only shovel snow. weak in body,
weak in mind, small in heart, and small in grace,
yet such as i do contend with spirits, giants,
drakes, and monsters and bury the Enemy Death.
our King will come, has come, is now coming,
and in His mouth a sword to strike down the evil one.
these things i think when, while i shovel winter
off the sidewalks, one of our giants picks me up,
and roars with joy that aslan is on the move.
