Love, work, prayer, and suffering will sustain us in the future as they have in the past. All who are here now, all who will come after us, will have no other tools than these with which to build.
–Sister Mollie Rogers of the Maryknoll Movement
William Shakespeare on Sorrow
“Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak whispers o’er the fraught heart, and bids it break.”
-William Shakespeare
MacBeth
Goethe on Art
“One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”
-Goethe
The Incarnation According to Kathleen Norris
“For me, the Incarnation is the place, if you will, where hope contends with fear. Not an antique doctrine at all, but reality–as ordinary as my everyday struggles with fears great and small, as exalted as the hope that allows me some measure of peace when I soldier on in the daily round.
When a place or time seems touched by God, it is an overshadowing, a sudden eclipsing of my priorities and plans. But even in terrible circumstances and calamities, in matters of life and death, if I sense that I am in the shadow of God, I find light, so much light that my vision improves dramatically. I know that holiness is near.
And it is not robed in majesty. It does not assert itself with the raw power of empire (not even the little empire of me in which I all too often reside), but it waits in puzzlement, it hesitates. Coming from Galilee, as it were, from a place of little hope, it revels the ordinary circumstances of my life to be full of mystery, and gospel, with means ‘good news.’ “
Kathleen Norris
Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith
Riverhead Books, The Berkley Publishing Group
1998
This is where I am today, reveling in the ordinary circumstances that are llena de misterio precisely because God has eclipsed darkness with light.
Clog #1: A Christmas Card of Squirrels
My sister and I keep a blog in her kitchen cupboard for two simple reasons: 1. Our trains of thought derail constantly due to a herd of small squirrels living in the house, and 2. She’s not online.
Installation of: The Clog (the cupboard blog).
In some moment of great societal aptitude, I piled a bunch of 3 by 5 cards, pens, and push pins into her cupboard. Now, when we have a thought, we jot it down and tack it to a piece of cork board pasted on the inside of the cupboard door.
These notes include bits of encouragement, questions we forget to ask each other, random thoughts we want to remember so that one day they’ll be deep, and of course, the occasional precious moment of the day clog.
Here’s what I found yesterday:
I laughed at the irony. We tried so hard for the last month to get a cute picture of those squirrels. We finally thought we had a winner, finally got them printed, and then finally realized the unfortunate, comical, perfect error.
We re-took pictures this morning just before mailing her cards. That was a close one. At least it was a good, clog-able moment.
Naphtalia 