Dear Bono,
I woke up on the wrong side of bed today. It is amazing how a few short hours can make so much difference inside. This helped a bit over the lunch hour.
I am praying you are well.
Much love,
The Bishop
PS It is from their CD, The Reckoning.
The distance from the dark to the light seems like a river to far, where the reverse seems like only a few steps at times. Maybe just a nights sleep. Its fragile this life we live. Fragile, haunting, beautiful and sacred.
ReplyDeleteI was struck and comforted by your thoughts about friendship and forgiveness. I wonder if it is about the distance that is inherent - the separation that is constitutive of sin. In friendship, at least friendships like the ones we nurtured around your break-room, the distance seems to be swallowed by intimacy, grace and a deep knowing. Maybe the atonement is simply these types of friendships, these ways of knowing, these intimate spaces that we hunger for and have a difficult time making room for in our calendar. Maybe Jesus' atonement was not primarily a need for blood sacrifice, but the distance a friend would go in order to stave the darkness from swallowing his beloved. I know the atonement of Jesus because I know you. I know the distance that the Master crossed because I know the distance in me that you crossed.
Spent the day talking with the Pioneer leader and talking vision. Stuff I really love. There seems to be hope coming back in my sails - hope and vision. The balance of the day was with the boys playing and a birthday party. Tonight is pasta and the Movie Up or The Grinch. Life is good and I somehow feel like it will all be ok. Funny that.
I love you brother and hope this side of lunch continues to sing songs of grace and peace over you. I love you.
Hey brother, it's so late here that it is early (sounds like a bad Alan Jackson song - wait it that redundant?) I think that I am catching the other side of jet lag here! Spent a few hours tonight crafting the beginnings of a proposal for some funding that will let me have the freedom to do some things in the local church and with pastors that really excite me. It is a long shot that the funding will come through, but I realize how excited I was about the local church and figuring out ways to articulate, study and compel other people to care deeply about the world in very practical ways. I am starting to see the limits of deconstruction - mainly that it can be wonderful and elegant and just that - wonderful and elegant and I am left deposited in the same place that stringent evangelicalism deposited me. A safe distance from the action - always talking about it, always describing it but rarely did I have skin in the game, rarely did it cost me much. I think most of the preaching that I have heard is an exposition on why the Sermon on the Mount doesn't have much to do with me - but what if it does? What if that is partly our rule of life and what is to shape my actions in this broken world.
ReplyDeleteAny way it's late and I am rambling. Enough to say that I feel alive (amid my struggle with my own personal crap that we can talk about off line!) and excited about what I am learning and where I am growing. I have no idea where this will lead and I have been able to let it go - if it leads to a big church so be it, if it leads to a missional community or a teaching post or a combination - I truly feel free of that worry tonight and alive to be here, in this house, in this place. It feels a long time in coming and I wanted you to be the first to know "-)
I love you brother and hope that today's sun rise brings you different winds.
The opera lives in you. I know because you reminded me of the melody and would not let me forget.