Two things you should know about me:  I was one of those awkward nerds picked last (or close to last) for teams in gym class.  In my mind I can still see the hours of playing games nervously, with no native grace or confidence.

And 2:  my first enduring image of mother’s day was the day Veronica vomited on me in church.  Em and C were doing their usual circus-y best at mayhem and I was pregnant.  Fun and dignified.

Now.  Understand this.  I am ambivalent about mother’s day.  I am unequivocal about motherhood, ambivalent about its celebration.  In my mind I see two groups—the cool moms, their kids are cute, well-behaved, lovable, they go to good schools, marry well, occasionally win prizes.  Then there is the other shadowy group—moms of sex offenders.  You can’t see their faces, they do not want to be recognized, or worse still, they make ridiculous excuses for their offenders’ behavior and compensate.  Not a fun or cool group.  Technically I believe I belong to both groups, but the cool moms will kick my sorry butt out if they find out about C.  I am sure of it.

There is a part of me that says, really?  Do I have to be a member of this group forever?  The answer is yes.  The answer is yes because of C.  The answer is that C will always need a kick in the butt and a mom.  Deal with it girl.

So instead of cleaning my room or writing the great American novel or going for a nice swim I tell God, fine, I am going to call him and cut through some of the usual meaningless pleasantries and give myself a real mother’s day present—the truth.

As soon as I start I cry and I keep crying throughout the conversation, but I get my mother’s day present—the truth.  I tell C. that I will always be his mom because he will always need one, and that the pain never, never stops, that I ask all the time why? And that what he did never goes away or stops hurting for any of us.  I tell him I wish I had answers but I only have one—God and He loves him.  He hates what he did, He will always hate what he did, but God loves him.  Do you know it, C?  I ask.  Do you know this?  Have you felt it?

I tell him I have an image of him scrounging for change under a vending machine.  No dignity for a quarter.  I tell him, that is what you need to do to find God.  Get down on your hands and knees, forget your dignity and look for Him, boy, He is the one thing that matters.

Draft.

tracing the luminous.

I  am holding my youngest child.  He, like all humans, is precious, but he is especially dear to me.  I think, how do people who do not believe in God handle the uncertainty of loss?  I can barely stand it and I know that God loves my little ones, holds them dear.

But then I have also experienced loss…almost unbearable.

I think it is a  little like this–imagine you owned the Mona Lisa.  Imagine that there was a growing group of people who asserted that it was worthless, just a waste of oil and pigment.  But you believed.  You believed it was the work of a genius, a one of a kind miracle of human art.  People scoffed, but you believed.  But you also worried.  What if someone took it?  Destroyed it?  What if something happened to it? 

Then you find out about the most wonderful insurance policy.  Not only will the insurer offer to cover your loss, he does it for free (because he is a huge Leonardo fan!!) and he does not insure it for money–he guarantees the restoration of the original.  No matter what happens you get Mona back, better looking, more vivid and more valuable than ever before.

That is not so much an analogy of the workings of faith.  It is analogy for the love of a perfect Parent.  It is a picture of Divine Love holding us close, his masterpieces, insured against loss.

Again.  Let me be explicit. You read this?  You are his masterpiece.  Do not let that kind of love slip through your grasp…

Whether you have children or not you should see the movie, “Pirates, Band of Misfits”

Queen Victoria would be appalled but otherwise wonderful!

I do not go to movie theaters often, so when I went tonight I was struck by the weirdness of the poster that said children under six could not go to R rated movies after six.

It raises more questions than it answers.

the picture is too vivid.  too irrevocable.  the story of a little boy (my son’s age) who dies before he reaches the hospital.  like kitty genovese, I remind myself.  people have been dying unrequittedly for millenia.  one baby’s death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.  still hurts.  the girl is found wandering down a street. covered with blood.  I wish her innocent but probably not.

first you should know that I have kicked myself out of a couple of churches.  the first was because there was no accountability.  the pastor was not reporting offerings to the church, there were ponzi schemes being shopped in the congregation and a candidate for a local judgeship was shopped from the pulpit.

the second was even worse.  we left a church because there was a self-identified pedophile who the church refused to supervise. 

the first church excommunicated us for leaving ( common people, we are all protestants here!)  and the second church harassed us until we sent them a cease and desist letter.

not promising

but i have gone to wonderful churches.  i will go to wonderful churches.  i thing we need to examine what it means to be a church.  we have lost sight of both the big and the very small picture

church means gathering, coming together.  a church is supposed to be like afamily or a community.  in one of the Gospel accounts of Jesus feeding the multitude He tells his disciples to get people to sit in groups of fifty.  that is  a church.  in jewish tradition a minyan of ten is a church.  technically just you talking to God is church.  we need to circle the wagons.  gather.  be with Him.  abide.

It is not easy to abide.  requires being with.  requires listening to.  requires living in the moment with God.

I suspect many of us are happy to look at church as an event, but do not look at it as part of an essential conversation.

I am crying out for the conversation.

I want to search every face and every horizon for my beloved

Jesus.

so gospel means good news.  people who refute the idea of the Bible as a divine love letter will say that the difference among the gospels proves the whole thing is a wash.  as a person who loves words i find this about as true as saying that William Faulkner was a hack (or a hick or a bully…) because he used multiple perspectives in his novels.  my view is this:  God is the author not just of the Bible but of all of our gospels. the stories of our lives with Him.  He is such a good author that his narrators are quite plentiful and diverse.

I like to listen to the Bible.  I hear things differently than when I read them.  I like to hear Him in all the love letters He has written. 

I have been listening to Luke’s gospel and I love the details, the doctorly-ness of it.  The perspective…