Author Archives: storehaufovic

Birthday wonder!

20 Monday Mar 2017

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  The textures of my birthday, have been like a Gustave Klimt painting and a circus so far; this part a hidden edible garden on a hill with a mystic meadowy melody of valley view! Thanks friends! Felt like I was in a Van Morrison song today, or Chopin sonata, or a floating place of vision! The textures of love never end. We’ll keep walking in them. And my wife loves getting lost in gardens which trail into wildness, and untended melodies…it’s a shared inner landscape!
 As our friend put it, beauty ministers, and is a ministry.
 My eyes are rich, as is my heart. Thanks friends!
 Of course, i got obsessed with these resplendent fish just being in their silent world beneath the trees, reflecting another world-where the types of silence of fish and silence of sky, meet and converse in light, is one of my favorite places. How they somehow reflect one another is something which has always captivated me.
 Good to have friends in high places and low. “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it, and continues to reflect and praise by being itself.” The gift of beholding some rarefied earth this year, blessed me. Anyway,  nice to return to this part of it, and these friends again this year! Cherished convergences, conjoinings, confluences, and collaborations through life’s many chapters. Let’s write more hours and daily life poems together friends! Thanks again. What a wonder filled birth celebration it’s been!

What type of priest my generation needs

13 Monday Mar 2017

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Someone asked me recently what type of priests my generation needed:
  Transparent priest, authentic priest, non-professional priest, as things are and will be priest, a new style of informal accessible priest, as is vulnerable priest, personally relational priest, living their spiritualities out loud priest, as you go expressive process oriented priest, face time Facebook and face to face priest, sermon not quiet there priest, overheard spiritualities priest, not waiting til your done to share your homily priest, as you are leaning towards what you will be priest, being themselves as they go priest…..is how I started my answer. I’ll finish it later, i promise!
 High priest, low priest, clearing out the snow priest, bird priest, cat priest, priest who wear cool hats priest, storm priest, calm priest, taking out the trash, walking the dog priest, city priest, rural priest dreaming of the city of God priest, writing priest, silent priest those somewhere in the middle priest, bald priest, long haired priest, tall priest, short priest, priest who bring the Light to dark places, priest who bring those in the dark to light places, priest who see another city settling down above us, priest who only see their corner of the street and are meant to make it shine and rustle us awake and keep us all in line, priest who call forth wonder, priest who call forth tears, priest who teach us how to leap above our fears, priest who dream, priest who stream, priest who scheme of how to make things better….the list is surely endless in the One who holds the priestly key, making us conformed holy into Thee. The High Priest of all Life forming us again, making us each, little priest in Him!
Priest who don’t have it all together yet, but are following One who does priest, further and farther into the forest of His Father’s Love!

Love births true identity!

13 Monday Mar 2017

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  Love releases sight. We can see one another to the degree we love one another. I can only help you to the degree I love you. We also can help one another to that measure. Skills don’t transform us or others, love does. Skills come from loving deeply over time, learning the rhythms of care. Skills in helping one another, are learned by loving deeply.
  Love conversely transforms sight. We are able to see accurately to the degree we love.
 Beauty is in the “I” of the beholder. Do the degree we engage in love, we are able to see ourselves and one another. For we are gaining more of God’s eyes on the other, and ourselves as we engage in Love. We are seeing more through His Lens. For God is Love.
 In doing so, in taking the risk of love rather than retreat, defense, or assault, we ourselves are transformed, for we come to appreciate how deeply He actually cares for the other, and sees them as they are and will be. In doing so, we hear our own names whispered in Love. We start to sense that we are each beloved. We are then both, when engaged in Love, transformed closer to who we actually are! Love brings us closer to our true selves, and calls forth the real in the other by our active heart gazing.
 To the degree we risk moving in this love encounter, we see both ourselves and the other into being. Love births true identity!

More on Love

13 Monday Mar 2017

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More from an article about what we talk about when we talk about love:
“Love releases sight into the heart. We can see one another to the degree we love one another. I can only help you to the degree I love you. We also can only help one another to that measure. Skills don’t transform us or others, love does. Skills come from loving deeply over time, learning the rhythms of care. Skills in helping one another, are learned by loving deeply.”

Nice to see you again, lover city San Fran!

13 Monday Mar 2017

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IMG_9315Hello again San Fran!

We love cities, but this is one we care about in full view of her shadows, and she is a returning or recurring motif in my own story.

Always good to kiss her, pray for, and dance with her again, and be back! Some people don’t like cities. I’m not one of those people. I experience them as people, and this is one I’ve always loved. We’ve seen each other, and still care for one another. That’s a good sign.

Always nice landing into ourselves here again this week in our space in San Fran…pleasant birthday week thus far!

Good coffee, hidden pathways, books, remarkable breakfast (fresh season crab eggs benedict and lemon banana crepe at one of our favorite local cafes), and this pizza was all they said it is.

And these yellow flowers near our house which come out seasonally here, have that celtic glory which makes my heart sing around St Patricks!

Thanks San Fran, nice to see ya again old friend, and lovely lady. Thankful for our friendship.

You can see how our days often roll here. We like to eat, think, write, walk and talk, look at and make art, lots of gazing at, and contemplating the personalities and design of cities; and be ourselves; and trail into the mysteries around us. Easy to do that here for us. A joy filled ease of release into other.

Thankful for the daily, beautiful and often small things in life. Also for five un-photoed green hummingbirds today, with tiny flecks of red on their necks—magical little words of life hovering and darting around the many early spring flowers and us today! (The unseen things in our days determine the seen!)

“The Word is so much with us, all around us.” as a friend from here wrote to me today. Or as my mom used to remind us daily: “This is the Day that the Lord has made, let’s find it, and rejoice in it!”

Wherever we are, that Day, always feels like home, and I like finding that Day, in this city! Nice to be back. I could list my thanks forever, for all the small daily blessings in life, like light on a city, or on the wrist of my wife’s hand, sipping a drink she likes. Or a good breakfast in a city i love.

journal notes from today!

12 Sunday Mar 2017

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Why Love His Church: Love what your friend loves.
Some of what I learn, is to be better informed when talking with people who carry different gifts—like apostolic people. I like being informed about what makes them tick, and what categories they are thinking in. I have my own pet projects and topics, but I also like learning other’s.  Church planting, for instance is not one of my native topics, yet I love learning about it, as I have so many friends involved in it. It goes back to loving what Jesus loves—which is really my interest in the church. I love what My Friend loves. That’s part of being in union with Him. I don’t have choice to not love His Church.  When you love what God loves, you will find yourself interested in His Church. And you don’t wait until she is perfect before you love her. As Willard said, we have to form in the imperfect communities given to us. We are to love what He loves..not just “the lost” but His Church as well, regardless of her shadows.
To speak into something or about something you must love it. This is true if you are speaking about the church, races, or other genders etc…otherwise people speak in bitterness and hatred and lose perspective. I don’t think you can really speak into something if you don’t love it, and your authority to actually change it is to the degree or measure of that love.
It is just as you can only prophecy to the degree that you yourself have formed that part of Christ in you!
“We can only speak into another to the degree we love them.  The other and God have to enter the same gaze. The measure of love towards them, is the level of our helpfulness to others. Skills alone don’t transform us or them, though they are formed from love over time. Love does.” anonymous monk.
Everything you are is known and hidden in Him. So you are free to be. Free to live as yourself now and forever. Our real life is safe to become in Him, that’s one of His whispered secrets about us. (the whispering monk)
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Purim!!!
  Celebrating Purim in our own way this weekend with our many friends around the world. Drinking a little extra wine and costuming, celebrating existence, just celebrating being human in this case with all the Purim craziness of San Fran, not to mention my saint Patrick’s day party (this city always wears a costume and looks for a reason to celebrate—wait we do this all the time! Today a Jewish father with a great cartooned royal hat let us cross the road and spoke a blessing our way. I love it when people exchange blessings freely between cultures! Makes us better people. As, we are all just people trying to be people, as one old friend used to say. But celebrating this people group continued existence really does help us all.
 Anyways, thankful that the Jews, and the human family, have survived despite ourselves, and stomping our feet wherever we go this week, that this is so—doing the dance of the human family’s continuing existence! Always makes me just glad to be alive! That we have done more than survive, we are still fruitful as people, is a miracle given the amount of suffering in the world! Of course, I love any holiday which gives me an excuse to celebrate, wear costumes and dance daily. Celebration reminds us that we are still apart of the sacred story.
Of course I was born on a Christian party holiday coming up this week, celebrating the saint Patrick, my favorite saint, so I lean towards celebration, poetry of life, and try to see each day of life as a gift, or as Heschel said: “See each day in the light of God, bring people and God into the same thought daily. The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments!”
“People of our time are losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating we seek to be amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state–it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or a spectacle…. Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one’s actions.” Source: The Wisdom of Heschel
Awareness of the divine begins with wonder.
A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.
The degree to which one is sensitive to other people’s suffering, to other (people’s) humanity, is the index of one’s own humanity
Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy. And yet being alive is no answer to the problems of living. To be or not to be is not the question. The vital question is: how to be and how not to be?
The tendency to forget this vital question is the tragic disease of contemporary man, a disease that may prove fatal, that may end in disaster. To pray is to recollect passionately the perpetual urgency of this vital question.
“No Religion is an Island”, p. 264

More on why Love still matters!

05 Sunday Mar 2017

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     From an article I’m writing on “Why Love still matters”:
Love is required to see and interpret life accurately. Love finds beauty, and the true nature of other, and calls it forth. For Love peers into the true nature of things. Love clarifies perception, allowing us to interpret things more clearly.
 The relationship between love and aesthetics hasn’t been properly named, but love is essential in seeing both art and nature well.  We see things rightly when we love them. And when we see things as they really are, we will love them.
 Hope is based on what only Love can see! We see things accurately, to the degree that we love them. In this sense Love also makes things more whole. Love heals what we see, as it heals us.
 Hope is not a denial of suffering, but it is a seeing of what is on the other side of it, as we look in Love! We are too selective with our love, maybe we are afraid of encountering other-or being transformed ourselves, by depth encounter! Love sees both. as it is, and as it will be. Love beholds things into wholeness. This is why Love still matters.
 Spiritual perception helps guide things home to themselves, and this occurs through Love. Love is our hermenuetic!
In this sense, learning to love is life’s highest art form. Love calls forth true identity. Love overcomes all forms of pornographic vision for it allows us to see other for their intrinsic value, not in terms of our own gratification. Love never fails. Love has no ending—as St Paul taught us. Love still matters!
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Raw notes from recent evacuations:
On another note, this happened this week. Got evacuated from a coffee shop which was attached to a Jewish community center. The Jewish community as a target…hum…this is getting more obvious!! Less subtle, more direct.
Twice this past week I was personally evacuated.—so here’s my vent. Sorry, but I get tired of racism. It’s ugly and has no art in it! Racism has no beauty and lacks intelligence, based in fear and interpretation based on appearance, it is also rooted in pride, and at times, as an artist i just get tired of it’s stupidity.
 Getting tired of getting evacuated! Happened again today.
  More Jewish community centers got bomb threats today in America, in this case, very close to where I was having coffee with friends. I was near two Jewish community centers visiting artist friends today when the block was cleared.
 Enough already. Let’s pray harder and be smarter. We’ve already lived through this a million times.
Praying, as always! But also frustrated.
  Bomb threats are a coward’s or teenager’s approach to conflict. Instilling fear rather than working through anger towards intimacy-like you have to do in real relationships! I’m just a counselor, and artist, a tender soul, and a fool, but I get tired of seeing this too.
  Plus, we where all evacuated in the middle of a good coffee conversation! Who knows what great art could’ve come from that conversation we were having today! Healing begins with forgiveness, even across generations–let’s at least start there!
 In counseling, we used to call this projecting and acting out, rather than “owning” and working through your own issues. These are basic human problems. I just wanted to finish my coffee with my art friends today, but this projected hatred keeps interrupting the flow of Love’s Way, and Love’e’s endless conversation. Starting to irritate me.

Light

05 Sunday Mar 2017

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  It has been written that the church is both the salt and the light. Let’s make sure we are the Light part as salt well friends! In Genesis, God said, let their be light, by which He could see things. Light delineates so we can put things in order.
   Light brings sight and understanding, allows us to delineate. We need both light and salt. Let there be light! Of course, Christ also called Himself the light of the world. We, in Him, are to carry and shine that light outwards endlessly so others may see! For in the Light was also the Life! Let’s be in Light friends!
   As the Light increases in us, in our times, we should be shining brighter, making things clearer around us for others to see. We should be helping interpret things well from this Light. Light matters. Let’s move in light, to make the contrasts more apparent, between the ways of Life and the ways of Death. Like Daniel we are to be helping interpret the king’s dreams, and to guide the other seers to see. Like the Levites, after the restoration in Nehemiah and Ezra’s times, we are meant to help people understand their times in the light of the word. Let’s be Light. Let your light so shine before men, that they too see and know and therefore Love the True God who is couched in your hearts. A city on a hill, and light not placed under a basket—we are the light as we shine in The Light.
   We know we are in a high contrasts time—and that both light and darkness is increasing and being made manifest. So let is be light reflectors, and those who make His Light more overtly obvious. In His Light is His Life and Ways, we are those collaborating to usher that Light into the world, so people can see.  Let there be light, then we can delineate and name and bring order, just as God was doing at the creation.
We know that the Light is increasing in us in our times.
  We know that this is a time of greater incarnation of the Life of Christ in His People; so we must get used to shining brighter in our days. -be part of the dawn already breaking into mankind’s hearts.
   We live in a time where Christ is drawing closer into His People—He is eclipsing things on  another level. What began as re-formation is now moving into a depth incarnation. We are being baptized more deeply into His Name and Life, and His Light.
As the Light increases so does our refinement, Because God is Light and in Him is no darkness. The Light came into the darkness…