listening to a mocking bird on my roof today

the mocking bird is not mocking
its talking for all the silenced birds ever
it remembers all their songs
it is not plagiarizing as supposed
all artist are thieves
we all sing other’s songs
but mocking birds just
impersonate better than most.

Jeremiah said:
they were radiant
over God’s goodness
in restoring the normal mundane-wine, oil
walking talking, taking a bath, seeing a new bird…
everyday things of life
to them
and they shone in thankfulness
like that forever
while they walked their dogs
and drank great wine.

I’m still a kid
hiding out
near the radiator
melting crayons
in the back
of yeshiva, or
rolling under the pews
at church
and in
the synagogue.
And promptly
being kicked out
of class,
having left glory behind
to the wonder
of my friends

(Prayer of simple thanks in hope, from an urban monk who likes coffee on cold mornings)

Thank You
for the warm comfort in my palms
when i hold my coffee today on a chilly morning
Lord. And in advance
for meeting that new bird friend
and rose we will certainly
walk by together this day.

Foolish enough to be useful today!

I talked someone out of committing suicide today.
That’s about the 15th time i think that’s happened. The first time i was around 23, and walking someone off that internal and physical cliff in Paris (long but good story, which ended well!). Had to do it with images and gestures, and as i recall in some sort of “tongues”.
This one was easier, as we at least had language and Love in common. Still, it’s always chilling, simplifying and humbling. First you have to convince yourself that life matters hourly! That each person really is a poem worth savoring, cultivating, beholding and keeping inspired!
“Never limit Mercy”, as Thomas Merton put it!
Maybe a birthday blessing at the same time today, to get to talk this new friend down! I love bringing Life near my celebration! This fellow just needed to be seen, not ignored, but valued, listened to in his daily story and struggle.
It’s the little things, which make me feel like it’s still good to be here, honoring one another’s stories, despite the times, bombs and rampant and random hatred of life. Good reminder today also, to stay available as we go. Life still matters friends.
It reminded me of that line: “What fools God uses to save us through is His choice.”
I’ve gotten to the point that at least i know I’m foolish enough to be useful.

Art deals most directly with the nature of what is Real. It also invites us to empathize and deal directly with human suffering. When it avoids suffering, it is bad art; when it brings light into suffering, it enlightens.

The imagination is a part of knowing. When we engage our creativity and understanding, we begin to encounter more of what is seen in the unseen.

Art is part of healing or making things more whole, or what they truly are. This applies to Nature, people and even our image of God. Good art teaches us to see things more as they truly are.

How we see things matters. To see things empathetically, through a lens of love and compassion helps heal what we see, and we, who perceive them. Art works in both of these directions. Creativity transforms our “I” as we encounter other’s I’s! Art is then, the ultimate risk of Love. On the cross Jesus saw humanity most clearly, through the lens of Love’s suffering for us all. God is Love, and incarnated into our sufferings. The Cross then is the highest fine art ever in history.

Our little art offerings are in this way just imitations and participations in The Cross as art. We create in collaboration with His creativity, which was His direct dealing with our sufferings! So art deals with theodicy or the problem of human suffering. It invites us to suffer with one another in care, and Love into our particular pains.

To the joy of watching anomalies: from the things i write on napkins as i travel series! Found this one today in travels:

I notice anomalies mostly. The tiny mocking bird, I saw today out the window, chasing the crow, taunting him all morning, but in jest, it seemed. Almost as if they were already friends. The piece of plastic red trash floating like that kid’s red balloon in the old parisien film i love. The fat raccoon walking up the middle of the street alone, but still with a sense of direction and purpose somehow.

The lady this week at the airport who was coming to get her lower teeth replaced, and showed me what was missing, but who also takes care of an elderly man, whom she takes to the park each day and applies lotion on his arms, so he can recall what he loves again.

The moment, in scriptures where Philip suddenly appears in another place, and affects the whole spiritual atmosphere. Angels and demons re-adjust, because he suddenly appeared and started teaching in and from something beyond himself.

These are my favorite moments, even in scriptures, as just after Jesus walks on water, the boat “suddenly appears” on the other side, and everyone is confused, but strangely hopeful—little tears and seemingly ironic tares in the fabric, or seams into the unseen around us daily, where love dwells. Those types of anomalies, i most often notice. And where Love and wonder most often kiss, at least for me. I read life through it’s anomalies.

I often get to know the whole identity of each day through it’s unexpected, surprising contrasts-ie, each hour’s anomalies. Love itself, must love anomaly. As a father loves it when a child does something entirely unexpected. And interruptions are where the sound occurs. Silence, is where the song resonates. And, we are little surprises, even to ourselves.

I hear God best daily in seams, ripples and in betweens. In things, which weren’t quiet expected. Sabbath is in that space of surprise for me. Where humor occurs, and that deep chuckle in a great Father’s throat. I didn’t expect that, His great laugh seems to imply; that is what makes me most happy. To hear Him listening to our best joke. To catch Him off guard, as if we could. We must all be anomalies, in that sense. And surprise Him with joy daily, as kids often tend to do, at our best. He seems to enjoy us enjoying ourselves, and, at least, trying to surprise him by being His anomalies.

From the book reviews on the road series:

Re-reading a tender toned but transformational little book by an old friend and mentor called, “Mystery of The Night Cafe” (Hidden key to the spirituality of Vincent Van Gogh):

Having finished this one again, and been changed by it, as all great books request of us. Here are some of my many heart’s “take aways”!

Great art let’s us suffer while having hope-that is, increases our empathy for one another. In short, it invites us to step into another’s shoes for a moment to know what it’s like from their perspective, and as we do, try on another’s shoes, we somehow become more comfortable in our own! That is one of the points, great art makes, and is part of how it changes us each into an image more like how we really are. The truer images, we really are!

We begin to slip off from our own skin, as we behold another’s. We know ourselves, through loving others. We start to know the own contours of our own clothing as we try on the suits of another! Empathy teaches us to be. Even St Paul said, we must be clothed with Christ, before we know ourselves. We lose our names to find them. That saint didn’t know his name, until He saw Another! We know ourselves, by the degree to which we are willing to see another in that Light of Love, as Paul might put it.

When we engage with the artist’s imagination, our own is invited into a transformational encounter with what that artist saw well-ie through love’s lens. How we see, determines how we know, as they say. How deeply we see, determines how well.

At the back of “The Night Cafe” is the well lit room past all the drunken derelict’s long nightcap.

And in the painting which this book keyholes Vincent’s spiritual journey through, there is that slanted hope room illuminated in the background, implied as a passage way out, in this one of Vincent’s seemingly bleakest works. One in which, he said, i tried to put all of human suffering in one cafe, and then paint it with “Japanese gaiety” or joy. Again, Vincent’s favorite verse was from St Paul…”rejoicing in suffering always!” I tried to put all our suffering in one room but with a way out that was present in the room!

Van Gogh, the failed minister and preacher’s son, tells his gospel by foregrounding places of suffering, where humanity is depraved. But the invitation to empathize is always there is all his art. As Dr Edward’s points out, increasing our empathy for one another and creation is one of the primary functions of art. As great art, contextualizes our shared suffering, we enter together, through our imaginations, into an enlightening hope for healing.

This one reads like a detective novel as well, and has such a caring tender tone, that you want to see what you are being invited to see, even as you start to see it.

As, Martin Buber, philosopher and aesthetician, would say- great art, activates your thou as you encounter the thou of the other. And to the degree that you encounter the other, you become more yourself! Beauty is always in the “I” of the beholder-that is, if my deeper self engages with yours, we will have a transformative encounter which should and will change us both.

Compassion occurs as we engage our imaginations in loving, and therefore knowing one another. And, to the degree we engage, even with art, we are changed by that risking Loving encounter!

And, this is one of the roles of art. Or, as Thomas Merton, put it, everything rest on how we imagine God. If we image Him as a brutal dictator, an abusive father or system, or as a loving kind patient father who tenderly calls us by name as kids. It’s also true with one another.

Are the people in this painting hopeless losers, or kings and queens being readied to come into the right light?! Regardless, in Vincent’s vision, they have already become poetry!

Of course, i was blessed to go to Arles, and several other significant places in Van Gogh’s life (including the Art Academy in Antwerp which my wife and I lived near for many years, and where Vincent attended art school) years back, and have deeply encountered many of the works by this now very famous artist, who was of course, penniless in his life. A king without a crown, that fellow, not unlike the fellows he painted in this famous piece! I always felt his paintings were little sermons of beholding.

Like Marc Chagall, my best art friend and guide into what can be seen of the unseen in the seen, Vincent illuminated the imagination towards the act of encountering what was true and real around us, without dualizing life. That in Christ, the Kingdom had come into our common suffering, and found us in our beer joints and stupors, as Vincent put it in an early sermon the miners in Belgium; before he was a painter. And both did so in their own authentic styles.

And that they pulled back a veil around their subjects to illuminate a more luminous backdrop for daily common life. That a beer joint is also always a holy temple, when seen in the right light!

Finding the luminous in the ordinary was one of Vincent’s great gifts, which he shared open heartedly through his art. And invited us to also see the water, not just the fish, in this enormous aquarium we all live in. He invited us into the well lit back room of our cafes at night.

And this little meditative book, does something similar-opens our hearts to more of what is real, that is, really there and here (that Kingdom in our midst! where we move and have our breath!)-if we have eyes to see.

How we see, matters, and this little book teaches us to see better. Helpful when a book, or any other art, can do that much. Illuminating. Thanks to Cliff Edwards for being our guide through Vincent’s “I” and eyes into a deeper, ever more spiritual or truer way of seeing.

I’ve gotten to meet many of the greater heart minds of my generation, especially those integrating art and faith in an imaginative unique engaging way, without throwing the Baby out with the bathwater, so to speak- here is another…if you think christian thought and imagination has gotten boring or too flat, read this book, and re-consider!

Many of you know this kind gentleman scholar and great artist who i had the privilege of spending time in Prague back in the day. This book like George Macdonald’s work integrates imagination, theology and historical context in a enlightening way, which will leave you changed, if you read it deeply or with your whole self, as they say. Some books are worth, what Martin Buber would call, “I-thou-ing”! That is engaging your whole self to know more of the other. Engaging your thou to know the thou of another. Both the books I am currently reviewing are this type and level of one artist to another, one thou to another’s thou. It’s like devotional reading, and it transforms the reader who engages fully.

And this book as well as all of Macdonald’s work, requires your imagination as well as intellect to dive in, in order to know. Appreciating this level of discourse which is extremely relevant to our times.

Like George Macdonald, John de Long has some bones to pick with modern faces of religion, but he picks them with Grace, wisdom and kindness in a way which has become rarer in our days or polemical argumentative discourse.

If you haven’t read Macdonald’s amazing body of work, do! It will change you too! And even when you don’t agree, you find your imagination enriched and engaged in knowing more and loving more of God. Great read. Read it!

Both men, are great artist, thinkers and theologians, and will and do have a lasting legacy of inviting us into “the More” around us, which was always present to those who could see well, in each generation. Thanks for this gem John, and may are imaginations and hearts and minds continue to stay awake, alive, and baptized daily into more of Him as we go! When people give this much of themselves into a book, it is a gift to show up fully and be changed by even a single book. For that we are grateful.

Confessions of an insider outsider:
How is it that I get to be an insider everywhere? I feel like the fellow in that film Zelig daily-able to super-impose and pop up into and onto key cool moments of history, and get to be a “character” in the drama of life. I’m a photobomb, that keeps happening!
Ironically, I’m a local everywhere, and get free VIP seats (although, often get asked, “Exactly, who is that guy, and what is he doing here?”
God must at least like me.
I’ve got a backstage pass for life, and get free t-shirts everywhere! I’ve gotten to meet most of my favorite people in life!
And, these days I get to wear a rainbow coat that glows in the dark. I’m blessed. I’m still here, hope it blesses the party! Glad to be welcomed, and to welcome! We are all insiders and outsiders simultaneously, i’m sure. Depending on the day.
And all dearly adored and welcomed forever! If you feel like an outsider, you’re also an insider! And if you are an insider, you are also an outsider. Everyone’s invited to the party! But we all play our roles daily.