Going deep with Court

My church has an in-house theologian. He says these things that make me go: huh. So you really ‘earn’ that theology bit don’t ya? (And part of me wonders if he feels it is a tad exhausting to have us lay-people attribute such deep meaning to everything he says, if some days he is all: I just want to eat a chocolate donut and not have it ‘mean’ anything.) We are doing a series on prayer and he was talking about different traditions and postures he had taken towards prayer when he said: “It’s the fingers and the toes and all of it..” and I think what he was saying was that not only is it important to express yourself physically- however you think best- i.e. if you feel it necessary to actually kneel then go ahead and do so, but that it was also a lining up of your very holy soul with what it is your mind and body are doing. And there’s the rub. The ‘how do you do that,’ or the sausage-making bit of praying.  The discussion went on to what are people’s expectations of prayer and thi...

soft and slow, steady and here this time, this joy, this gift of life my child you came crashing into a world that i scarcely believed by and by, all things become new beats of another world spun to your little face, steady gazing up how did you get stuck being mine I will be brave for you my children

Have you ever done something really satisfyingly exerting like a long and difficult hike? And you come out the other side of some literal bush like you are crawling through the Earth itself and then -unbeknownst to you when you were crawling through- there is fantastic view that you are rewarded with?  Or maybe it’s more of an internal thing, a struggle of some sort, but rather than your normal negative coping strategies being employed you actually took it to God through prayer and fasting, diving deep into His holy word for the answers rather than calling everyone you know instead first?  Admittedly those two have been rarer for me lately, but, the third one I’m just now standing out the mouth of the cave. I had been lost inside myself for quite a while and it was like each trick of light or drip of water was luring me deeper into the depths of the Earth or to the next desert dune in a vain search of water.  Now, tenting my hand over my eyes like a makeshift visor, I pee...

What if more of this life is veiled  Than we realize For the brightness of the moments  Is too much for us What if we can't even begin  To see the truth here So he yanks us to where We can see the glorious 

Once again I am apologizing for my lack of posting with any semblance of regularity. To that end I’m pretty sure the word hanging me up is ‘deep.’ Cause here’s the thing, I write like I breathe- all the time. Usually it’s journaling and while it’s not quite : ‘had two eggs for breakfast’ I can get pretty whiny.   No offense if you’re into that and if so may I suggest Madly, Deeply the diaries of Alan Rickman, but it’s not my thing. My thing is reading to escape and I’ve been doing a LOT of that lately.  So when I go to write something recently I find myself unable to wrap it up with any sort of ‘point.’ Or maybe there are points I just don’t want to make them and am in denial about them.  It’s the middle, you see, like the middle of a really long and dark tunnel that I feel stuck in. It’s hard to go deep when you’re stuck in the middle.  Perhaps it requires a change in thinking about what is ‘deep.’ Perhaps, deep can be a myriad of things.  At any rate I’m a bit...