First light

Miri Rubin:

We can only understand anti-Judaism when we appreciate that it [is] not universal, and that it must be contextualized to be understood. . . . One looks around, guided by the single thing that anti-Judaism and similar social pathologies teach us loud and clear: that any attempt to categorize people, to place them in exclusive groups is a lie, and it requires an enormous effort of mendacity and persuasion to keep such lies believable. So much so that no claim can be coherent, that it cracks, and its cracks can become visible to us.

Goat on a mountain

Open 🙂

Bonhoeffer, joy, and “being for others”

“He wishes he were back in his country, praying in person with Haitians who have nothing to eat, instead of being stranded in Texas trying to persuade Americans that they have too much to eat.”

Andrew J. Newell:

At the heart of this moment, and of many such moments in Buechner’s writing, is a barely-spoken revelation of that which we take most for granted: the marvellous procession of all things out from their first cause. The seed, found situated in friendly earth; the hidden germination of its heart; the slow and steady downward reach of its roots towards deep treasuries of moisture and nutrients; the upward search of the sprout until, finally, it scents air above and unfurls its face to the residual heat and light of a myriad hydrogen protons smashing into one another at the core of a sun that burns at twenty-seven million degrees Fahrenheit ninety-three million miles away. Radiating through the empty vestibules of space and terminating on the outspread palms of the seedling’s leaves, the light meets favourably with air that is itself the collective sigh of all plants everywhere, and with water droplets borne from distant seas along the secret pathways of the wind. Thus, seedling becomes sapling, and the sapling — grown to maturity, its wooden arms outstretched and bearing fruit — is the product and continuation of a miracle. […]

Standing in a pulpit before the “cultured despisers” of his day, the upturned faces of staff and students alike, he returns time and again to this message — the ordinary, for Buechner, is extraordinary enough to exhaust the mind with holy wonder at the work and presence of God. […]

[Jesus] ate, he drank, he sat down and walked around, and the soft footfall of his feet of flesh upon the earth left imprints in the ordinary way. He was ‘the gardener, a stranger coming down the road behind us’, and he ate meals ‘like any other meal’, and this was enough to flood the world with light.

Early-rising blue heron enjoying a misty morning sunrise after the storm on the southern tip of Damariscotta Lake

“The practice of nepsis is counter-cultural. Social media, politics, culture wars, pop culture, influencers, pundits, prognostications, and even personal mental health are focused on the “BIG picture”, global political, cultural, and environmental issues, things over which we have no individual control. But nepsis calls on us to be aware, not of global issues but the issue of how I put my silverware in the sink.”

Ask and you shall receive!

This was great, and it could not have worked out better even if I had sent Geoffrey West a letter. Worth your time.