“Mere life is interesting enough. . . . I had always vaguely felt facts to be miracles in the sense that they are wonderful.” – GK Chesterton

Messalonskee Lake - 21April2018 - at the Maine Arts Academy

Finished reading (2021): Bonhoeffer’s Religionless Christianity in Its Christological Context by Peter Hooton 📚

As expected, this did not disappoint. I don’t remember the last time a book on theology so thoroughly resonated with me. Though it remains limited in definition and shape, I have to think that there is an abundant, and growing, number of people, especially those in the current “deconstruction” movement, hungry for exactly what Bonhoeffer had in mind, to which Hooton has done diligent justice. I will definitely have more to say.

A friend joined me for coffee this morning, though I didn’t have an extra chair

Hawai’i or Ireland?

Mary Oliver:

This 2019 essay by Zadie Smith is the best thing I’ve read in a while. More of us need whatever it is she has.

“I am fascinated to presume, as a reader, that many types of people, strange to me in life, might be revealed, through the intimate space of fiction, to have griefs not unlike my own. And so I read.”

Last flight for a while, I hope

Currently returning with the cleft surgery team from Juba, after previously spending a few weeks in Lviv. As the French say, I am le tired.

Because I’m looking for a good word on restoration, as well as for the dirty, overlooked things around the world that strain and somehow work every day; and because last week I reread Alan Jacob’s piece in Comment Magazine on “filth therapy” and “the recognition of what is of worth in that which is scorned by the unseeing”; and because now I know (unsurprisingly) how central that piece is to his thought and writing — I put up an album of photos from the cleft surgery trip with this quote in mind:

“But then what praise is appropriate for those who have taken the filth of the world and given it souls…?”

I tried to think of a good paraphrase that was more fitting to an old, rundown hospital in South Sudan, but I think the idea is fitting enough just the way it is. I will only add a line from a previous year’s journal: Sometimes our work is to make more clear and explicit what is already there, if you have eyes to see.

I’m often torn between the idea of restoring as a means of making visible what is hidden, and restoring as a means of enabling a thing to be what it was not. I’m also happy to leave this unresolved.

What goes on across the globe in hospitals like this one is not as eloquent as, say, the image and feeling of Elizabeth Bishop’s “Filling Station,” but it can be every bit as grimy and every bit as redemption-bearing. And it is capable, therefore, as Christian Wiman said of the last line in Bishop’s poem, of an immense theological statement.

Almost everything in these pictures has contributed in some way to the work that produces — or reveals — smiles and faces like these:

Currently Reading: Bonhoeffer’s Religionless Christianity in Its Christological Context by Peter Hooton 📚

I am beyond excited for this. As I wrote here, Bonhoeffer’s “religionless Christianity”—though mostly undefined and unfortunately titled—is pretty much where I’m at, but few seem to write faithfully about it. I have a good feeling about this one.