My tone is not meant to be obnoxious. I am in a state of shock.
[Flannery O’Connor]

[a poem by Lynn Ungar, sent to me by Lisa Murray]

Consider the lilies of the field,
the blue banks of camas
opening into acres of sky along the road.
Would the longing to lie down
and be washed by that beauty
abate if you knew their usefulness,
how the natives ground their bulbs
for flour, how the settlers’ hogs
uprooted them, grunting in gleeful
oblivion as the flowers fell?

And you — what of your rushed
and useful life? Imagine setting it all down —
papers, plans, appointments, everything —
leaving only a note: “Gone
to the fields to be lovely. Be back
when I’m through with blooming.”

Even now, unneeded and uneaten,
the camas lilies gaze out above the grass
from their tender blue eyes.
Even in sleep your life will shine.
Make no mistake. Of course
your work will always matter.

Yet Solomon in all his glory
was not arrayed like one of these.

Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said: Abba, as much as I am able I practice a small rule, a little fasting, some prayer and meditation, and remain quiet, and as much as possible I keep my thoughts clean. What else should I do? Then the old man stood up and stretched out his hands toward heaven, and his fingers became like ten torches of flame. And he said: If you wish, you can become all flame.

[From Desert Wisdom, translated by Yushi Nomura]

This is the third movement from Beethoven’s Tempest Sonata, played by Wilhelm Kempff. It’s a beautiful black and white video and even on YouTube you can hear how luminous the performance is.

This is a poem by Roger Pfingston, the best love poem I’ve read in a long time, for which I am grateful to Theresa Smith:

Bones

Today, dear one, I attempt the impossible:
I’m going to love your bones,
I mean love your bones so they will know
that they’ve been loved, so your flesh
will simmer with jealousy, melt and merge
with your bones, be one with your bones
and know how cold your bones have been
without love. Are you ready? Can we do this?

It may not be easy, it may be that bones
remain without love for their own good,
it may be they can’t withstand
the pressures of love, the infectious heat
of love, it may be that bones can only make it
with the hard mouth of Death. Nevertheless
today I am going to love your bones,
beginning of course, with your flesh.

This is another of the videos for After the Yellow Ribbon, which was last weekend and went startlingly well — nothing major went wrong, that I know about. And people actually talked about how to heal the wounds of war in soldiers and communities — they were concrete, honest about their positions, and they listened well to one another. It gives me hope for conversations not having to go completely off the rails just because the topic is controversial.

This is the one interview for which I was the interviewer:

Jeremy Begbie: On the arts as a resource for healing and reintegration from Pilar Timpane on Vimeo.

This, too, is ancient: Eddie Izzard on what would happen if the Church of England tried an Inquisition.

This is lovely, on lament and ministry and healing.

Jo Bailey Wells: On the Psalms of lament and resources for healing from Pilar Timpane on Vimeo.

I am not making this up: there is a Dum Dums sucker labeled “Artificial Mystery Flavor.”

Slavoj Žižek (Slovenian Marxist theorist and activist) understands you. In answer to the question, “What does love feel like?” he said:

“Like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.”

My friend Lauren Greenspan may just have improved on Chesterton. She quoted to me, earlier tonight, a line from his essay “A Piece of Chalk” inTremendous Trifles, which, when I looked it up, ran like this:

“Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.”

But when Lauren quoted it, she said, “Chastity is not something tepid; is something burning, like Joan of Arc.” I think I’d keep “flaming.” But other than that I think Lauren’s version is not only an improvement, but an improvement precisely in the spirit of what G. K. meant.