“I remember a morning about 15 years ago. It was a particularly bad morning, after a particularly bad night. We — my wife and I — had been caught in one of those cyclical rows that reignite every time you think they’ve come to an exhausted close, because the thing that’s wrong won’t be left alone, won’t stay out of sight if you try to turn away from it. Over and over, between midnight and six, when we finally gave up and got up, we’d helplessly looped from tears, and the aftermath of tears, back into scratch-your-eyes-out, scratch-each-other’s-skin-off quarrelling. Intimacy had turned toxic: we knew, as we went around and around it, almost exactly what the other one was going to say, and even what they were going to think, and it only made things worse. It felt as if we were reduced — but truthfully reduced, reduced in accordance with the truth of the situation — to a pair of intermeshing routines, cogs with sharp teeth turning each other. We got up, and she went to work. I went to a café and nursed my misery along with a cappuccino. I could not see any way out of sorrow that did not involve some obvious self-deception, some wishful lie about where we’d got to. And then the person serving in the café put on a cassette: Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, the middle movement, the adagio.
If you don’t know it, it is a very patient piece of music. It too goes round and round, in its way, essentially playing the same tune again and again, on the clarinet alone and then with the orchestra, clarinet and then orchestra, lifting up the same unhurried lilt of solitary sound, and then backing it with a kind of messageless tenderness in deep waves, when the strings join in. It is not strained in any way. It does not sound as if the music is struggling to lift a weight it can only just manage. Yet at the same time, it is not music that denies anything. It offers a strong, absolutely calm rejoicing, but it does not pretend there is no sorrow. On the contrary, it sounds as if it comes from a world where sorrow is perfectly ordinary, but still there is more to be said.
I had heard it lots of times, but this time it felt to me like news. It said: everything you fear is true. And yet. And yet. Everything you have done wrong, you have really done wrong. And yet. And yet. The world is wider than you fear it is, wider than the repeating rigmaroles in your mind, and it has this in it, as truly as it contains your unhappiness. Shut up and listen, and let yourself count, just a little bit, on a calm that you do not have to be able to make for yourself, because here it is, freely offered. There is more going on here than what you deserve, or don’t deserve. There is this as well. And it played the tune again, with all the cares in the world.
The novelist Richard Powers has written that the Clarinet Concerto sounds the way mercy would sound, and that’s exactly how I experienced it in 1997.”
— Francis Spufford, The trouble with atheists: a defence of faith, The Guardian
hospital vespers
RSSMy life is a story about who God is and what He does in a human heart.
- Shauna Niequist (via churchjanitor)
Listen. To be married 66 years took a lot of guts and forgiveness. There were a lot of arguments, bullshit, and courage. Grandpa did a lot of things he wasn’t supposed to do. You know some of them. A lot, you don’t know. You don’t know what I went through with him. But I did it.
- THE RUMPUS MINI-INTERVIEW PROJECT #48, SARA FINNERTY IN CONVERSATION WITH HER GRANDMOTHER, ELENA IOCCO. (via therumpus)
Samuel Huntington was correct in looking toward culture as the boundary between Western and Eastern societies. But boundaries are ever-changing and values cross over between cultures by osmosis. To assume cultures are autarkic and unchanging is as erroneous as to assume that cultural distinctions are invariably resolvable. The truth about culture lies in the middle; values are transposable, which is why identity is most enthralling when they are tethered the least.
- Michael Young, from his op-ed “What Does Muslim-Western Relations Mean?” (via beingblog)
In Austin, someone has scrawled on the bathroom wall of a cafe on Congress Street, ‘I don’t know if you or I exist, but somewhere there are poems about us.’
-
Linh Dinh, from “Poetry Sightings”
(via the-final-sentence)
(Source: poetryfoundation.org)
I looked at a lot of pictures today. But this one. This one. Not protected by any graphic warnings, no gore to speak of. The action is all in the background.
It’s the foreground that takes my breath away. An umbrella stroller, abandoned, overturned. I am undone.
Faith is not some half-remembered country into which you come like a long-exiled king, dispensing the old wisdom, casting out the radical, insurrectionist aspects of yourself by which you’ve been betrayed. No. Life is not an error, even when it is. That is to say, whatever faith you emerge with at the end of your life is going to be not simply affected by your life but intimately dependent upon it, for faith in God is, in the deepest sense, faith in life - which means that even the staunchest life of faith is a life of great change. It follows that if you believe that fifty what you believed at fifteen, then you have not lived - or have denied the reality of your life.
- Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss, 7. (via invisibleforeigner)
Tomb, thou shalt not hold Him longer;
Death is strong, but Life is stronger;
Stronger than the dark, the light;
Stronger than the wrong, the right.
Faith and Hope triumphant say,
Christ will rise on Easter-Day.
- Bishop Phillips Brooks, An Easter Carol
Pope Francis models an ideal of MKE Church WoW — taking the Gospel to “the least of these”.
Pope washes feet of young detainees in Holy Thursday ritual
NBC News: Pope Francis washed the feet of of a dozen young inmates in a juvenile detention center as part of Holy Thursday.
The group of 12 young people who had their feet washed and kissed by the pope included two young women - the first time a pontiff included females in the rite. The ceremony has traditionally been limited to men, since all of Jesus’ apostles were men. The young people were aged between 16 and 21 and chosen from different nationalities and religious backgrounds. The Vatican spokesman said two of the 12 whose feet were washed were Muslim inmates.
In the past, Francis’ predecessors washed the feet of priests in the Basilica of St. John in Lateran.
Photo: Pope Francis washes the feet of a young inmate during a mass at the church of the Casal del Marmo youth prison on the outskirts of Rome as part of Holy Thursday. (Osservatore Romano via AFP - Getty Images)
About hospital vespers
