Copper Earrings

It's that time of year again! A few people have already been asking and placing orders, so it's time to get the official word out. I make these earrings every year [around the season in which people like to buy things to give as gifts to others]. These make great gifts- the copper is hammered, oxidized and etched by hand, resulting in pieces that are purposefully unique. Go here to see samples and find out how to order.

because we need a housemate

Joshua needs someone to live with him. He lives downstairs. So that means we need someone to live with him. That means you'd be living with us too... (genuine smiles). Here's his invitation- please contact us for details and a roof over your head (actually, it'd be 2 roofs because you'd be downstairs).

Community, Relationship and Solidarity... with the Other.

I had a classic "driveway moment" this week- where the story on the radio kept me from getting out of my car for another 15 min after I had arrived home. I was surprised, moved and brought to tears by this tale of how relationship bears more weight than morality or values. Enjoy the story and I'd love to know your reaction, too.

[overheard]

Sylas (4): Lets hurry up the stairs so the bears don't get us!
Judah (2): Yeah, lets hurry up the stairs so the... Hey! There's no bears in the house!

this is problematic

"We have counted on preaching, teaching, and knowledge or information to form faith in the hearer, and have counted on faith to form the inner life and outward behavior of the Christian. But, for whatever reason, this strategy has not turned out well. The result is that we have multitudes of professing Christians who well may be ready to die, but obviously are not ready to live, and can hardly get along with themselves, much less with others." - Dallas Willard (2006).

Current [NonStop] Soundtrack

Wendell Berry says...

...the Food System is firmly grounded on the following principles:

• Food is important mainly as an article of international trade.
• It doesn't matter what happens to farmers.
• It doesn't matter what happens to the land.
• Agriculture has nothing to do with "the environment."
• There will always be plenty of food, for if farmers don't grow it from the soil, then scientists will invent it.
• There is no connection between food and health. People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are healed by the health industry, which pays no attention to food.
• It follows that there is no connection between healing and health. Hospitals customarily feed their patients poor-quality, awful-tasting, factory-made expensive food and keep them awake all night with various expensive attentions. There is a connection between money and health.

Wendell Berry (Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, 1994).

Your Body belongs to the World of Love

"A body, love insists, is neither a spirit nor a machine; it is not a picture, a diagram, a chart, a graph, an anatomy; it is not an explanation; it is not a law. It is precisely and uniquely what it is. It belongs to the world of love, which is a world of living creatures, natural orders and cycles, many small, fragile lights in the dark." - Wendell Berry (Health is Membership, 1994).

Being and Utility

Perhaps it was Max Weber who first made the connection between the development of capitalism and the puritan work ethic in his 1905 classic text. The links he draws feel obvious to me and I believe that today, the reverse influence of capitalist culture back upon the church is also true. The more we "run" churches like businesses, the more cues we begin to take (unchecked) from the corporate world. How should we organize without rigidity? How do we program without using eachother? How do we strategize without loosing sight of faces? How do we hire, fire, promote and demote within a worshiping community, called beloved by God? How do we encourage eachother to live into our spiritual gifitings without defining people by their utility? Are we more than simply cogs in the Kingdom of God? These are some thoughts on my mind these days that connected with these words by Moltmann in which I experience comfort and rest.
“When a man sees the meaning of life only in being useful and used, he necessarily gets caught in the crisis of living, when illness or sorrow makes everything including himself seem useless… Whoever lays hold of the joy which embraces the creator and his own existence also gets rid of the dreadful question of existence: For what? …We are evidently supposed to be busy with something, as if our existence were justified or rendered beautiful by this. The opposite is true: Our existence is justified and made beautiful before we are able to do or fail to do anything." - Moltmann (Theology of Play, 1972)

How do you Play?

We no longer know how to do nothing. We have mastered our work and now must master our leisure. “Yet those who would master their leisure merely manage to violate their own freedom. Freedom has a way of coming by itself to those who are open and receptive. Those who feel they must master it are destroying freedom even in their leisure.” - Moltmann (Theology of Play, 1972).