Each morning, I ask forgiveness for things I have done and for things I have left undone. And some mornings I ask forgiveness for things done in my name.

Justified?

I've wrestled with this, but I'm now open to accepting, should they wish to give it to me, Wendell Berry's Medal of Freedom, Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer for Fiction, Alice McDermott's National Book Award, or Ron Swanson's Golden Floppy Disc Award. Thank you.

If the beauty is shrinking and the soul-true tears have run dry, we should be wary. And we should pray for mercy. And we should begin to pay attention in new ways to how God is appearing among us.

"Wherever there is weeping," says Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, "there is God. The water of our tears invites him to create a new world within ourselves.

Like wax, our fear and posturing and attempts to control others melts. There's tears. Genuine tears. We crave more God-beauty in our lives. We ache to have this beauty let loose in the world.

There's abundance, laughter, joy. Everything opens up in God's world. There's dancing. Beautiful dancing.

And, when God is at work, we also experience a deep healing and holy upheaval in the human heart. Old anxieties and self-protections and resistance falter. We are "willing to yield" (James).

Whenever truth (and I understand "truth" to be another way of talking about God) arrives, then generative, raucous beauty breaks loose. In Genesis, the first thing we learn about God is how God creates. God makes more space, welcomes more creatures, expands what's possible, shatters boundaries.

When everything's piss and flamethrowers and facts seem as squishy as the kitchen sponge, sometimes we need to return to a few basics to discern whether an idea, a movement, a vision of God, is true or a farce.

And when you need to be humbled: the peg game.

I like the logo. Just don’t mess with the peg game. Or apple butter.

Being spiritual (though not religious) is common fare these days. I've been thinking about what we mean by this, how we use these ideas, what the assumptions often are. And I've realized I'm really not very spiritual.

winncollier.substack.com/p/im-not-ver...

“Ol’ Gary Chapman didn’t list mixing me an evening cocktail as one of the love languages. What a dumdum.” - Miska

The same moral ethic, the same understanding of humanity as bearers of God's image (I'm speaking to Christians on this point) moving us to defend Jews when they are slaughtered also moves us to defend Palestinians when they are slaughtered. This part is not complicated. This is basic Christianity.

Hamas carries blame here for how they use their own people as pawns, but Israel holds almost all the power. And the vulnerable are always the ones who pay the price.

It is more than possible to support Israel's existence, even their right to defend themselves, and also insist the slaughter of innocents must end. The starvation must end. The complete destruction of healthcare must stop (the last hospital standing in Gaza has basically been bombed into closure).

Ok, I'll revise by half: 25,000 innocents killed is unacceptable). Starving out a people is vile. Murdering 1200 in a rampage is butchery. Twenty-something hostages still being held (God, may they still be alive) is inhumane.

then we'll have far harder questions we want answered before a soldier pulls a trigger in our name or our government ships a bomb to an ally on our dollar.

But some threads are simple. Like these: 50,000 innocent killed in Gaza is unacceptable (are these numbers exaggerated?...

The world is very complicated, and things are often more (or less) than they seem. War is almost never as simplistic as the powers pulling the strings want us to believe. If the complications (the evil motives and the misjudgments and the sheer ignorance) are allowed into the light...

They loaded commercial jets with children, many of them infants, strapped into carriers into seats. Some were even tucked into cardboard boxes and loaded in the cargo area. The children were flown to the U.S., and also to Australia, West Germany, France, and Canada.

When things are haywire, we need more beauty, not less. I refuse to act as though the world is not a wonder.

It’s time once more in Holland.

It’s been a doozy of year (or was that a decade?) since last Spring. And there’s no switch to flip to turn off the sorrows and fears, the bone weariness, we continue to carry. Still, there are always new beauties, new joys, new invitations, awaiting.

I can't believe I'm writing this line: It's a very, very, bad, bad idea to attack Greenland.

//

“We’ll get Greenland. Yeah, 100%,” President Trump said.

"No, I never take military force off the table. But I think there's a good possibility that we could do it without military force.”

Grateful it arrived at the right time

We can allow our wound, our grief, to be our prayer. We can bend our weary bodies. We can lean, even if only barely, toward the Mercy. For us. For everyone.

Lent is, after all, precisely for those who know they’re in trouble, for those who know they can’t get themselves out of their mess, for those who know they are going to die. But our lack and depletion provides us a unique capacity to carry the weight and the heaviness of this groaning world.

our dismissal of those virtues that would make the kind of world we’d want to give to our daughters and sons. We receive the ashes for ourselves and for the world.

If you have little to offer this Lent, little mojo for new spiritual practices or disciplines, then Lent might be especially for you...

our outrageous consumption, our failure to welcome and protect vulnerable children, our disdain for the immigrant, our killing, our inability to clearly name the truth, our failure as stewards of creation, our failure to nurture friendship and tenderness and self-sacrifice and bold courage...

In Lent, we remember our human story is bound together. Whether we like it or not. Whether we like each other or not.

And so, on Ash Wednesday, we repent. Not merely for my sins and shortcomings, but for the world's. We name our collective greed, our racialized evil, our abuse of the poor...