Sane?

“If the world is sane, then Jesus is mad as a hatter and the Last Supper is the Mad Tea Party. The world says, Mind your own business, and Jesus says, There is no such thing as your own business. The world says, Follow the wisest course and be a success, and Jesus says, Follow me and be crucified. The world says, Drive carefully—the life you save may be your own—and Jesus says, Whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. The world says, Law and order, and Jesus says, Love. The world says, Get, and Jesus says, Give. In terms of the world’s sanity, Jesus is crazy as a coot, and anybody who thinks he can follow him without being a little crazy too is laboring less under a cross than under a delusion.”

From Buechner, The Faces of Jesus

You look great, honey.

We'll post pictures from the CD release party soon. The last few days have been blurry -- like the kind of blurry that happens when you've been looking out a car window for hours on end, scanning whatever it is that shoots past your line of vision, and you can't differentiate shapes and colors anymore. Thursday night was fantastic; tons of folks from our community, church, and city showed up, and the bands who preceded Alex were great. Then, Alex played, and did so well -- I was so proud of him. On Friday, he left again to lead worship for a retreat with the Falls Church in DC for the weekend and came home tonight.

I've been reading a bit more Wendell Berry lately, and celebrating the birth of the first son of our dear friend, Erika, and her husband, Jeremy. Over the phone, I laughed with my friend a few nights ago about some old jokes -- as she held her new son -- and thought about what Wendell Berry has been teaching me and how it massages the pangs of loss that I've felt in being so far from old friends and family. He writes that we live in the culture of the "one-night-stand"that we now know no commitment to place. We are not married to anywhere -- we are not forced to learn a place, to learn a people. Laughing with Erika -- and yet knowing that she, along with my other dear Rhodes friends -- are many miles away and not in my daily life because I, too, live in that culture, brings such pain. We need "enough time" to really farm the relationships, the jobs, the very life that staying promises. We do not know faith to a place anymore. And yet, Berry writes, that being faithful to place, staying, bears witness to the very gospel that became flesh and dwelt among us.

I am the worst offender of this principle -- I am constantly soothing my discomfort with thoughts of the next place we will go, or the move home I imagine we will make. And maybe God will call us to do one of those things, but I do know that the impermanence that plagues our lives is not the way things are supposed to be.