Weekly Inspiration (1/25/24)

“You will go through seasons of life where you are overwhelmed and feel lost: having lost your bearings, lost your direction, lost your meaning, maybe lost your hope. The good news is in Jesus’ real presence. Jesus is God Emmanuel, God with us. And his presence is real: not imaginary, not hypothetical, but real, really connected with what it means to be fully human.”

Br. Curtis Almquist
Society of Saint John the Evangelist

Mixed
by Steve Garnaas-Holmes

Last week I wrote a prayer welcoming God's refining fire.
Then horrifying flames began devastating Los Angeles.

“When you walk through fire you shall not be burned,”
God says, and then some are.

The baptismal flood brings beauty and devastation.
Some drown in holy water.

Life is a mixed bag, and we grab it
because it's our only bag.

It's plush with knives and we pick it up,
and find in it sweets and nuts, and blood.

You eat the whole luscious fruit;
the seeds of calamity are too small to pick out.

Ruin has its joys, and triumph its sorrows.
To love God is to lose and receive everything.

Sometimes it is among ashes
we become most human.

After the fire they will clean up using power
generated by burning something.

Love walks among the tents in the camps of death,
a child singing her undying song.

We join the beautiful slow dance of the Beloved,
man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.

What does this mean? That nothing is absolute but God,
who is always present, and mostly paradox.

We touch each other. We trust grace,
and we take what comes.