On life and love.

I think about this a lot:

Our imitation of God in this life must be an imitation of God incarnate: our model is the Jesus, not only of Calvary, but of the workshop, the roads, the crowds, the clamorous demands and surly oppositions, the lack of all peace and privacy, the interruptions. For this, so strangely unlike anything we can contribute to the Divine life in itself, is apparently not only like, but is, the Divine life operating under human conditions.
-CS Lewis, The Four Loves

Living a life that expresses our sonship, inheritance and experience with the Holy God means we read the Gospels and do everything God said and did when He moved into our neighborhood. This type of life, devoted to servanthood, compassion, justice and mercy may seem very unremarkable to the average, temporary eye, but the otherworldly love that propels each of these small, seemingly insignificant actions will move with an inexpressible, invisible force that the momentum will draw all attention to the compulsion that drives us: that is, Christ Himself.
So, let's do that.

Moving Mountains - Thrice

I give my body up unto the flames;

And never once have I denied your name

But I don't know the first thing about love.

Twelve Dancing Princesses

In writing class a couple of years ago, we had to write poems inspired by fairy tales. I wrote this one based on the story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses.
I don't really know why I'm posting it; I just like it.

OH! And how my feet do ache by morn
And how the sisters’ shoes lay worn
And by come evening, in the dead day’s dusk
There are king’s sons heads gone from bodies

Because oh! While they slept and slumbered so
We escaped and danced under leaves of gold
And if, for one night, we stayed at home
One more man might have lived.

But the title of heir is too great to decline
And the mystery of where 24 feet escape in the night
Too great to forget
Despite lost heads.

Girls, for the price of shoes and boy’s lives we dance.

"I can't call a blog that, Jeremy!"

In high school, I took a class called Comparative Religions; one of the units was on the branches on Buddhism. I remember learning then, for the first time, about sand mandalas. Huge, intricate designs made on the floors of Buddhist monks utilizing nothing but individually placed grains of dyed sand. I thought for months about old, patient monks with wise and withered faces and clad in orange robes devoting the hours of their days to the colourful reality of sand at their feet. Every grain of sand is delicately placed into the patterns; the process can take days, months, even years.

A finished mandala is always breathtaking - both for the beauty it gives to the world and also the dedication it represents.

When the mandala is done, the monks step back, take a look at the result of hours of backbreaking work, pick up a broom and sweep the whole thing up.

The monks call mandalas a discipline in release, a teaching that beauty is temporary and fleeting, and they much be as able and willing to let go of it as they were to create it in the first place.

In my life, I am currently cleaning up the remnants of my last mandala.

I am learning to be free of my grief for what was once beautifully layed out at my feet, and is now swept up and given to the winds.