these are a few of my favorite things

After visiting with my sweet community members tonight - and watching/ discussing clips from our Lenten discipline movie, "Chocolat," - I went looking for a few old blogger friends that have nourished me over the years. Like Coltrane's version of "Favorite Things," these blogs just get better over time... and I thought it kind to share them with you. And joy upon joy, I found some copies of some of Robert Lentz's radical icons, too. So, in no particular order, but all a delight I invite you to check out: Velveteen Rabbi, One Hand Clapping, the Dude Abides, Refractions, Gregory Wolfe, the Painted Prayerbook, the Arts Abbey and Soulforce. (These are all listed on the side bar with links so you can go right to the good stuff!) I am heading to NYC later this week for my second International Arts Movement Conference/Encounter. Last year at this time we travelled to Manhattan from Tucson to check it out - and that trip eventually led us to a new call in the Berkshires. Who knows what wild blessings this trip will bring, but one will surely be visiting with children in Brooklyn and maybe actually getting to MOMA!

Tonight at our Lenten conversation we talked about having fun as an essential spiritual discipline - laughing at ourselves and taking time to be conscious of an other's needs, too. The blessing is that we are finding new and even tender ways to claim God's presence for us in the ordinary events of everyday life. In that light, dig this poem by James McAuley: "In the Twentieth Century."

Christ, you walked on the sea

But cannot walk in a poem,

Not in our century.

There's something deeply wrong

Either with us or with you.

Our bright loud world is strong

And better i some ways

Than the old haunting kingdoms:

I don't reject our days.

But in you I taste bread,

Freshness, the honey of being,

And rising from the dead:

Like yolk in a warm shell -

Simplicities of power,

And water from a well.

We live like diagrams

Moving on a screen.

Somewhere a door slams

Shut, and emptiness spreads.

Our loves are processes

Upon foam-rubber beds.

Our speech is chemical waste;

The words have a plastic feel,

An antibiotic taste.

And yet we dream of song

Like parables of joy.

There's something deeply wrong.

Like shades we must drink blood

To find the living voice

That flesh once understood.