A Positively Poetic Priest

 “We seldom admit the seductive comfort of hopelessness. It saves us from ambiguity. It has an answer for every question: "There's just no point."; Hope, on the other hand, is messy. If it might all work out, then we have things to do. We must weather the possibility of happiness.” This was written on the former Twitter, by The CryptoNaturalist last July. (July 22, 2022, Twitter) This quote spoke to me about the reason hopelessness seems so easy in the face of so much in our world that seems so hard. In order to have hope, we have to be willing to change whereas hopelessness gives us an easy out. In August of 2017, the United States experienced what some media outlets called "the Great American Eclipse." It was a total solar eclipse that spanned fourteen different states, with a partial eclipse being visible from parts of Canada to parts of South America. I was traveling that day and remember pulling off the highway into a shopping mall to catch a glimpse of the...

I have had a reputation in my life for not sleeping. As a small child, I didn't sleep through the night and frequently kept my parents awake. As a kid at camp, not being a good sleeper, everyone thought that I just didn't sleep. Even through college and seminary, my friends joked that I must not be human because they had never seen me sleep. I have a hard time sleeping through noise, and people make a lot of noise. My husband continues this line of joking still today though he has managed to catch me asleep, though not often, because he falls asleep faster than I do and he can sleep through almost anything. In the Gospel passage this morning, we hear another parable from Jesus. And this one leaves us with a lot more questions instead of answers. In the stories and teachings before this parable in the arc of story from Matthew Jesus is on this theme of staying awake. Of course, we get to the parable of the bridesmaids and see all of them promptly fall asleep. Thankfully, I don...

Have you ever seen the comedy movie  Chicken Little? The sky is falling! If you haven't seen the movie, what happens is that Chicken Little is sitting under a tree when a piece of sky falls and hits him on the head.  He starts panicking. He runs to the town bell tower and starts ringing the emergency bell. And everyone else starts panicking. Without knowing why. So much so, people are running around, running into things, screaming and carrying on, that the town water tower falls apart  and the huge round part at the top,  full of water, falls down and rolls around town destroying things. Chicken Little's panic does actually cause a real emergency. All because he believes the sky is falling. The sky is falling! Jesus says it, so it must be true. Quite literally, Jesus says the stars are falling out of the sky. Remember the three kinds of apocalypse? The world ending because of natural disaster the wor...

Have you ever been listening to a piece of music, enjoying the melody, flowing along with it... when all of a sudden the melody completely changed? (Play music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moL4MkJ-aLk ) Many would describe the way the melody changes in Sir Edward Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 as sudden. Most people would say that they know the song Pomp and Circumstance, but Sir Elgar actually wrote five different Marches with the same name. The No.1, which we heard, starts with large brass fanfare and a full string melody which includes the musical whip banging in the background before all of a sudden going into the much softer fluid grandeur of the what we all associate with Pomp and Circumstance. Perhaps you could hear the audience's surprise in the form of laughter when the melody suddenly changes. It was an unexpected turn of events.  We as Christians have gotten so used to the idea of waiting for Jesus to come. Every year we wait, spending Advent wai...