| Welcome to The New Coffee Room. We hope you enjoy your visit. You're currently viewing our forum as a guest. This means you are limited to certain areas of the board and there are some features you can't use. If you join our community, you'll be able to access member-only sections, and use many member-only features such as customizing your profile, sending personal messages, and voting in polls. Registration is simple, fast, and completely free. Join our community! If you're already a member please log in to your account to access all of our features: |
| This made me think of Frank | |
|---|---|
| Tweet Topic Started: Apr 19 2011, 06:04 PM (131 Views) | |
| Dewey | Apr 19 2011, 06:04 PM Post #1 |
![]()
HOLY CARP!!!
|
Currently reading "Leaving Church," a book by Barbara Brown Taylor, an amazingly gifted preacher whose writing I enjoy. This particular book details her personal story of leaving a large urban Episcopalian Church in Atlanta in favor of a very small rural church in northeast Georgia, where she thought she would escape the burnout, disillusionment and seeming unending job description of being a priest of a city congregation. She quickly learns that serving the rural congregation includes all the same stresses and problems found in serving the large church, if not more so. She ultimately leaves the small congregation and becomes a professor, the position she currently holds. I'm only starting the book, but this excerpt made me think of Frank, his spirituality, and his cathedral: ===== As hard as I have tried to remember the exact moment when I fell in love with God, I cannot do it. My earliest memories are bathed in a kind of golden light that seemed to embrace me as surely as my mother's arms. The Divine Presence was strongest outdoors, and most palpable when I was alone. When I think of my first cathedral, I am back in a field behind my parents' house in Kansas, with every stalk of prairie grass lit up from within. I can hear the entire community of crows, grasshoppers, and tree frogs who belong to this field with me. The smell of the grass is so sweet that it perfumes me from within, while the sun heating the top of my head brings out my own fragrance too. There is more in this field than I will ever be able to discover - not only the abandoned shells of land snails and the shed feathers of blue jays but also round holes in the earth that might have been dug by field mice or black snakes, but I will never know which, because as long as I lie there watching the hole, no creature ever appears to go in or come out of it. This does not matter because lying there is very good. My skin is happy on the black dirt, which speaks a language my bones understand. If I roll over and think only about the places on my back that are touching the ground, then pretty soon I cannot tel whether I am pressing down on the earth or the earth is pressing up on me.... I am floating in this field, held up toward the sun by the black dirt under my back. I am this earth's child, and I know it. When I am done lying here, I will visit the small crystal stream that runs through this field to se what is moving in it today. The Presence will be there too, lighting up everything that moves. I have met salamanders there, tadpoles, crayfish, and water bugs. I have watched the moss on the bottom ripple as the water runs over it. Years later, I will discover that this was no crystal stream but a drainage ditch. The difference between these two descriptions of the same place will screw with my sense of reality for a long time. Is the Divine Presence in the world, or in my eye? Because I was not brought up in church, I had no religious language for what happened in that golden-lit field or in ay of the other woods or fields that followed it. I had no picture in my mind of a fantastic-looking old man named God who lived in a heaven above my head. I did not know to close my eyes and bow my head to speak to this God, and I certainly did not know that there was anything wrong with that field or what I experienced in it. If anyone had tried to tell me that creation was fallen or that I should care more for heaven than earth, I would have gone off to lie in the sweet grass by myself. When I was seven I went to church for the first time, where I got the same feeling of being held that I knew from the field. I furthermore got the impression that the people who were there that morning had figured out a way of talking about that feeling. They seemed to know where it came from, who was responsible for it, what it meant, and how to respond to it. They read from a big book that apparently taught them these things, and when the minister talked he seemed to know more than anyone about how special the feeling was and how important it was to thank God for it. I was impressed, with him and with the singing, if not with the readings from the book. An hour later, I was back in the car with my family, permanently hooked on finding out more about God. Because we moved a lot, and because my parents were not as taken with divinity as I was, my religious quest was largely do-it-yourself. I paid careful attention to movies with Christians in them, which spanned the gamut from Spartacus to The Lilies of the Field. .... I hitched rides with friends to the churches and synagogues they attended without ever finding what I was looking for. The services lasted for only an hour, for one thing, and I never got to ask any questions during them, for another. When I went to Sunday School, it was like being back in regular school again except that the subject matter was different. The teachers worked from a set curriculum with specific things in it that they wanted me to learn, but I was hard-pressed to find any connection between those things and the Divine Presence that I knew from the field. By then my family had moved far from Kansas, but the Presence was still with me. On warm Georgia nights I would climb over the fence of the golf club near my house and walk the manicured greens bathed in moonlight. There was a crystal stream there too, which ran under a small wooden footbridge between two fairways. Some nights I would sit there until the stars came out, seeing them first in the water and then seeing them in the sky. During the summer months, when the fireflies were out, it was hard to know whether the lights belonged to heaven or to earth. This is a line that has remained forever blurry for me. Though is was night instead of day, I still felt held in arms that I could not see. No words came with the feeling. I received no visions or directions, which would have surprised me in any case since the Presence was not outside me. I lived inside the Presence, which placed me in communion with everything around me, including my parents and my two sisters in the house I had left behind, every neighbor behind the lit windows that stretched down my street, and all the creatures i could hear rustling in the dark. ===== |
|
"By nature, i prefer brevity." - John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, p. 685. "Never waste your time trying to explain yourself to people who are committed to misunderstanding you." - Anonymous "Oh sure, every once in a while a turd floated by, but other than that it was just fine." - Joe A., 2011 I'll answer your other comments later, but my primary priority for the rest of the evening is to get drunk." - Klaus, 12/31/14 | |
![]() |
|
| Frank_W | Apr 20 2011, 04:14 AM Post #2 |
![]()
Resident Misanthrope
|
*tears* Amen.... She gets it!! Thank you for this amazing gift, this morning, my friend.
|
|
Anatomy Prof: "The human body has about 20 sq. meters of skin." Me: "Man, that's a lot of lampshades!" | |
![]() |
|
| Frank_W | Apr 20 2011, 06:25 AM Post #3 |
![]()
Resident Misanthrope
|
(Shared in a note on Facebook, too.)
|
|
Anatomy Prof: "The human body has about 20 sq. meters of skin." Me: "Man, that's a lot of lampshades!" | |
![]() |
|
| « Previous Topic · The New Coffee Room · Next Topic » |








6:26 AM Jul 11