Lent 2025: March 20

Yes, I missed the 19th.

From Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy

"Lament helps us embrace two truths at the same time: Hard is hard. Hard is not bad."

As mentioned previously, lament is more than the common idea of a weepy person. I still have not fathomed it. But I am amazed by the paradoxes of our faith, and how people want certainty rather than the tension and uncertainty of paradox and we are not really allowed that. Love and justice. Sovereignty and free will. We want those resolved and they just won't be, really, until eternity; so today we just ignore the other side and make all love or justice.

Paradox is hard. Hard is not bad. We have built a civilization around hard is bad. We have definitely built an education system around it. "Learning should be fun!" Hard is not bad.

My husband's brother died, and he wants me to go to service and viewing 6.5 or more hours away. I don't want to . It's a nuisance, and I was not fond of his brother, to say the least. He was not a good person. But then I realized it might be okay. I will survive it. I will see some folks I might never see again in this life.

Hard is not bad.

Comments

Why to Read Fiction, Idea #27: Empathy, anyone?

The Idea #27 is tongue in cheek. But these are some ideas about writing fiction, which I have done in ten novels (and counting), a dozen short stories, and two produced plays (I know, not exactly the same). Background: In 2015 a colleague and I wrote an open educational resource public speaking textbook for a grant provided by our University System. We didn't realize at the time that it would go viral and be used all over the world within a few years. There are two reasons for that: it is good (as good as anything on the market) and it is free, although only in digital form. Check out www.exploringpublicspeaking.com for it. We also didn't know at the time that my co-author would die at 39 in 2016. I still miss him. Back to the point, I receive requests for the test banks every other day, and this morning I received one from Pennsylvania. The writer had a signature line: "Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in t...

Books I Have Read Lately

Retirement means more time to read. One Blood , by Denene Millner. This book and author won the Townsend Prize for Fiction 2025 and therefore beat me as one of the other nine finalists. She deserved it for her dramatic and exotic style; mine feels pale in comparison. I have to admit, I have timed out on it when I got to the third main character's story. It starts with a Black midwife in 1950s/1960s Virginia, who is imprisoned for not lying on a birth certificate about a "white" baby's racial identity. The baby is clearly part Black, meaning either the family had Black ancestors or the mother had a lover (I'm not entirely sure about that). The midwife's daughter is brutally murdered by her lover and in this chaos, the granddaughter is spirited away to New York in a wooden box. (Why I am not sure--New York makes sense, because a relation lives there, but why she couldn't just be put on a train, I'm not sure. I imagine Black people could ride trains in ...

Keeping Up Appearances? David's Surprise Anointing to Be King

Have you ever watched the show, Keeping Up Appearances? What it is. A comedy about a British woman who wants to be thought of as very high class even though her family is low class. Her name is Hyacinth Bucket but she pronounces it Bouquet. She wants everything perfect but her family works against her, and her neighbors run from her. We all know someone who wants to keep up appearances, and sometimes we do. In our everyday life, we depend on our eyes and we automatically trust them, at least at first, and we often don’t look closely or below the surface. Like puzzles. But we know that appearances can be deceiving, even though they catch us. So I wanted to show this video I saw recently because it’s disturbing but informative. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FERa1AI2EK8 AI has gotten far better on making these deep fakes—videos that are not of anyone but totally generated by the software. Even though they look like someone, they are not. Of course, it is stealing fro...

Parts of Speaking Publishing

Search This Blog