Brennan Manning on The Divine Milieu

“Living by the gospel of grace leads us into what Teilhard de Chardin called the divine milieu – A God filled, Christ-soaked universe. A world charged with the grandeur of God. How do we live in the presence of the living God? In wonder, amazed by the traces of God all around us.”

-Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel

A Kiss from Trinity – Back to Life! The Matrix Redux…a la Greg Boyd

Neo had been killed by the agents of the Matrix but is resurrected by Trinity’s faith and love. It is only at this time that Neo finally believes the truth and experiences the reality that he has power over the agents of the Matrix. He has died to the Matrix and has let go of all fear, doubt, and disbelief. His mind has been freed. He now believes Morpheus’s teaching that the agents can never be as strong or as fast as he is. He finally lives up to his name – Neo (meaning “new”). Finally, Mr. Anderson (Neo) is in fact a “new creation” (2 Cor.5:17).
From this time on, the battle within the Matrix will be fought in a new way. Neo now fights from a position of victor to help others break free from the Matrix. In the words of agent Smith, Neo’s, own freedom from the Matrix as well as the freedom of all who will choose to follow him is “inevitable.”
So it is with us. We have in fact been resurrected by the Trinity. Our real identity is found in Christ. We truly are new creations. When we finally put aside all fear; doubt, and disbelief and fully accept this fact – despite all our experiences to the contrary – we are empowered to extinguish the “agents” of the Matrix – what we’ve been calling “Matrix neurochips.” We no longer futilely fight to gain an identity we think we don’t yet have. Instead we realize our identity is already established in Christ. We wake up to the fact that we are exhaustively defined by Christ’s death and resurrection. Thus, our battle within the Matrix is not to establish the truth of who we are but to apply the truth of who we are to all our thoughts, emotions, and behavior. And we understand that our total conformity to Christ is a matter of inevitability. From before creation it was predestined that all who chose to trust in Christ would ultimately be “holy and blameless in [God’s] sight” (Eph. 1:4; see Rom8:29).

-Greg Boyd, Escaping The Matrix: Setting Your Mind Free to Experience Real Life In Christ

My Place Today

Today I am in North Branch at a friend’s house. Looking out the window from where I am sitting it looks like a beautiful day; the sun is bright with the shadows of the trees being cast across the blanket of snow. Cold! It looks cold and I am sure that it is, although I have not ventured out to feel the cold. On my third cup of grace this morning as I am still attempting to awake fully – perhaps every life is like a morning and we all are attempting to awake fully to an awareness of it. To what it means to be alive, to be human and that is what grace affords us in some way. Just as a cup of coffee does something to help each morning, something even to the soul as one takes the time to sip and contemplate. So does grace do something to help in and through our lives, to give the soul hope and release to lurch forward in life? As Anne Lamott has commented, “I’m lurching forward in my life again, and it feels as if someone finally cracked open a window that had been jammed.” I feel something like this as well this today.

Grace in the Divine Milieu...A Kiss from Trinity - Back to Life!

Grace in the Divine Milieu...Born to Run...

"I want to know if love is wild,
I want to know if love is real..."
- Bruce Springsteen

“Grace abounds in contemporary movies, books, novels, films, and music. If God is not in the whirlwind, He may be in a Woody Allen film or a Bruce Springsteen concert. Most people understand imagery and symbol better than doctrine and dogma. Images touch hearts and awaken imaginations. One theologian suggested that Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love album, in which he symbolically sings of sin, death, despair, and redemption, is more important for Catholics than the Pope’s last visit when he spoke of morality only in doctrinal propositions. Troubadours have always been more important and influential than theologians and bishops.”
-Brennan Manning, A Ragamuffin Gospel

My Place Today

Snowing in St. Paul and I am sitting at Bethel University working on some "stuff" but mostly thinking and listening to music (Bono at this moment singing "Bad" - great older U2 song) and drinking some Caribou Coffee! Thinking that I would like to be at the Seminary library talking about theology, philosophy and life with a friend that is "...as good as spring itself" as Hemingway characterized some of the special people in his life. It is wonderful to have some "...cool quiet and time to think..." as so often the distractions and noise drown out the true voice of God that is so often bidding you to a new adventure on the journey of your life. Augustine said that, "A friend is someone who knows everything about you and still loves you" and when you have friends like this to be with, to walk with, on each others shared journey it is a divine blessing. These friends bring a grace into your life!

Here is a dream of mine:

Go to Europe to study,
Contemplate philosophy, theology and life itself.
Teach, think, write, wonder...
Go slow.

Watch the sun rise and set,
Sit near the ocean.
Walk in the mountains,
Sip coffee in a Paris cafe.

Walk amongst the ancient ruins,
Make poetic memories,
And sleep until I wake!

On Being Alive by F. Buechner

"After lecturing learnedly on miracles, a great theologian was asked to give a specific example of one. "There is only one miracle," he answered. "It is life."
Have you wept at anything during the past year?
Has your heart beat faster at the sight of young beauty?
Have you thought seriously about the fact that someday you are going to die?
More often than not do you really listen when people are speaking to you instead of just waiting for your turn to speak?
Is there anybody you know in whose place, if one of you had to suffer great pain, you would volunteer yourself?
If your answer to all or most of these questions is No, the chances are that you're dead.
-Frederick Buechner

Grace and the Trinity

Where the Imagio Dei is, the Father is…
Where the Truth is, the Son is…
Where Life is, the Spirit is…
And where pain and suffering and loss are,
All three are, as there can be no experiencing of the Trinity,
Except through pain, grieve and loss as it is through these, that grace gives way to joy and then to love.

“You will grieve, but your grief will turn to joy.”
-Jesus

Pride and Joy - Brandi Carlile

Looking Out - Brandi Carlile

"...some people get religion,
some people get the truth..."
-Brandi Carlile

"Life Itself Is Grace..."

"Why do the things that we treasure most, slip away in time
Till to the music we grow deaf, to God's beauty blind
Why do the things that connect us slowly pull us apart?
Till we fall away in our own darkness, a stranger to our own hearts
And life itself, rushing over me
Life itself, the wind in black elms,
Life itself in your heart and in your eyes, I can't make it without you..."
-Bruce Springsteen, Life Itself

Grace In All Our Stories - A Life Together

“In the long run the stories all overlap and mingle like the searchlights in the dark. The stories Jesus tells are part of the story Jesus is, and the other way round. And the story Jesus is is part of the story you and I are because Jesus has become so much a part of the world’s story that it is impossible to imagine how any of our stories would have turned out without him…. And my story and your story are all part of each other too if only because we have sung together and prayed together and seen each other’s faces so that we are at least a footnote at the bottom of each other’s stories.
In other words all our stories are in the end one story, one vast story about being human, being together, being here. Does the story point beyond itself? Does it mean something? What is the truth of this interminable, sprawling story we all of us are? Or is it absurd to ask about the truth of it as it is to ask about the truth of the wind howling through a crack under the door?”
-Frederick Buechner

A Glimpse of Grace and a Father's Love

Thought at Caribou Coffee in St. Paul

Grace means learning to be a fully human being, with all that entails! What in all its meaning it is to be alive, to experience life abundantly. To be able to know when you are dying that you lived! You really lived! To agree with Thoreau, “… to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…” in every moment that we are given to be alive and know that we are not alone in the living of it – we have our friends, our community of grace all around us.
God knew what he was creating when he made us and then later he intimately experienced what being human is, through Jesus, God becoming man! He knows, he knows, he knows what we feel – all of what it means to walk on the earth. To feel the ground beneath us, to have rain fall on us and the sun warm our face – he knows. He also knows suffering and joy, pain, loss and happiness – he laughed and cried, got tired, took a nap and died! He knows! As Brennan Manning has written, “Jesus expects more failure out of us, than we do…” he knew a Peter that denied him and a Thomas that doubted him and a Judas that betrayed him. But he also knew who each really were and how amazing the grace of his Father is. That is why he came to die, to free us to live the abundant life we all are intended to live – the wide open life that only grace makes possible.

U2 - Amazing Grace/Where The Streets Have No Name

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The Door

The Cross is the doorway between suffering and joy.

Feeling Alone...

Pride and Joy
– Brandi Carlile

Time of day I can't recall
The kind of thing that takes it’s toll
Over years and over time
Over smiles and over wine
All in all it wasn't bad
All in all it wasn't good
But I still care
That's the problem with the days
They're never long enough to say
What it is you never said
All the books you never read
I throw myself into the wind
Hoping somebody will pick me up
And carry me again

Where are you now
Do you let me down
Do you make me grieve for you
Do I make you proud
Do you get me now
Am I your pride and joy
I believe this to be true
Nothing sacred nothing new
No one tells you when its time
There are no warnings only signs
And you know that you're alone
You're not a child anymore
But you're still scared
All your mountains turn to rocks
All your oceans turn to drops
They are nothing like you thought
Can't be something you are not
Life is not a looking glass
Don't get tangled in your past
Like I am learning not to

Where are you now
Do you let me down
Do you make me grieve for you
Do I make you proud
Do you get me now
Am I your pride joy

What is Grace?

"What is "grace"? It is God's own life, shared by us. God's life is Love. Deus caritas est. By grace we are able to share in the infinitely selfless love of Him Who is such pure actuality that He needs nothing and therefore cannot conceivably exploit anything for selfish ends. Indeed outside of Him there is nothing and whatever exists exists by His free gift of its being, so that one of the notions that is absolutely contradictory to the perfection of God is selfishness. It is metaphysically impossible for God to be selfish, because the existence of everything that is depends upon His gift, depends upon His unselfishness.
When a ray of light strikes a crystal, it gives a new quality to the crystal.
And when God's infinitely disinterested love plays upon a human soul, the same kind of thing takes place. And that is the life called sanctifying grace.
The soul of man, left to its own natural level, is a potentially lucid crystal left in darkness. It is perfect in its own nature, but it lacks something that it can only receive from outside itself. But when the light shines in it, it becomes in a manner transformed into light and seems to lose its nature in the splendor of a higher nature, the nature of the light that is in it,"
- Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

Thinking of a Friend...

English Bay
- Blue Rodeo

You are so far away
On this cold and empty night
As I lie in a hotel room
Lookin' at a street light
Outside my window
I listen to the rain
And the sounds of the passin' cars
And the waves on English Bay
And I wonder if you think of me
As I dream of you
Do you hear the song
That I sing
In this hotel room
Cause I see you in the stars above
And in every setting sun

And even though you're
fifteen hundred miles
away
I hear you howlin' at the moon

And I hold you in my mind
And I start to float away
Yea the whole world
seems very strange
In a pleasant kinda way
And as the morning sun comes up
And puts an end to this long night
More than anything I wish
You were here
Lying by my side
Holding me near
Listening to the rain
And the passin' cars
And the waves
On English Bay

A Place of Grace

“…but places are full of mystery as times are, and almost from the start I knew that, of all places, it was the one that was right for me.” – Frederick Buechner






This is a place in Compton Baptist Church in St. Louis that I prayed, contemplated, read and wrote in my journal each morning. It became both a place of grace for me as well as where I connected with God. So many wonderful things happened on the mission’s trip and this place was one of them as well as the inspiration for many others.