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Showing posts from October, 2009

In Between These Notes

“ I remember exasperating my piano teacher(s) as a child by flying through Chopin at breakneck speed, ignoring rests and fermatas in furious pursuit of fini.   I knew the notes but they never sounded very musical when I finished them.   I learned later from a maestro counseling his orchestra, “The music is in between the notes.”   Faith, like music, needs rest. After all it started in a womb, and there is no such thing as instant incubation.   Americans have pronounced a pox on waiting.   Yet Sabbaths punctuate the Godbearing life.   Godbearers live through Advents and dark nights of the soul in which Jesus tells us: “Sit here while I pray.”” (Kenda Creasy Dean; The Godbearing Life ) Do you know what it is like to wake in the middle of the night, cheeks flushed from the perfect dream, to a room filled with silence? You are suspended between your multicolored dream and the opaque moonlight falling across the sheets.   It is then, in that oddly lucid moment that you have to decide wh

Instructions on How to Care & Life According to the Poor

Today I volunteered at Loaves & Fishes, a soup kitchen in Santa Ana that serves a number of homeless men and woman, struggling families and a diverse group of people that could be classified as the “working poor.” After serving a number of nacho and bean plates, I found myself at a shaded lunch table, across from a woman who appeared to be eating alone.   Her name was Gloria – or around those parts, “Outspoken Gloria” as I would shortly find out.   She was open enough to conversing with a total stranger, and we began talking about her working union and the medical benefits she was hoping would be extended throughout her retirement.   This led her to the point that she spent many a conversations making: young people, such as myself, do not understand the world and what is worth fighting for.   Gloria protested the war, she grew up with Kennedy’s hopeful voice booming from the television, she knows what it means to take a stand in defense of life’s most precious goods.   “You