a forehead with a story to tell

I've got this awesome tan face, pale forehead thing going on. I wore a bandana while I was walking in the hills, a bandana and no sunscreen.
I'll sleep in a bed, under a roof for the first night in six tonight. I'll fall asleep to the sound of people snoring instead of sheep bleating.
I'm going to miss the sheep.
And a whole lot else too no doubt - but I'm ready to come home. And I'm coming home.
Flight number 93, Dublin to Chicago OHare, Tuesday 10.45am.
Peace..

a plea for fencelessness

Even the tiniest fragments of life shared has the power to quelch great furies of lonliness.
Broken bread and the common cup, Bonhoeffer's 'Life Together', the doctrine of the holy Trinity, People's Market in the park between Sandycove and Dun Laughaire -- we are meant to commune; by these things and more I have been convinced. And the idea of such communion, not to mention the brief and often whispy but very real glimpses of its realization, is absolutely saturated with the staggering hope of what some of us call the gospel.
I'm ready to live this, and to know it, and to spread it like the contagion that it is.
Now how do we go about it?
I believe it begins and ends with laughter.
I believe along the way it is just as full of tears and honest struggle as it is of the playful endeavor of creating memories of joy.
I believe it means we begin loving one another even and especially when it makes us sweat and feel pain. I believe it means we begin loving not only each other but also the others we label as 'them' until 'they' have disappeared into the all embracing 'us'.
I believe we ought to take seriously, and maybe even literally, some of the things that Jesus more-than-suggested; some of the things we have failed to include in our white-picket-fenced gospel of personal space and private property.
We should pray. We should want it. And we should try.

"The new story [which is also the oldest] is about communion, and it will be up to us whether we experience it as a taste of heaven or as a dose of the other place." (a.jones)

re-imagination

Reading 'Re-imagining Christianity' by Alan Jones, Episcopal priest and Dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. He tells about how 'the monks who prepared him for the priesthood taught him that the life of faith was like falling in love.' He says, 'the monks told us that three experiences would be ours: pregnancy, suffereing, and communion. These three gave life its dramatic structure.'
Pause a moment.
The images of Mary with her son, the image of Christ on the cross, and the mystery of the holy Trinity. Pregnancy, suffering, communion.
As images and art these are more prevelant in the Anglican, Catholic, and Orthodox flavors of Christianity than they are in the Protestant -- but as realities I think these elements are common not only within all sects of Christianity but within all of the branches of humanity.
On the most basic level each of us each day should be able to see, if we open our eyes wide enough to take notice, that we do indeed experience pregnancy, suffering, and communion. We are, each of us at some point everyday that we are alive, pregnant with hope for something, anything. Whether it be a noble hope, for a world in which peace dominates; or a simple hope, for a kind word or just a smile from a neighbor, even a stranger. We each experience suffering, that is not difficult to admit. We each find ourselves hurt and hurting, and it is more often than not a result of a hope deffered if not shattered. Communion - we desire it, we need it, and, thank God, we receive it. And if that's not the case, if you happen to be the one whom communion has managed to ellude then go to someone, or go to God, or a tree or a lake or a bird or a flower, and extend a hand, an embrace, a look, a compliment. For such an extension results in reception, and that is communion.
How invigorating it is to me that these realities of the human situation - pregnancy, suffering, and communion - are not only represented but fulfilled in the Christian tradition. Or is it the other way around? Or who cares?

tunes

The past few days I've been dancing and humming to all sorts of tunes. The tune of the Blasket Islands across the white speckled waters on the western coast of Ireland. The tunes of the dynamic personalities manifested in Joey the Irish bus driving poet and Sherah the middle-aged, boisterous, stout, redheaded psychologist from North Carolina. The tune of rain on my face from a top the battlements of Blarney Castle. I swum in the Atlantic with Eric the quasi-agnostic Swede. The waves that took us under were just a stones throw from the hillside where the first scene from Far and Away was filmed. In Killarney I caught one final set of Irish traditional music in the pub with the fire place, and I found a book of Seamus Heaney's poetry to flip through in Adare's small town library.
Dublin welcomed me back for the night.
Tomorrow - sabbath in People's Market between Sandy Cove and that port that sounds like Dunleery, but is spelled something like Dun Laoghaire.
Monday I look to the hills..

my friend edinburgh

goodbyes are tough. and it's hard to hug a city.
a few more hours in this place that has become for me.. what has it become? it is not home, i don't want to keep on living here, but it has been.. what has it been? this place has been the backbone of my pilgrimage. and leaving it feels significant in such a way that might make me cry and will definately make me smile. leaving it leaves me happy-sad, empty-full.

many a wrong and its curing song
many a road and many an inn
room to roam
but only one home
for all the world to win
(g.macdonald)

olives with garlic in 'em

The combination of Lauren, Cassie, and Amy is a thing more to be experienced than described. If you get the opportunity I fully recommend that you embrace it. When said combination is combined with the sharing of one's favorite city, the sharing of meals, the sharing of tea, and the sharing of adventures, what results is a heart (or several) quickened toward happiness.
I love hanging out with girls. Especially the sort who play in mud on Scottish hill sides (or was the mud playing with us?), who infect you with the enjoyment they are feeling at any given moment, who buy you ludicrously delectable cups of hot chocolate and make vats of spinach pasta with olives jammed full of garlic mixed in next to the sun-dried tomatoes, and who consider the wetness of rain to be a touch of welcome, a whisper of endearment from the author of all weather, the author of all that is right and good and lovely.
You should have seen the sunset we got their first night here. God likes us, I'm convinced.

The combination of Lauren, me, and not an ocean in between us will also remain undescribed.. "for words are vain, reject them all, they utter but a feeble part.." It was poetry. The best bits of life are.