Coming this weekend

You do not want to miss these two artists…All Son’s & Daughters coming Sat & Sun to PCC….

April 21st mark it down

It was last September when I first heard All Sons & Daughters at a conference in downtown Chicago. I found the music of David Leonard and Leslie Jordan fresh, honest, thoughtful and moving.

In a very unique and uncharacteristicly me move, I said to my colleagues Dave and Steve, “We need to get them to come to Parkview.” Well, they made it happen. On the weekend of April 21 & 22, All Sons & Daughters will travel up from Nashville to Glen Ellen. Saturday evening will be a more subdued interactive worship type experience while Sunday morning will feature All Sons & Daughters leading the church in all three services. Mark down the dates Parkview – you don’t want to miss this two day event.  Invite some guests – you won’t be disappointed.

made me smile

Here’s another short indy film that made me smile. It’s an award winner about Ben – a nice but shy sign-holder who loves his job but is working his his last day before his career moves to a new level. Great message about friends and encouragement.

Winning film awards

Director Nathan Clarke is the founder of Fourth Line Films and his recent documentary Wrestling For Jesus is winning awards at film festivals all around the country.  I’m not a wrestling fan so for me considering it a ministry for Jesus is odd and a little unsettling.  However, Clarke seems good at inviting us into something that is quite different from what most of us experience.  I’m intrigued. Wrestling for Jesus is the story of man from rural South Carolina who started a professional wrestling league and how his passion and vision for it are tested when his life begins to falter.  Other films by Clarke include “Family” a story of young gang members in Central American prisons and “Neighbors” the story of two men in Nigeria caught in a community wide conflict. 

It just so happens Clarke is a Christian but I love how he asserts that “Christian” is a bad adjective for art.  He says, “I have no fear of judgment by my Christian peers.  I actually feel more fear about judgment from the secular world that this is just another piece of Christian propaganda.  Ultimately I wanted to create a piece of art that would be taken at face value, that would be judged because it’s a piece of art, not because a Christian created it or didn’t create it.  I believe God has made us to create things — that is what I want to do.  What I want is for people to watch the movie  and talk about that, not talk about me.  I just want to create something that causes people to stop, think and maybe consider their life a little more deeply.”

Keep up the good work Nathan Clarke!

Christmas Love and Logic

“The idea that God, if there is a force of logic and love in the universe, would seek to explain itself is amazing enough. That it would seek to explain itself and describe itself by becoming a child born in straw poverty…a child…I thought: Wow! Just the poetry … Unknowable love, unknowable power, describes itself as the most vulnerable. God incarnate. There it was. I was sitting there… tears streaming down my face, and I saw the genius of this, utter genius of God picking a particular point in time and deciding to turn on this.” [Bono: in conversation, NY: Riverhead Bks, 2005].

How many lives can you live?

Spoken-word poet Sarah Kay tells how when she was little she wanted to be a princess ballerina astronaut but soon learned she would never be all three.  We have only one life to live — however through the power of story Sarah asserts we can experience many different lives.  I heard someone recently ask, “Where are the poets today?”  Well, here is one and I think she is quite good.

the irony of communication

In our age on of over-communication [email, texting, facebooking, etc.] it is sadly ironic how good communication remains hard to achieve. Expressing thoughts, ideas and feelings through messages launched without needing to look into the eyes of another person leaves something to be desired. Hitting the “send” button may not always be the best decision.

A good friend of mine recently wrote a blog entry about this topic. You can read it on her website.  It’s entiled “Dear Google – Can you make us more relationally responsible people?”

I’ve wondered similar things about…

The Chairs That No One Sits In

You see them on porches and on the lawns
down by the lakeside,
usually arranged in pairs implying a couple

who might sit there and look out
at the water or the big shade trees.
The trouble is you never see anyone

sitting in these forlorn chairs
though at one time it must have seemed
a good place to stop and do nothing for a while.

Sometimes there is a little table
between the chairs where no one
is resting a glass or placing a book facedown.

It may not be any of my business,
but let us suppose one day
that everyone who placed those vacant chairs

on a veranda or a dock sat down in them
if only for the sake of remembering
what it was they thought deserved

to be viewed from two chairs,
side by side with a table in between.
The clouds are high and massive on that day.

The woman looks up from her book.
The man takes a sip of his drink.
Then there is only the sound of their looking,

the lapping of lake water, and a call of one bird
then another, cries of joy or warning -
it passes the time to wonder which.

grace

by Mo Bella Russo

Because of his love and grace, God takes the empty canvas of our lives and creates beautiful things.  These paintings were created in the few minutes we discussed this on Sunday.  The song “Beautiful Things”by Gungor was featured while our artist was at work.

by Mo Bella Russo

All this reminds me of the Apostle Paul’s words, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation;  the old is gone, the new has come!”

Two Poems

One of the books I’m currently reading is Horoscopes for the Dead by Billy Collins. With the death of a friend this week and the memorial service today, I can’t help but think about several of his poems that reflect on the brevity of life. Here are two of them.

Memento Mori

It doesn’t take much to remind me
what a mayfly I am,
what a soap bubble floating over the children’s party.

Standing under the bones of a dinosaur
in a museum does the trick every time
or confronting in a vitrine a rock from the moon.

Even the Church of St. Anne will do,
as structure I just noticed in a magazine–
built in 1722 of sandstone and limestone in the city of Cork.

And the realization that no one
who ever breasted the waters of time
Has figured out a way to avoid dying

always pulls me up by the reins and settles me down
by a roadside, grateful for the sweet weeds
and the mouthfuls of colorful wildflowers.

So many reminders of my mortality
here, there, and elsewhere, visible at every hour
pretty much everything I can think of except you,

sign over the door of this bar in Cocoa Beach
proclaiming that it was established–
though established does not sound right–1996.

As Usual

After we have parted, the boats
will continue to leave the harbor at dawn.
The salmon will struggle up to the pools,
one month following the other on the wall.

The magnolia will flower,
and the bee, the noble bee –
I saw one earlier on my walk–
will shoulder his way into the bud.