Will innocence protect us from our own violence?

Anger, rage, aggression, violence.

These are ugly aspects of humanity.

For some reason these vices are particularly egregious on a woman.  These vices are accepted as a necessary evil from men.  Hence this seemingly endless and perpetual warfare - both internal and external - here on our odd little planet, Earth.

I have been wrestling with my own inner 'ballistic psycho bitch' energy.  This aspect of my own ugly humanity comes out with force in certain circumstances - self defense - husband defense - child defense - sister defense - mother-father defense.

So why am I on the defense?  And why do I shield my self with the song of this wise young lady above?  She calls her self: Lady Lamb the Bee Keeper.  She seems to embody a strange confluence of innocence and worldly knowing that hit my heart.  Her song made my eyes well up morning.

And now I remember this quote, which has always been for me a source of confusion:

"The Kingdom of Heaven suffers violence and the violent take it by force."  

---St. Matthew, quoting the Lord Jesus Christ (ch. 11, v. 12)

I have too much to say at this moment and nothing will be answered on this strangely public half-reflection.

Let us not end on a dour and incomplete note.


May I share one last song? It is from a precious and beautiful member of the male contingent:

Own Stunts

by our dear friends in Michigan, Micah Middaugh and Andrea Moreno-Beals 

with Mr. Trevor on drums:

This is all terribly disjointed and unintelligible, I fear.  This mind of mine draws connections where others see none.

I will not try to prove or clarify anything.  Nor will I try to tie a bow on this impressionistic and mucky hodge-podge.

Let's just stand up straight and conclude with all sincerity,

Happy Feast Day of St. Herman of Alaska.  

Precious Father, intercede for all of us,

 your sinful children trying to figure out how to live like Christ in America.

An Excerpt

 from the Teachings of St. Nektarios

By St. Nektarios of Pentapolis

Seek the Lord everyday; but do so within your heart and not outside of it. And when you find Him, stand with fear and trembling as the Cherubim and Seraphim, because your heart has become a throne of God.

But in order to find the Lord, humble yourself down to the dust, because the Lord abhors the proud ones, and loves and visits the humble in heart. For this reason he says: “But on this one will I look: On him who is poor and of a contrite spirit, and who trembles at My word” (Is. 66:2).

Fight the good fight and God will strengthen you. In the fight we identify our weaknesses, our deficiencies and our defects. [The fight] is the mirror of our spiritual state. He who has not struggled, does not know himself.

Take heed even of the small trespasses. If a sin occurs in you out of carelessness, do not lose hope, but get up quickly, and fall before God who has the power to rehabilitate you. Great sorrow hides within it pride.

Exaggerated sorrow and despair are harmful and dangerous, and many times are exacerbated by the devil in order to hinder the progress of the struggler.

Within us we have deep-rooted weaknesses, passions and faults: they are many in number and are inherited. None of them can be cut off with a spastic motion, neither with impatience, anxiety or intense sorrow, but with patience and perseverance, with patient endurance, with care and attention.            

The road that leads to perfection is long. Pray to God to strengthen you. Face your falls with patience, and after you get up quickly, run and do not stand, like children, in the place where you fell, crying and wailing inconsolably.

Be vigilant and pray in order not to enter into temptation. Do not give up hope if you fall continuously into the same sins. Many of these are by nature strong and out of habit. With the passing of time, however, and with diligence they are conquered. Nothing should drive you to despair.

Source: http://users.uoa.gr/~nektar/orthodoxy/tributes/agios-nektarios/didaxes.htm

Transformation

Seems like a keystone of Christianity is transformation.  No?

Everyone I grew up with loved to give testimonies about all of their naughty la-la's and how asking Jesus into their heart turned them into awesome people.  Those of us, like me, who 'came to the Lord' when we were 6,7, or 8 because we were at church camp and we missed our mothers -- well, speaking for myself now, I always felt that I had never actually been naughty enough to be a super awesome Christian.

So what's a Jesus loving little A.P. class, National Charity League, frosh-soph track star wannabe, over-privileged over-achiever nerd like me to do?

Go to WHEATON COLLEGE and GET NAUGHTY.

Isn't there something in Proverbs about like sow in the mud....like a dog returning to his vomit.....something?

Stir in a little prozac, screwed up psychiatric 'help' and a beautiful pastor's kid who is just as destroyed in the mind as I am and we are having f.u.n.

Heaven and hell, the soot of sin and being washed 'white as snow', Judas and Jesus, Mary the Virgin and Mary the Magdalene.  An awful lot of bipolarities here aren't there?  Hmmmmmm.

Enough of that.  I am no longer bitter - or at least not as bitter.  I meant to write about transformation and this is not about me.  Because in truth, me does not actually exist.  There is only Us.

Now it is time to take a moment for quiet reflection and meta-cognition:

Thank you for staying with me.  The purpose of this post is to reflect upon transformation - both in the abstract and in the concrete.  We Christians seem to long for it - and yet most of us spin the sin wheels while we see everyone else ascend the latter of divine ascent.

I have become convinced that the only way to gain any traction on the slippery slope that leads simultaneously to both death and Life is through hunkering down in community.  Sticking with our spouses when it seems that we hate their asses.  Sticking with our friends when they piss us off and drain our energy.

The smarty-pants people always say: energy is neither created nor destroyed.  So, if they are right - if your energy is currently depleted, just hang on baby, there is more to come.  Just wait.  You don't need to get the hell out of Dodge in order to heal.  The truth is staying with it and laboring together is the only way that new energy/life ever comes forth.

We know this from wombs and farms.

I hope this makes sense to someone out there.

Enough of the abstract. Now to the concrete aspects of transformation relevant to our wee community on Spring Street:
- We are now - Casa de Curacion
- New people have moved in
- We are not doing Thursday dinners at this time, but we would love to have you over for a meal!

Thanks for reading this entire post.  I hope that it was useful to someone.


Love never fails.

Moving to Houston

Taken from:

http://houston.culturemap.com

Everyone is moving to Houston: 

No. 1 relocation spot in U.S. for fourth straight year

BY WHITNEY RADLEY

 

4.16.13 | 11:52 am

If it seems like everyone is moving to Houston these days, perhaps that's because they are. For the fourth year running, U-Haul has ranked Houston No. 1 on its list of "The U-Haul 2012 Top 50 U.S. Destination Cities."

The company bases its annual destination ranking on the number of movers renting a truck one-way — totaling more than 1.6 million transactions — and those stats are consistent with the overall pattern of recent population growth: According to census data, Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land added more than 125,000 residents between July 2011 and July 2012, the second highest number in the United States behind only Dallas-Fort Worth. 

Orlando, Fla. ranked No. 2 on U-Haul's list, followed by Chicago, Las Vegas and San Antonio. Austin came in at  No. 5 on the list for the second year in a row; Dallas fell from No. 15 to No. 17; and Plano and Fort Worth landed No. 25 and No. 26, respectively. 

Change

The Casa de la Fuente will continue to be a wellspring of community goodness, crockpot meals and musical creativity - but the faces are changing and shifting.  Some of us are moving out - some are moving in.

Part of our Casa is in the process of getting resettled in CA and working to create a  collective out near Long Beach: http://www.meetup.com/Viriditas-Collective/  Help us make it happen!

Mother Maria Skobtsova

1891-1945

"And we may speak not only of the imitation of Christ, but also of a sort of inevitable imitation of the Gospel; not only of man's striving toward perfection in Christ, but also of his falling into all of the abysses the Gospel tells us of..."

Who was Maria Skobtsova?

an intellectual
a communist activist
a city mayor
an avowed atheist
a mother of three
a chain smoker
a divorcee
a woman who developed a love for the man Jesus of Nazareth before she could believe in a God
a nun who nursed drug addicts to health and cradled them as her own children
a friend who sacrificed her own life that others would live

Through her efforts in Paris, hundreds of Jewish children and adults escaped from the Nazis during World War II.  She was finally taken herself by the Nazis and she was killed at Ravensbruck in 1945.

May her memory be eternal.