Today turned out to be a good day. At worship, I read the scriptures, and made 2 Kings live! I spent the afternoon alone, so I looked up the Hubble telescope website (http://hubblesite.org/) and looked at pictures taken of deep space, and I mean deep space! Planets being born, planets dying, creation continuing to happen. Profound spiritual nurture, watching evolution at work.
My own faith was fed this weekend by reading two books: Evolutionary Faith by Diarmid O'Murchu, and Bruce Sanguin's Darwin, Divinity and the Dance of the Cosmos. These books are wonderful for the believer who can't accept the notion of a "literal and inerrant and infallible" Bible, and who need a different way to understand the Word of God about creation and the evolutionary process.
So today my faith has been bolstered, lifted, given wings and a song. Great stuff. For tomorrow I will need it. Tomorrow Beatrix and I meet with a young couple - not past their thirties - who face a death together. She is the dying one, slowly or quickly, but inexorably. Leukemia is a quiet enemy, an implacable for that just keeps marching in. The husband is the son of a childhood friend of mine. For that, and other reason I can think of, he reached out to us to help them plan together for a time of memorial for the mother of their two primary age girls.
Tomorrow will be listening time, time for 'knowing' who this woman is, who this man is, and what they need from us. We have had the chance she will not have, to live a whole life. How can she not be enraged, broken-hearted, to be defeated in her youthful prime by a wasting that will not cease?
I have come to this page tonight from watching Rita Dove, the American poet laureate, discussing poems from the twentieth century with Bill Moyers. The mother who is dying is a poet too, and I felt her presence in the intensity of the discussion that came from my TV. Somehow, Rita Dove's beauty and wisdom and liveliness gave me courage and energy for tomorrow's labour. May it be so.
My own faith was fed this weekend by reading two books: Evolutionary Faith by Diarmid O'Murchu, and Bruce Sanguin's Darwin, Divinity and the Dance of the Cosmos. These books are wonderful for the believer who can't accept the notion of a "literal and inerrant and infallible" Bible, and who need a different way to understand the Word of God about creation and the evolutionary process.
So today my faith has been bolstered, lifted, given wings and a song. Great stuff. For tomorrow I will need it. Tomorrow Beatrix and I meet with a young couple - not past their thirties - who face a death together. She is the dying one, slowly or quickly, but inexorably. Leukemia is a quiet enemy, an implacable for that just keeps marching in. The husband is the son of a childhood friend of mine. For that, and other reason I can think of, he reached out to us to help them plan together for a time of memorial for the mother of their two primary age girls.
Tomorrow will be listening time, time for 'knowing' who this woman is, who this man is, and what they need from us. We have had the chance she will not have, to live a whole life. How can she not be enraged, broken-hearted, to be defeated in her youthful prime by a wasting that will not cease?
I have come to this page tonight from watching Rita Dove, the American poet laureate, discussing poems from the twentieth century with Bill Moyers. The mother who is dying is a poet too, and I felt her presence in the intensity of the discussion that came from my TV. Somehow, Rita Dove's beauty and wisdom and liveliness gave me courage and energy for tomorrow's labour. May it be so.
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