Journey with Jesus #2

Old Testament - Nativity 01/16/09

The Old Testament has many birth narratives – Moses, Samuel (Hannah’s song of praise is the basis for Mary’s Magnificat in Luke), and Joseph, son of Jacob, to name a few. This study focuses on stories surrounding the birth of Isaac (found in Genesis 18:1-15; 19:1-11 & 20:1-7). In Chapter 18 Abraham welcomes the Lord who, with the ambiguity often found in these early stories, appears as three men. The patriarchal narratives – the stories in Genesis before Moses and the exodus – have a more anthropomorphic (human-shaped) description of God.

These stories come out of a specific socio-historical situation - the near east (of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Palestine) 2000 – 1000 BCE. This was a time of city states – often small walled cities ruled by a warrior class – there are thirty one in Palestine alone identified in chapter12 of Joshua. Because of these oppressive city states, in parallel with the great empires, there were many displaced, landless people migrating form one area to another. These people would have been particularly vulnerable, without protection, resources or status. It is some of these landless, rootless people, enslaved in Egypt, that Moses would lead to the Promised Land and give identity as the people of God.

Abraham, Sarah and his nephew Lot are displaced peoples. In Gen 19:9 Lot is described as a stranger by the mob in Sodom. The passage in Chapter 20 where Abraham pretends Sarah is his sister is an example of aliens who have the desperation of the powerless– bartering what they have to survive. In this context hospitality/care for the stranger becomes a matter of life and death. The angels from God (messengers/emissaries - not the Persian winged versions that we think of today) that are protected by Lot in Chapter 19 are another example of vulnerable travelers dependent on the hospitality of strangers. The real sin of Sodom is not the sexual act of the rape of the men – rather it is that they have broken the code of hospitality and protection of the stranger. It is not the sexual sin as such that is at issue– it is the threat of violence to the vulnerable outsider. The fact that they were men indicates only that the sin was greater – men were perceived as more valuable than women.

In this underclass of the dispossessed, women had an even more powerless role. They were the most expendable – bartered and traded . In Genesis, twice Abraham pretends Sarah is his sister (barters her as a prostitute, and in a separate story Isaac does the same thing with his wife). Lot is prepared to sacrifice his daughters to save the lives of the visitors that have fallen under his protection. In this context, women are pawns to preserve or increase the honor/survival of men.

The action of God in these circumstances is to speak for the vulnerable – the widow, the orphan, the stranger. The Exodus was the foundation act – God acting against the mighty of the world on behalf of the powerless. The Torah was a way of trying to say that “you shall not do to others what was once done to you in Egypt”. The subsequent stories of the Old Testament often bear witness to the failure of the people to uphold this Law, but the Torah remained at their center, and the desire was always to return to faithfulness to the Law. But before the Exodus we have the destruction of Sodom as judgment for its offenses against the stranger. Later God tells Abimelech in a dream not to touch Sarah. This is similar to Joseph’s dream in Matthew where the angel urges Joseph to protect Mary and not to cast her out. In the early stories of the Old Testament God acts with violence to bring about justice – it is only as the people experience increasing suffering – the collapse of the kingdoms, the loss of their land and exile – does their understanding of the nature and action of God in the world begin to change. When Mary is mentioned at the end of the three-times-fourteen list of generations in Matthew she stands for all the vulnerable and oppressed women of the Old Testament through whom, paradoxically, God’s purpose will be fulfilled.

Genesis also has the ultimate nativity story – the Creation narratives. In Chapter 1 is the account of the seven days of creation culminating in Ch2:4 “These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created”. “Generations” (geneses) here is the same word used in the following lists of the descendents of Adam and Eve in Chapter 5. Humanity, made in the image of God, also has the ability to generate life. In Matthew 1:1 the Gospel opens with “an account of the generation/birth of Jesus the Messiah”. The same word (genesis: often mistranslated as “genealogy”) is used here. In one sense it means that what follows in the next few chapters is an account of the birth of Jesus – his nativity story. But in a broader sense Matthew is signaling the birth or genesis that Jesus brings into the world. The fourteen generations x3 of the ancestors of Jesus are like the seven days of creation doubled up and then multiplied by the holy number three – a symbol of creation perfected in Jesus. In Jesus we have a new beginning, we are born again—not just as individuals but the whole creation.

Journey with Jesus #1

Here is the summary of the first of our new "Journey with Jesus" Bible studies that took place on January 2nd. Tony has included a short introduction. Peace-Linda


This month we have begun a “Journey with Jesus,” a monthly pattern of prayer and meditation based around a concrete theme in Jesus’ life. The study is not so much about Jesus’ teaching or the theology of a distinct episode but related to some life circumstance which can help us grow closer to Jesus’ experience and person. The Jesus yoga will reflect the theme and meditation, and in the following week we will enter the circumstance more deeply looking at parallels in the Old Testament. Finally we will celebrate our present journey in communion with Jesus through the celebration of a eucharist.


Journey with Jesus – Nativity 01/02/09

Mark and John do not have Nativity narratives. Mark begins with Jesus’ adult ministry, John with his transcendent origins. Matthew and Luke both have infancy narratives but very different – one of the reasons that Biblical scholars do not think that Luke had access to Matthew as a source or vice versa. So why did they write the nativity/infancy narratives? One reason is natural curiosity about origins – people are always interested in who a person’s parents are and where they come from. This is especially true when that person is a great historical figure. In the case of Jesus here was someone who brought a decisive newness into the world through his word, life, death and resurrection. Fifty years later Matthew and Luke were looking for clues in his origins that would signal the radical newness they were experiencing.

Matthew was writing to a Jewish audience. He begins his Gospel with a genealogy (Mt 1:1-16). This idealized list of the ancestors of Jesus is comprised of three groups of fourteen. (Three is a holy number in the Bible and seven is associated with the divine work of creation. Fourteen signals the divine action of creation twice over). The final group does not quite fit – in that there are just thirteen male names – the final name being that of Mary, a woman. Some scholars think that Matthew might have miscounted, or intended that Jeconiah from the previous group was meant to be counted twice. The most natural reading of the text though is to include Mary as the fourteenth name – equal to the men, and a generatioin in her own right.

There are four other women listed in the Matthean genealogy. These are Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Bathsheba . All four conceived their children in scandalous or at the least dubious circumstances. The text seems to underline this by naming Bathsheba as “the wife of Uriah” – another man’s wife. These four women, all heroines of the Old Testament, were therefore also women with questionable histories. Mary is framed in this way – numbered with the patriarchs but in the company of risqué women.

In MT 1:18 Mary is found to be with child “of the Holy Spirit”. Again in v. 20 Joseph is told by the angel not to be afraid to take Mary as his wife because the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. In the Greek this is more rightly translated as “what is conceived in her is from/out of the Holy Spirit”. The emphasis is on the Holy Spirit and God’s faithfulness rather than on a miracle of parthenogenesis (like that found in Luke). It brings to mind other stories from the Old Testament (for example the birth of Moses) in which God chooses to bring birth out of peril and danger. These stories would have been familiar to Matthew’s Jewish audience.

Luke, in contrast, stresses the miracle. He is writing to a Greek world familiar with stories of gods impregnating human women – for example Zeus in his disguise as a swan or a bull. The mythical/magical events surrounding the conception and birth of great figures was nothing new to the Greek world – Hercules was said to have strangled a snake in his crib dropped by an eagle passing overhead; Alexander the Great was believed to have been born of a woman impregnated by Zeus. In Lk 1:34 Mary makes explicit through her question “How can this be since I am a virgin?” the fact that we are dealing with a physical miracle. The words “the power of the Most High will overshadow you” have subtle echoes of those Greek gods sexual relations with human women. But in Acts (the continuation of Luke’s Gospel) the Holy Spirit is poured out on all flesh – which can be seen as taking the “overshadowed by the Holy Spirit” imagery and magnifying it exponentially.

Mark and John hint that Jesus’ status as a respectable Jew was not totally assured – that there was some irregularity in his background. In Jn 8: 40 the crowds respond to Jesus discussion about their erroneous claim to be Abraham’s children by saying “We were not born of fornication, we have one father, God himself”. Some scholars (e.g. Raymond Brown) suggest that this might be a slur on Jesus’ own parentage (“we, unlike you Jesus, are not illegitimate…”). In Mk 6:3 the people at the synagogue in Nazareth say “Is not this the carpenter the son of Mary?” This would have been an unusual way of stating his background because children were named as sons of their fathers not their mothers. It implies that his father was not known. Jesus does not claim the title “Son of David” for himself. He chooses instead the “Son of Man” appellation from the Book of Daniel. The father Jesus identified with and spoke about was his Father in heaven. It is his relationship with his heavenly father that defines him. If he was in fact illegitimate this would have had a profound impact on his own self-understanding and his relationship with God. It was not in spite of but because of his background that he was able to break free from cultural and religious constraints. Jesus affirmed those who were broken and excluded. He had mercy on the woman caught in adultery. In John’s Gospel Jesus invites us time and again to enter into the relationship he has with his Father.

Jesus’ nativity narratives teach us that God chose as his Messiah someone born in questionable if not disreputable circumstances. Perhaps it is only in these circumstances, when we are forced outside of our places of cultural/social safety, that the Holy Spirit can truly be free to move. Often we do not feel good or holy enough to enter into a relationship with God. Jesus teaches us that it is in fact when we feel the least worthy that we are closest to God and that it is in the times of crisis and scandal in our lives when the Holy Spirit is often most likely to act. Regardless of our own parentage, background or identity, we are all beloved children of the Father.

The Abyss is a Well of Light

I recently had to take myself to the ER: just a scare, nothing wrong at all. But being there with a dozen electrodes stuck to your body certainly concentrates the mind. It serves also to create a personal parable. What signals are you really sending? What truly is in your heart? It made me think one more time about the abyss and something about it that I have not said clearly enough and I really should.

I think I’ve always been attracted to deep places, to caves, pits, ocean depths. Not for any dark psychological reason, but because I felt truth was likely hidden away in the deep recesses of the world, kept from plain view. What happens, however, when the metaphysical distinction between these places and the places of height, purity and clarity begins to break down? What happens when the attention of the world is drawn to those fearful spaces, to Abu Grahib as much as to Capitol Hill? Surely the world is being drawn into the abyss?

And we know the reason why that is the case. It is because Christ voluntarily went to this place in fulfillment of forgiving love. So far the effect on the world is not so much forgiving love as an opportunity for anger when all those dark places are brought to light. This is understandable in terms of the old world (the word Nietzsche gave to it was ressentiment/resentment) but it is not the truth of the gospel. The exposure of the abyss in terms of anger and revenge is a half-measure of the gospel in the world, the maximum distance that we’re prepared to go while we hang on to our violent human structure and response. But the fact is it would be impossible to bring the abyss to light if God-in-Christ had not gone there in absolute nonviolence and forgiveness. One hint of retaliation down there and the whole place folds over on itself in violence and unforgiveness, until the last man standing gets to be god. That is the story of Zeus and the Titans. He fought the monsters and locked them up in a pit and then went off to live happily in Olympus. But Christ, though risen from the dead, remains the crucified, and so in a world under the impact of the gospel the abyss remains clearly in our sight, continually in the range of human geography. What we don’t yet see so clearly, what we don’t “get,” is this absolute love of Christ in the abyss, a love without remainder, which makes the revelation possible in the first place.

Another way into what I’m saying is that Jesus did not go to the abyss on a “mission” like Bruce Willis destroying the giant meteor in Armageddon. He didn’t go down there to do something dangerous and then get the heck out. He went there to be something and remain. He committed himself absolutely to that space so that it will end by being radically transformed.

This then is the secret: at the heart of the abyss there is the constant enduring light of absolute love and life. In Christ the abyss becomes a well of light, it becomes heaven itself, the very space of God like to none other. It is the New Jerusalem come down out of heaven, a bride adorned for her husband.

For me this is the truth that the churches have yet to wake up to: that this earth is already the contemplative and redemptive space. There is no other, and we can and must already dwell in this truth, prayerfully, ecstatically, transformatively. The reason why the tradition has not seen this is because it has known the earth as abyss, but with a Greek heaven in view it has said “bad, bad, bad” to the earth. It has displaced the transformation to an other-worldly space and banked the currency needed to get there. (See Augustine’s famous passage in the City of God describing human life as hell-on-earth and a consequent expectation of heaven as release. In this respect the modern abyss-as-anger is a real step forward from the old Christian dualism; at least it assumes ownership of the abyss.)

My dream is that one day there will be a new Christian architecture as evident and recognizable as the painfully boring gothic that in one form or another dots every Western landscape. Instead of providing spires that reach up to the sky it will show forth a communal shape where people live and pray in union with God-in-the-abyss, a place of peace, of love, of light, of sustainable work, of harmony with the land, of endless circles of life, death and life-again. These new constructions will say plainly that the people there are not going any other place than where they are, pouring themselves out continually into the present moment of love and life already realized by God-in-the-abyss. The only thing they await is the final connection of all these spaces, when the life to which they give themselves will join with all other spaces of life and fuse into pure light. They await the time when visibly and irreversibly the universe will become its own pure well of light.

The A-Word

Anyone who has heard me present or has read some things I have written knows that I use the word “abyss.” Numerous authors make use of this term, and it doesn’t matter whether they are religious, philosophical or literary, they never bother to define it as far as I can see. In a way they don’t have to. The word carries an immediate resonance we all seem to know about. I came across this the other day. It’s from an interview with Roberto Bolaño, author of the apocalyptically mind-blowing book, "2666."

“While we search for the antidote or the medicine to cure us, the new, that can only be formed in the unknown, we must continue to turn to sex, books and travel, even knowing they lead us into the abyss, which, as it happens, is the only place where we can find the cure.”

The A-word gives us not just a strong metaphor, a poetic device with literary effects. It is more and more an anthropological event, a real place made out of humanity’s real existence, an experience, a progressively more powerful fact. It’s where we’re heading as a planet, where all gods are dead and new ones cannot be born. It’s the wreckage of the physical and religious environment. It is the melting of the icecaps, the flooding of small islands, the extinction of species, and at the same time it’s Jurassic Park, the dream of resurrecting Dinosaurs, the Mammoths, anything enormous and transcendentally violent. It’s humanity left to its own devices, casting around desperately for something big and powerful enough to hold us all in awe before it’s too late.

That used to be the job of God: keeping us in line, while destroying our enemies for us. But now we’re so aware of other people’s gods doing that for them, and the negative effects that has in the world, that many people jettison God completely. This is largely the motivation behind what’s called the “new atheism,” subsequent to the old philosophical or scientific atheism (while sometimes using the same arguments). It’s also come on top of a half century of having our cake and eating it: holding onto the role of God in public life, and for the sake of an afterlife, but every single human day living sky-high as consumers, with the next car or T.V. as the only things really worth caring about...

Thus God in many people’s minds is either a bully or a sick colluder, and in any case a has-been, and so we’re both dealing with a super-stressed planet and watching God exit from the back door of history joining all the other refugees of history on the road to nowhere. But, then suddenly, isn’t that the point? God does not control us anymore. God as the Father/Mother is a refugee, packing her bag the same as the rest of us for a journey to the unknown, to the new. God is alienated from the world, but that’s OK because all the rest of us are too. The current historic exile of God is precisely the way to meet and know God, as hand-in-hand we make our way to the unimaginably new. Isn’t that perhaps the plan of God all along, and God-self has been waiting out at the crossroads of history for God-knows how long. Because if God is truly “other””—and that for me means unimaginably nonviolently dynamic, i.e. loving—then all our all-too-human constructions have to break down before we have a chance truly to encounter God.

But meanwhile—and here’s the thing that really does me in—the churches fight a ridiculous rear-guard action to keep God back at home, or at least on the mountaintop we can see from our back yard. To keep him in church! They try to insist God is in charge, there on a Sunday morning between the four stain-glassed walls, and so permanently in a piece of our imagination that needs him like that. Check it out. The next time you go to church the minister will say some one of the following: God remains in charge because all roads lead to God, because all religions say the same thing, because God lives in heaven and will bring us there in the end, or because God is just and will come one day to establish justice and he’s biding his time right now, or because he in fact will intervene right now only for me, plus some other me's, to make all the me's successful while everyone else can literally go to the devil, etc. etc. Perhaps there is a sense in which some of this is true—I am sure that anyone given to metaphysical thinking can find ways to argue the case, as no categories are more elastic than metaphysical ones. But what is missing in it all is the very thing metaphysics can never supply: the critical sense of the human condition, the fearful moment of the planet that we are in, the way the human crisis bears down on all of us more and more each day amid each new manifestation of global malaise and unrest. What is missing precisely is human sense, the anthropological truth, the six days of the week apart from the metaphysical sunday sabbath, and the way God is now to be found there, in the human, and only there. What is missing is the abyss.

Jesus has always led us into the abyss. He said “The only sign that will be given you is the sign of Jonah,” and he meant it. When he also said “My God, why have you abandoned me?” that means in the last analysis that God also has been abandoned—God-self is lonely, isolated, dying—otherwise it was not in fact “God” who “became man.” No, the image of Jesus hanging on the cross has slowly eaten into all images of an infinitely powerful, impassive, vengeful deity and at root is the most provocative source of the current exile of God—continually weakening God so that many people who think violence is the only strength identifiable with the thought of God no longer take this (crucified) God seriously. But, really, it is the weakness of the cross which is its long-term, enduring, immense and transformative strength. So, then, the abyss is the necessary Christian destination, and the churches really need to wake up to this historic destiny. I could say more, if only because I feel I can never express this adequately or clearly enough, but I will just ask you to think on the quote from Bolaño again, this time amended in a way he would surely nor recognize but I think still works (and with apologies to the dead!)

While we search for the antidote or the medicine to cure us, the new, that can only be formed in the unknown, we must continue to turn to Jesus, even knowing he leads us into the abyss, which, as it happens, is the only place where we can find the cure.

The abyss is a concrete reality which is a mystery, a secret, but it’s there, and less and less of a secret because Jesus is walking around in it. Sunday services which reference God outside of this become progressively a falsification, not just an evasion.

Small Is Getting Bigger

I just got back from, Toronto and a weekend with a group of about forty Baptists called “The Gathering.” They first came together twenty years ago as a protest and alternative voice in face of the hijacking of McMaster Divinity College by a dogmatic theological perspective and administration. It was a joy to be with them.

They have sustained over the years and in the process have built an experience of dwelling and journeying together on the margins of power and privilege. They are an “Abrahamic minority,” one of those small groups through which God’s world-overturning purpose is served.

The great plus of being a small Christian group is that it’s possible to operate in an immediacy of love, littleness and forgiveness that big structures make so difficult. There is perhaps a spiritual law that the less you have in terms of power relations and status the more the new way of being human desired by God may be experienced. It’s an air or breath of freedom which it’s possible to breathe at these “little” levels, but much more difficult to find in the office complexes and complex offices of big organization.

My dream is that one day the church will consist entirely of such minorities, linked without hierarchy, but by word and by love.

The election was never far away. Its consequences for the whole world are acutely felt outside the USA, rather than the tit-for-tat of plumbers and polls that dominates inside it. Here is another, this time political (and in many ways peculiarly Canadian), sense of powerlessness, but, also again, a sheer hope and trust that a new human way will finally emerge the winner.

I presented on what might be called “archaeology of the cross,” going back through the layers of what the cross has meant over the long course of Christian history. From a symbol of victory, to an icon of divine violence, to a body of human pain, to an abyss of compassion. The image of the cross is a barometer or mirror of our most crucial humanity, struggling with itself as the Shepherd seeks to lead it out into a new creation.

So, go “Gathering”! Greetings from Wood Hath Hope and, for what it’s worth, I think you’re on the way!

Tony

The Scandal of Death (or the Death of Scandal)

I recently got back from a theology conference in San Francisco organized by Michael Hardin and Preaching Peace. Kudos to Michael. Great papers, and the inspiring presence of René Girard! (But I’m also sorry I just got round to talking about this. Linda’s in England, attending to her very seriously ill father, so things are a bit out of kilter. Please pray for her Dad, Peter. He doesn’t have long.)

I’ve been thinking about the conference off and on ever since I got back. You fly across the continent to hear the condensed insights of outstanding scholars, and in areas that are of central interest for you. It’s impossible not to be processing so much of it. One of the papers was by a philosopher who also considers himself a bit of a theologian. I could say perhaps I’m the converse of that, a theologian who also considers himself a bit of a philosopher. So we have a lot in common, except coming at it from opposite directions! What this scholar was talking about was Resurrection, and I was reminded of how the philosophers in Athens reacted to Paul when he spoke on that topic, about the “resurrection of the dead:” some scoffed, others wanted to hear more. (In Acts, chap. 17).

My opposite-direction colleague’s argument was that you really can’t have resurrection and remain a creature of flesh because the character of flesh is just precisely its mortality, its corruptibility. The only other way is to talk about two worlds, a second world of “spirit” separate from this one where we can be “beamed up,” and this is a dualism which we’re all trying to get away from (certainly all those at the conference.) So the honest and truthful thing is to accept real death and forget fanciful notions of resurrection.

First off, the New Testament is already aware of this issue. Paul uses the word “flesh” to stand for a whole complex of reality, both bio-physical and relational. Flesh is the human (anthropological) system predicated on death, working through a desire that knows nothing else but death, and that’s why it produces continual mayhem (Gal. 5.19-21; note how relationships of violence outnumber traditional sexual sins “of the flesh” at least two to one). But Paul also has the concept of “body” and this in fact overlaps with flesh precisely where he’s talking about resurrection (e.g. 1 Cor.15. 39-41). So he expresses a radical continuity with embodied existence occurring in the resurrection. However, it is the Gospel of John which fixes the value of flesh in the New Testament: Jesus is the Word “made flesh” and he gives us his flesh to eat as communication of endless life. In other words, in John flesh is transformed through Jesus, not done away with.

The problem for philosophy is that it finds it extremely difficult to recognize the dramatically new thing that Jesus has brought into the world, and I mean into. For philosophy there is really nothing new under the sun. On the other hand actual philosophers do have some inkling of it, otherwise why would you have a philosopher speaking at a theological conference? Actual philosophers are smart enough to know that the game has been changed by Jesus, yet they’re always trying to say the change is not actual but in fact has been always and ever the same game. That way they have the final word!

Death, however, is the tripping point where things either are indeed as they have always been—death the absolute and universal leveler, or where, through Jesus, something genuinely, impossibly new makes itself known. In other words death is a scandal, which can overwhelm us or which, through Jesus, we can overcome. Now I have no idea what makes resurrection happen, how much it is a miracle of God in the cosmos, how much the product of human attitude and transformation. I feel likely it is both, mixed up so deeply, to a point where we can’t tell one from the other. What I do know is that the raw vibrancy of the Risen One has so permeated our world that philosophers are drawn to theological conferences, that movies feature the theme of Jesus’ nonretaliation on a regular basis, that a meal in the food court of a Mall can turn into a Eucharistic thanksgiving quicker than a heartbeat. And that forgiveness of our enemies has become a contemporary question and dangerous political possibility. If death had the final word with Jesus all of this would be unthinkable, literally beyond our anthropological ken.

My thoughts are with Linda and Peter…these thoughts, of the Risen One standing at the door of death.

Overflowing Cup

I entered the novitiate of a religious order when I was in my seventeenth year. I stayed for another twenty. The nerve of my youth I gave to a contingent set-up claiming the name of Christ. It was written in my genetic and cultural code that I would do this, a perfect storm of my own most profound senses and the particular formation that only a wounded human being who happens to be your mother can give. Life saved me. It popped the rivets of my world. It was like sitting down at a desk, and the whole thing, desk and chair, collapsing underneath you. There were no two pieces left together. The only reasonable thing was to walk away.

I then became the director of a homeless shelter in London’s East End. After that I came to America and did a Ph.D.

Where was God? I thought she was in the religious life and the priesthood, but no, not there. I looked for her among the homeless, but she moved on. I sought her in thought, and only found scratches on a desert sand. The Divine Lover is dark and mysterious. She is never missing but rarely seen. It’s like trying to catch sunlight in a cup. The moment you take it inside the sunshine’s gone. Or play the shell game with the Spirit. If you say she’s under that shell and lift it up, she’s gone!

God has disappeared from every closed system I was ever in, ecclesiastic, social service, academic. But like a deer in your back yard if you’re quiet and patient she’ll turn up. Shaking morning dewdrops from her flanks. Or a sometime walk on the beach: lo, every shell is filled with God!

But it’s not simply a matter of God being elusive, a willow-the-wisp, in some happy mystical sense. It’s that God is actively popping the seams of all the closed systems, in Christ. That’s the point. I haven’t gone on this wacky pilgrimage across the face of the world just to come up with a reheated Hinduism.

All our systems are sick with violence and Jesus is in the slow but relentless process of breaking them down, so, yes, they can be open to the infinite Spirit. A broken cup in the sunshine has a beauty all its own.

Today I think I’ll go out and find a shard of some pot or cup. It’ll be a sacrament for me.

Tony