"Is he safe?"
"Safe?" said Mr. Beaver, "who said anything about safe? 'course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the king, I tell you."
- C.S. Lewis

Some Bulgarian Poetry in Honour of the Feast of Sts. Cyril and Methodius

This author, Blaga Dimitrova, was recommended to me by a friend. She is Bulgarian and the feast celebrating the patron saints of Bulgaria is RIGHT around the corner! Therefore, given the current name of this community, I felt the need to spread around three peices of Bulgarian beauty.

- Gloria

IMPERCEPTIBLY

I will go.
And the space I used to take
will be filled with air—
a liberation—
invisible and spacious.
A silent presence,
from which someone else,
unconsciously,
will take a big breath



5.

The silhouette of a love,
refracted in my memory—
rootless seaweed
carried from far away
on a warm current.

How much bargaining with circumstance,
how many devious moves,
how much struggle with ourselves
and risk and recklessness
for just one meeting.

So close—the sea, jumping out of itself,
and again subsiding to its own element.
Around us—tourists,
shrieking cutouts
on the boiling background.

Only the two of us are quiet—
a small island amid the chaos,
so stormless, almost a mirage,
set against reality,
against your ticket home,
against tomorrow.


Cassandra With A Tail

A cat stretches from one end
of my childhood to the other.
Those winters, by the hearth,
it spun a yarn of smoke into a ball.
At night, it flickered half-moon eyes
into the dark corners of the house.
By day, its tail twirled a signature
on the sky and pawed the air with grace,
gathering in its coat
the electricity of the storm
and smoothing it into gloss fur.
Wise With cottony steps.

Self possessed.
Just once she jumped out of her skin,
One peaceful evening
her tail shot up like a bottle brush
and she lept onto the chandelier
wailing like an ambulance
as if all the voltage in her fur
exploded out in flashing rage.
None of us understood the cat’s prophesy.
We hissed at her to calm down…And
the earthquake nearly flattened the house.
The oracular cat disappeared
with my childhood, forever.

But her miracle stayed with me.
Tonight, to my surprise,
she crept inside me.
Bristling with shock, I shook
and bounding back from wall to wall
yammering up a piercing cry
to call you wherever you are:
Listen. You have so little time.
Grab what you can,
whatever is dear, whatever you love.

Deep in the belly of the earth
an atomic blast is swelling up,
nurtured by electronic brains,
and produced by pulsating robots.
The green careening planet
spins blindly in the dark
so close to annihilation.
Listen. No one listens. Meow.

The Benediction

This is a video my cousin showed me a few months ago. Its not directly related to our house...but I like it :)

Prayer

A few of us are currently reading Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster. I'm in the midst of the prayer chapter, which is a really nice coincidence because last night we had some realizations about the great need to pray for this project.
Within the past couple days a few things have been going wrong. Katie pointed out that we have not been praying for this as much as we should be. This has been weighing on my mind for the past 24 hours and a few parts of the prayer chapter in the book stuck out to me.

'All who have walked with God have viewed prayer as the main business of their lives.'

'In our efforts to pray it is easy for us to be defeated right at the outset because we have been taught that everything in the universe is already set, and so things cannot be changed. And if things cannot be changed, why pray? We may gloomily feel this way, but the Bible does not teach that. The Bible pray-ers prayed as if their prayers could and would make an objective difference. The apostle Paul gladly announces that we are "co-labourers with God"; that is, we are working with God to determine the outcome of events (1 Cor. 3:9)...This comes as a genuine liberation to many of us, but it also sets tremendous responsibility before us. We are working with God to determine the future! Certain things will happen in history if we pray rightly. We are to change the world by prayer.'

I just wanted to share this because it emphasizes how powerful prayer can be and I've always know that somewhere in the back of my mind, but this really brought it to the fore front. So we just wanted to ask that everyone would keep us in their prayers as we search for a place to live and begin this crazy and huge task of creating a community house.

Thanks :)

-Rebecca

I read this yesterday and I found it interesting for thought especially considering what we're doing. When you're reading it though, do note that it's speaking against the very church it's describing -- the Modern church.

From Modern Christianity to a Postmodern Church

"If I am opposed to the epistemology, or theory of knowledge, that plagues modern Christianity, then I am also opposed to ecclesiology (or lack thereof) that accompanies this modernist version of the faith. Within the matrix of a modern Christianity, the base 'ingredient' is the individual; the church, then, is simply a collection of individuals. Conceiving of Christian faith as a private affair between the individual and God -- a matter of my asking Jesus 'to come into my heart'-- modern evangelicalism finds it hard to articulate just how or why the church has any role to play other than providing a place to fellowship with other individuals who have a private relationship with God. With this model in place, what matters is Christianity as a system of truth or ideas, not the church as a living community embodying its head. Modern Christianity tends to think of the church either as a place where individuals come to find answers to their questions or as one more stop where individuals can try to satisfy their consumerist desires. As such, Christianity becomes intellectualized rather than incarnate, commodified rather than the site of genuine community."

(A couple of paragraphs later...)

"The church does not exist for me; my salvation is not primarily a matter of intellectual mastery or emotional satisfaction. The church is the site where God renews and transforms us -- a place where the practices of being the body of Christ form us into the image of the Son. What I, a sinner saved by grace, need is not so much answers as reformation of my will and heart."

- Who's Afraid of Postmodernism by Jamie Smith