Matthew 5:3 — “A Bad Memory …”
But only the light souls can be saved;
Only the ones whose weight
will not snap the angel’s wings.

John 4:1-42; 20:11-18 — “Dawn Moon Over Calvary”
The prostitute who loved Jesus so much, and the woman ashamed in the act of adultery, and the girl whose brother he had brought back from the dead, and the stranger to whom he had spoken at the well, the one who had not heard of him, unable to lower her eyes in his presence, so startled had she been to hear a male stranger’s voice addressing her personally, asking if she would not like a drink from the water that would quench her thirst forever: so lonely and desolate had they been in the first days of the life they would have to live without him; what a relief it was to find each other at the place of his tomb, just as it was beginning to get light out. … All the while Jesus, unnoticed, or mistaken for the gardener, had been waiting for her.

Matthew 7:13-14 — “Bees”
In every instant, two gates,
One opens to fragrant paradise, one to hell.
Mostly we go through neither.

Mostly we nod to our neighbor,
lean down to pick up the paper,
go back into the house.

Matthew 5:45 — “Pines at Ponary”
… Their needles offered oxygen
to victims and executioners, the same.

Ecclesiastes 9:10 — … this whole blog is a subtle blow against double-tasking, and a paean to doing one single thing with, as the Bible puts it, “all thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.”

Mark 10:13-16 — Innocence is wisdom only of the spirit.  We can and do all learn from children, all through our life; but “become as little children” is a spiritual counsel, not an intellectual, practical, or ethical one.

Mark 10:17-22 —
There are moments that cry out to be fulfilled.
Like, telling someone you love them.
Or giving your money away, all of it.

Your heart is beating, isn’t it:
You’re not in chains, are you?

There is nothing more pathetic than caution
when headlong might save a life,
even, possibly, your own.

Luke 9:60 — If they think that things are more important than people—and they do—well, let them think so. Let them be destroyed by their things. … Let the dead bury their dead.

2 Corinthians 1:3-7 — “You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain,” he wrote in “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity” in 1963, “and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less.”

Genesis 1:1-2 — The Hebrew text, however, conjures a very different image, not of creation from nothing but emergence from chaos. … “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Full stop. What follows, “And the earth was without form, and void,” then describes the unformed chaotic (tohu vabohu) earth that God just created from nothing. Taken this way we imagine an absolute beginning …
… “When God began creating the heavens and the earth, the earth,” which was already there when God began creating, “was formless void. Taken this way, we have a story that begins not as some absolute metaphysical beginning, with nothing, but in the midst of things, with God creating, or rather giving shape and form to, things that are already there in some sort of primordial formlessness. This offers an image of God as a co-creative participant with the material universe, interacting with each element of creation as it emerges and integrates within a larger ecosystem. This is not creation from nothing but emergence from chaos, with a creator God who is in relationship both with the material world and with the primordial deep from which it surfaces. God and matter are not categorically separate. On the contrary they are intimately connected.

Genesis 2:4-25 — This [second creation] story is also much narrower in scope than the first one. It attends to relationships as they emerge and develop between God, humans, animals, plants, and the earth itself. It is a humbler, more grounded story …

Genesis 2:4-7 — As is the case in English, where the words “human” and “humility” derive from the same root as “humus,” so here ha’adam, “the human,” is literally connected to ha’adamah, “the ground” or “humus.” For this reason, we might better translate this Hebrew word as “groundling” or, as feminist biblical scholar Phyllis Tribe proposed, “earth creature.” The human comes from the humus. It is literally humble, that is, close to the ground, grounded. And it will eventually return to the ground, as the creator God will later explain: “By the sweat of your nose you will eat bread until your return to the ground [ha’adamah], for from it you were taken. For you are soil [‘afar], and to soil you will return (3:19).
The ground, moreover, is not some passive mass of dirt but an active character in the story. It is imagined as alive with agency and subjectivity. The subterranean wellspring quenches its “face (panah), or more literally, “makes the ground’s face drink.” And it awaits the arrival of the human to … “till” it? The word is ‘avad, which elsewhere most commonly means “serve” (as in serving God, other gods, or another superior). … A little later, moreover, this same ground will “open its mouth” to consume the blood of Abel, whom Cain murdered, and will refuse to let Cain “serve” it (Genesis 4:10-11). This ground has personality and agency. It eats and drinks. It is served by humans and sometimes refuses to be served by them.  (p. 88 f.)

Nefeš is closely related.to its verb form, nafaš, “breathe” or “gasp,” which refers to life-giving breath and can also refer to the throat or windpipe that takes it in. So we might translate nefeš hayah as something like “breathing aliveness” or “breathing life.”  (p. 90)

The human groundling is divinely inspired soil, spiritual dirt, intimately connected to the ground and as close to God as breath.
…
… when we read Biblical Hebrew less figuratively and more literally (e.g., “breath instead of “spirit,” “face” instead of “surface” or “presence,” “drink” instead of “water), we can better see how deeply rooted it is in the body and bodily experiences in the natural world. … Our propensity to translate less literally and more figuratively alienates us from this body language. We lose its earthy fleshiness, attuned as it is to this-worldly embodiment.
Earth creatureliness: dirty spirituality …  (p. 91)

Psalm 90:3-6 — Within this tradition of ecotheological poetics, the land is not to be treated as a matter of entitlement or property. It is imagined as a member of creation, a subject of verbs—drinking, giving, resting, mourning, sometimes staggering, sometimes vomiting. God looked after it before the Israelites came to dwell in it (Deuteronomy 11:12). The land was there before humans lived on it and will be there after they are gone.

Jeremiah 12:4 — … these ancient poets conceived of an astonishing image, one that I believe also speaks to us: the earth itself grieving over the injustices and violence of its human inhabitants.

Hosea 4:1-3 — In the poetic imagination of many biblical texts, the land has agency. It is a subject whose actions impinge on humankind and vice versa. … It joins other nonhumans in lamenting the injustices and bloodshed perpetrated by humans, who are in denial of the consequences of their actions …

Amos 6:1-7 —Simultaneously pronouncing judgment and inviting sadness, Amos cries out in horror for those who recline in denial and do not (cannot? are unable to? refuse to?) grieve the ruin that is outside their high walls and doors.  …  Here, as elsewhere the prophet pronounces judgment from the inside, inviting “us” to look at ourselves, to stare at the wounds, to live into the pain, not as a path to healing but as reality in and of itself.  …  The prophet confronts ancient Israel’s imperial ideology of special blessing and national exceptionalism with the realities of exploitation and violence.

Psalm 145 —
So it is not hard to understand
where God’s body is, it is
everywhere and everything; shore and the vast
fields of water, the accidental and the intended
over here, over there. And I bow down
participate and attentive
…
I would be good—oh, I would be upright and good.
To what purpose? To be shining not
sinful, not wring out of the hours
petulance, heaviness, ashes. To what purpose?
Hope of heaven? Not that. But to enter
the other kingdom: grace, and imagination
and the multiple sympathies: to be as a leaf, a rose
a dolphin, a wave rising
slowly then briskly out of the darkness to touch
the limpid air, to be God’s mind’s
servant, loving with the body’s sweet mouth—its kisses, its words—
everything.
Matthew 5:14-16 —
… they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”  (p. 123)

If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it?
Of course, it isn’t.
Neither do I mean anything miraculous, but only
the light that can shine out of a life.  (p. 327)

Matthew 5:43-48 —
under the blue sky
that loves us all

Matthew 6:19-21 —
We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power …
… We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things …
…  All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a
commodity.  …
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard and full of meanness.

Matthew 6:26 —
…  For the birds who own
nothing—the reason they can fly.

Mark 11:1-11 —
But the donkey, tied to a tree as usual, waited.
Then he let himself be led away.
Then he let the stranger mount.

Never had he seen such crowds!
And I wonder if he at all imagined what was to happen.
Still, he was what he had always been: small, dark, obedient.

I hope, finally, he felt brave.
I hope, finally, he loved the man who rode so lightly upon him,
as he lifted one dusty hoof and stepped, as he had to, forward.

Mark 14:32-42 —
Oh the dear bodies, slumped and eye-shut, that could not
keep that vigil, how they must have wept,
so utterly human, knowing this too
must be a part of the story.

John 2:1-11; 6:1-15 —
Why wonder about the loaves and the fishes?
If you say the right words, the wine expands.
If you say them with love
and the felt ferocity of that love
and the felt necessity of that love,
the fish explode into many.
Imagine him, speaking,
and don’t worry about what is reality,
or what is plain, or what is mysterious.
If you were there, it was all those things.
If you can imagine it, it is all those things.
Eat, drink, be happy.
Accept the miracle.
Accept, too, each spoken word
spoken with love.

Matthew 5:1-12 —
Your opening needs to be a kind of pleasant shock therapy. It should grab people. And in grabbing them, it should both awe the guests and honor them. It must plant in them the paradoxical feeling of being totally welcomed and deeply grateful to be there.
… this simultaneous work of making audiences feel flattered and unworthy. …
… we are being made to feel slightly overwhelmed while at the same time made to feel welcome; our attention is gripped even as our nerves are soothed. … When Melville addresses you … He is not explaining an entire world to you. He is welcoming you into a world.
When you awe as a host, you are in a sense putting yourself—and your gathering—above your guest. When you honor, you are placing your guest above you. When you do both at once … you end up … making your guests feel like valued members of a club to which they have no business belonging. …
After the initial shock therapy of honoring and awing, you have your guests’ attention. They want to be there. They feel lucky to be there.

Matthew 13:24-30 —…
how hatred hurts
how love makes fruitful
and how intertwined they are
in us and others.

Mark 8:34 —
Jesus’ striking statement
calling for carrying crosses
was challenging
and impressive
and implausible
hyperbole
until he took himself
literally.