I think that is a very, very good plan

“I thought she spoke of your having some plan of going round the world.”

“I’m rather ashamed of my plans; I make a new one every day.”

“I don’t see why you should be ashamed; it’s the greatest of pleasures.”

“It seems frivolous, I think,” said Isabel. “One ought to choose something very deliberately, and be faithful to that.”

“By that rule then, I’ve not been frivolous.”

“Have you never made plans?”

“Yes, I made one years ago, and I’m acting on it to-day.”

“It must have been a very pleasant one,” Isabel permitted herself to observe.

“It was very simple. It was to be as quiet as possible.”

“As quiet?” the girl repeated.

“Not to worry–not to strive nor struggle. To resign myself. To be content with little.”

- – Chapter 24, Portrait of a Lady, Henry James

hello, stranger

(photo by velco)

Melbourne, the city so profoundly and superficially you

I saw you the other day. It was a nice day, I was out and about, walking in the city, getting on and off trams, going into shops, sitting on a bench. It was the kind of day when every face that passed came from somewhere, was going somewhere else, no longer a mask but a personality. It was the kind of day when the light was kind, and the breeze was sugary, and there was time for looking, as I waited for a tram, as I walked in the park, as I passed you in the street.

You were loudly hailing a man in a bear suit in Bourke Street Mall, flinging your arms around his sagging velvety waist, screaming happily, because it was a beautiful day and your spirits were high and you’d just had a call from the boy you like. You were riding your bike down St Kilda Road, sunglasses on, intent only on the zing of asphalt beneath the wheel, thinking of getting home and ringing your best mate and having that beer. You were falling asleep on the tram to Smith Street, your hat pulled low, your teeth not aching for once, the drugs soft in your veins. You were doing your homework on Platform 6 at Flinders Street Station, frowning. You were paused on the corner opposite Parliament House, to look at the clouds rising above the facade. You were begging for change outside St Paul’s. You were kissing your girlfriend in the Botanical Gardens, down by the lake, the whole afternoon ahead of you, her shoulders so crushable under your hands. You were buying poetry in the bookshop, wondering if $34.95 was too much to pay for something so beautiful but so brief.

In the ladies’ lounge in Myer I saw you rubbing your sore feet. You and your friends were taking up the whole footpath in Russell Street and everyone who passed you was annoyed, and you didn’t even notice. You were surreptitiously checking your breath before you went into an office block for a meeting. A man’s shirt in the window of a shop in Little Collins caught your eye, and but you remembered that he broke up with you last week, and there will be no more gift-giving, and you hastened on. You were reading a script in a cafe in Degraves Lane, hoping someone would notice. In Elizabeth Street you were stomping down past the convenience stores and the accessories stores and the mobile-phone stores and the hair-product stores, full of rubbish you don’t need, hating all of them and hating everyone who was getting in your way, because the whole day had been awful and you really just wanted to go home and take your pill. You were on your way to a hotel to see your lover, running late and hot in your business suit, hoping she wouldn’t mind. You were missing your brother, still in the village on the other side of the world, wondering what he’d make of a place like this, hoping you’ll get to show him one day when he saves enough money, when the paperwork is cleared. Because Melbourne is a wonderful city, and there is so much to see.

The buildings are so tall and fine, or crumbling and concrete and ugly, and the streets are easy to learn, and in the shops you can buy the riches of all the world, and here are thousands of people, your people, each one of them a capsule of thought and memory, all of them perfectly fitted into this bubble of a city between sea and hills, and though some of them don’t know where they’re going next, they will arrive there nonetheless.

I heard you say to your mate, the two of you in tracksuits and runners, swaggering down Swanston Street, “Nah, mate, nah, I wasn’t fucking rebuking you.” I heard you say, unsmiling, leaning over a cafe table to your boyfriend, both of you beautiful young men, “Do you really want to know?” I heard you tell your friend, “That’s the best thing, isn’t it. A cup of tea. A cup of tea and a fried egg. Beautiful.” I heard you whisper on the phone, “Don’t be like that.”

You were sitting on a bench, watching the crowds. Every song that came up on on your music player was perfect, and the world was bevelled with golden sunshine at the end of the afternoon. You watched everything. One person scowled at you; another smiled. Hello, you thought. Hello there.

- Kate Holden (The Age, 06/10/07)

for want of a good dose of holy anger

What is, therefore, our task today? Shall I answer “Faith, hope, and love”? That sounds beautiful. But I would say – courage. No, even that is not challenging enough to be the whole truth. Our task today is recklessness. For what we Christians lack is not psychology or literature… we lack a holy rage – the recklessness which comes from the knowledge of God and humanity. The ability to rage when justice lies prostrate on the streets, and when the lie rages across the face of the earth… a holy anger about the things that are wrong in the world. To rage against the ravaging of God’s earth, and the destruction of God’s world. To rage when little children must die of hunger, when the table of the rich are sagging with food. To rage at the senseless killing of so many, and against the madness of militaries. To rage at the lie that calls the threat of death and the strategy of destruction peace. To rage against complacency. To restlessly seek that recklessness that will challenge and seek to change human history until it conforms to the norms of the Kingdom of God. And remember the signs of the Christian Church have been the Lion, the Lamb, the Dove, and the Fish… but never the chameleon.

– Kaj Munk, a Danish priest and playwright killed by the Gestapo in 1944

A question for the bride

I remember hearing about an old comic strip back in the days of St. Ed’s. Two guys are talking to each other, and one of them says he has a question for God. He wants to ask why God allows all of this poverty and war and suffering to exist in the world. And his friend says, ‘Well, why don’t you ask?’ The fellow shakes his head and says he is scared. When his friend asks why, he mutters, ‘I’m scared God will ask me the same question.’ Over and over, when I ask God why all of these injustices are allowed to exist in the world, I can feel the Spirit whisper to me, ‘You tell Me why we allow this to happen. You are My body, My hands, My feet.’

– - Shane Claiborne

voice of the day

We hunger to be known and understood. We hunger to be loved. We hunger to be at peace inside our own skins. We hunger not just to be fed these things but, often without realizing it, we hunger to feed others these things because they too are starving for them. We hunger not just to be loved but to love, not just to be forgiven but to forgive, not just to be known and understood for all the good times and bad times that for better for worse have made us who we are, but to know and understand each other to the same point of seeing that, in the last analysis, we all have the same good times, the same bad times, and that for that very reason there is no such thing in all the world as anyone who is really a stranger.

- – Frederick Buechner
from Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons

the reality of (real)love

‘What is REAL?’ asked the Rabbit one day, as they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, just before Nana came in to tidy up the room. ‘Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?’‘Real isn’t how you are made,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.’

‘Does it hurt?’ asked the Rabbit.

‘Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ‘When you are Real, you don’t mind being hurt.’

‘Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,’ he asked, ‘or bit by bit’?

‘It doesn’t happen all at once,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real, you can’t be ugly except to people who don’t understand.’

- – Marjorie Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit

virtual self-construction

To hear that people are vain, even obsessively so, is not surprising. Still, though, there’s something sad about this – funny-sad, anyway. Your online self … is entirely self-created, and because it determines your identity and social standing in an internet community, each decision you make about how you portray yourself – about which facts (or falsehoods) to reveal, which photos to upload, which people “to friend,” which bands or movies or books to list as favorites, which words to put in a blog – is fraught, subtly or not, with a kind of existential danger. And you are entirely responsible for the consequences as you navigate that danger. You are, after all, your avatar’s parents; there’s no one else to blame. So leaving the real world to participate in an online community – or a virtual world like Second Life – doesn’t relieve the anxiety of self-consciousness; it magnifies it. You become more, not less, exposed.

- Audible’s Vox