Through the Window

I  took a nap yesterday, and a bath, and watched a 1933 William Powell movie on TV called The Kennel Murder Case, which made very little sense but involved dogs. At the muddy end of winter quarter, my mind is almost empty.


Emptiness would be an opportunity, I know, if I could keep myself from racing to fill it with anything more complicated than this forsythia, blooming outside our kitchen window.

I've been reading Bob Ekblad's Reading the Bible with the Damned and remembering what took me to El Salvador so many years ago--the drive to understand how people in desperate circumstances come to believe that they're safe, that neither death, nor life, nor principalities, nor powers (and so on) can separate them from the love of God. In order to grasp this, I--who never worry about where my next meal is coming from or whether I'll die before I can eat it--apparently need to encounter people who do worry about these things, either in the Global South, or right next door, where making connections seems much harder. Ekblad labors in both fields--in Honduras and with the locally desperate. His hermeneutics, as I once learned to call the bias one brings to interpreting the Bible, ring truer than most, but that hoary book resists all efforts to clean it up or systematize it.  Ekblad's is just one more. It's the struggling people in the book, the ones in jail, or coming off drugs, or bending over to pick berries, that offer instruction. I owe them something for it, and I need to find a way to pay my bill.


This choice of reading has something to do with emptiness, but it's way more complicated than forsythia, so I'm putting it down. When the rain finally stops in Bellingham, there's no place more beautiful.  Have I mentioned this?