by the sights and the sounds and the million images a minute that flow in, through, and around me, even, it seems, when I sleep. I am an organic creature in an electric world. I was created from earth but I live on cement. I was made to walk in the sun but I am often little more than the soft guts of a machine.

I have reached my capacity and still push comes to shove. I remember simplicity but only through a digital haze. I am a person trying not to be a product, a soul trying to avoid the status of commodity. I am slated to be emptied and recycled like a tin can with eyes, an old car when the heartbeat fails or a new one comes along.

Yet I resist. Even the anxiety of the world is a kind of resistance, the sense of a sea of humanity holding on to something higher even as they are being marched to the ovens. Something higher, something better flashes in and out of our consciousness and it will not go away even as our masters say “Move along, there’s nothing to see here.”

Jesus is resistance to everything inhuman within and without. When they come to stamp my forehead it is His life that will say “no”. When they ask me to die in their wars. When they call on me to spend my money to pay for my own imprisonment. When they show me the kingdoms of this world and say this is desirable.  I will refuse because I have seen the Light beyond darkness and have nowhere else to go but there.

Maranatha.

I had the opportunity to see the gravesite of Memphis Minnie, an acclaimed blueswoman of the past century. In her life she was acclaimed but in death there wasn’t even a marker until a charity group founded by musicians, and particularly Bonnie Raitt, bought a stone. Even with the stone the grave looks bare, too close to the highway, alone and kind of forlorn.

The truth is that every one of us, except for the rarest few, will disappear from the world just a few years after we die. We are all destined to be a Memphis Minnie in our own way.  The only One who cares is the only One who cared for us with complete purity and integrity when we were alive. That’s worth remembering.

and I already miss Lent. My body likes the diet better and my spirit likes the idea of intentionality, of focus on better things.

The news of the world is the same. Politicians are blathering on. People, at least journalists, are still fascinated by the travels of Tiger Woods’ private parts. Some singer no one cares about took off her clothes at the JFK assassination site and if I were a three legged buddhist lesbian and blew myself up in front of the White House I could be famous but probably not for long because someone would up the ante.

Whatever else Lent is it is surely sanity. It is a rare moment when the devout, or even the reasonably devout, can take even a minute or two and turn off the noise. One second of being in a holy place is worth days and years of being on some made up red carpet. A flash of being in the Presence is cool running water to a parched soul.

Only necessity forces me to leave the season but necessity cannot take the season from me. There is much to do. There is much to understand. Yet I caught a glimpse and that was all I needed.

LaCrosse, Wisconsin