During my early morning reading the other day, a line leaped off the page from one of R. S. Thomas’s poems: “In an age of science everything is analyzable but a tear.” This is what I’ve been trying to say for years, but here, in one stunning image, this wonderful Welsh poet catches it all. I couldn’t shake this image for days.

I was reading this morning in Abigail Rine Favale’s stunningly beautiful book Into the Deep, the story of her “unlikely” conversion to Christianity, one that ends with a wholehearted plunge into the Catholic Church. This is my second reading, not something I usually do with this kind of book. It’s penetrating, wonderful.

We were with a group of people recently where someone remarked: “I can’t believe how much depression and anxiety and hopelessness seems loose among so many people, many of them our friends.” We are constantly reminded of the statistics, but we feel it close by as well.

I have always been attracted to poets who sense God’s presence in the surrounding beauty, in cool air as it touches our face, in water as it ripples across ageless stones, in a whiff of breeze across a lawn. The scene may bristle with arresting color; it may call out in the soft voice of a dove; it may arrive quietly as the moon rises over a field of wheat.

I’m back. A number of friends have asked me if I would ever return to my blog. There are lots of reasons I stepped back for a while. I’ve been intensely engaged writing my new book, now tentatively called Conversion: Drawing Nearer To The Heart Of God. In addition, Sharon and I had to take an unexpected pause to make our way through a rough patch with health in this past year. We believe we are healed and feeling better than ever, full of energy for what’s out ahead.

Last Sunday our choir at church sang this beautiful anthem: For the beauty of the earth, For the beauty of the skies. For the love which from our birth, Over and around us lies. Lord of all, to Thee we raise. This our joyful hymn of grateful praise. Then our pastor, the Reverend Jeff O’Grady, gave a fine sermon on the creation story from Genesis. What we learn in this familiar story is foundational: God created all of life. He cherishes life, from its very beginnings to its end. He created human beings, in his image, and set them free to enjoy an exquisite garden of surrounding beauty. He gave us beauty to enjoy.

I’ve been trying to enter the amazing Christmas story from the inside out. I think the story is robbed of all its power when we try to move the other way, from outside in. Perhaps what I am trying to do is see the baby Jesus the way Simeon saw him:

The Psalms never cease to surprise. You think the poem is giving it to you straight, and then it takes a turn, a twist in the road. Don’t go to the Psalms for Hallmark sentiment. We sometimes like to quote bits and pieces of the Psalms to suggest a kind of fantasy perfection. But that’s not the world of the Psalms. It’s not our world either.

I’ve been thinking a lot about joy. It’s kind of hard to find these days. Where does joy come from? What is it? Can we make joy happen, or does it just come to us, like grace. If it’s like grace, can we make ourselves more open to receive it? Whatever the answers, they’re worth asking in these joyless of days in which we find ourselves.

In 1996 I began work as the President of Seattle Pacific University. Like any new leader, I set out to learn more what this unique university was all about. I dug into some of the history, trying to locate its DNA. I talked to hundreds of faculty and staff, trustees and students, over coffee and croissants, often in our home that overlooked the campus. Out of all that conversation, and the ensuing reflection, and out of the DNA I brought to the table, we shaped a vision. We called it engaging culture, changing the world.

I have been reading a lot of Celtic poetry lately. Most of this poetry is ancient, coming out of the deep medieval centuries when Christianity was weaving itself into local ways of living. The Celtic people were known as travelers, movers, in seasonal migration, moving on from dangerous geopolitical shifts, simpler moves as well, out from the household with sheep and cattle into now-blooming pastures of the highlands, off perhaps to negotiate with far-flung neighbors. Wonderfully for us, now centuries later, living in a far less sacramental world, the Celts provide a vivid glimpse of how to travel well.

I love summer. As I’ve been marveling on my little patio the almost-overpowering jasmine, the strikingly bright bougainvillea, the gently fragrant gardenias, the all-of-a-sudden reddening tomatoes—oh how exuberant, how explosive, what fullness, what beauty. On my little patio! Suddenly summer is here. I love the long evenings when things cool down for relaxed dinners and longer conversation. I love the colors, the sounds, the cool breeze in the morning. The beauty of summer is restoring. It is joy.

I’ve been wondering lately whether it might ever be possible again for our nation to rejoice. Yes, you heard that right, rejoice. I know some folks will recoil with revulsion. This smacks of a patriotism that denies our enormous faults and shortcomings. We need deep, ongoing contrition, not self-praising. To rejoice as a nation also evokes the nasty sides of nationalism, something the Western world has agonizingly tried to shed since the horrifying carnage of WWII. That dangerous kind of nationalism is seared into the memory of our civilization. We don’t want to go there again.

As we plug into the news every morning, we are often overwhelmed with how much sorrow there is in our world. Sorrow is the word Paul Tillich uses as the opposite of joy. I’ve been thinking a lot about joy, but as we look around, it’s fair to ask where is the joy? And then there is this: Are we actually choosing sorrow instead of joy? Or are we just not watching for the joy that lies all around us? Perhaps what we need is to change our angle of vision in order to see the joy that gestures for us to enter in.

In my last post I talked about how Michael Gerson characterizes the state of our public discourse today: “nasty, shallow, personal, vile, vindictive, graceless, classless, bullying, ugly, crass and simplistic. . . .” It all spells “the triumph of the boors.” This is not the talk of a great nation, Gerson contends, but rather “a sign that greatness of purpose and character is slipping way.”

I woke up yesterday at 2 AM and found myself churning over the current climate of discourse in our country. I sunk into a place of sadness, sorrow, and shame. It is not just that our leaders are failing us in this regard. No, we are all complicit at letting this vileness seep into our culture and even into our own homes. We should all be ashamed.

It’s time to talk about frogs. It’s time to think about, in Christian Wiman’s words, why a “moment of joy,” seeing a bunch of frogs, “can blast you right out of the life to which it makes you all the more lovingly and tenaciously attached. . . .” It’s time to think “how in the midst of great grief some fugitive and inexplicable joy might, like one tiny flower in a land of ash, bloom.” Sometimes it might be that tiny flower. Sometimes it might be those frogs. That’s the way joy works. Such a surprise in a “land of ash.”

“Where do we go from here,” we ask ourselves on this Monday morning after Easter. It’s as if we took off smudged glasses and wiped them crystal clean, for a moment. “I have seen the Lord,” says Mary Magdalene, before she dashed off to tell the world. Yes, we see! Yes, indeed, we have seen the Lord. He is risen. I have been handed new glasses. I see everything differently!

I’ve been thinking a lot about church. What is church? What is the main purpose of church? Why do we continue to go to church in this age of skepticism and unbelief? And then there is this troubling question: Is the church dying, as statistics seem to indicate, truly fading, declining in influence, becoming a kind of curiosity to our society? We find ourselves scratching our heads about where church is headed. Sometimes we are deeply troubled.

Hooray, my new book is finally out! My fabulous publisher Wipf & Stock (Cascade Books) sent me the first copies of the book last week. Yes, this project has now come to fruition. I am delighted to let my blog readers know.