All We Can Say (Tracy Chapman)

While they were there, the time came for Mary to have her baby.  She gave birth to her firstborn child, a son, wrapped him snugly, and laid him in a manger... 

 -Luke 2

Here they are, the usual characters, ushered into our consciousness on this day, as we hear once more the story of travel-weary parents-to-be, lowly shepherds, glorious angels, kings, wise ones, various farm animals and, of course, the babyGod. They remind us that God comes, once more, to be born among us; among the weak, the powerful, the ordinary, the violent, the fearful, the cynical, the innocent… among us.

In the stables of our lives- the lowly and cold places, the messy, chaotic places, the unsuitable and unexpected places-God emerges.  Through the voices of these familiar characters God proclaims, into our time, hope that makes us unafraid, peace and joy that reach out across creation, and Love that has come to save us all.

What can we do on Christmas Eve, but agree?  In today’s song, Tracy Chapman infuses the familiar Christmas hymn with the beautiful and gentle refrain of “Mmmhmm.” What more can we say as we stare again into the manger’s soft light, as again we are embraced by a love that is bigger than we understand? What is left but our awe and a quiet “Yes,” “Let it be so,” or “Mmhmm”?

The wondrous answer to our broken Advent cries of “Come, Lord Jesus,” God’s answer of Love, rushes with possibility all around us. As Shawna Bowman, pastor at Friendship Community Church, writes, “God’s expansive love bellows ‘yes’ through eternity… and it joins us where we are. It is magnified by our own yes – our willingness to love in the same way God loved - to live hard into love in the midst of our messy human god-filled lives.”

So, this Christmas Eve may our spirits answer back "yes." As we spiral again around the luminous mystery, may we dwell in the wonder of the moment when God, in whom all things hold together, became a small baby and reached out to embrace all things in the hold of grace. Yes, we say together, Love has come. Mmhmm, Love has come for us all.

Holy One, let us meet you tonight, in wonder that unfolds and opens our souls and in Love that sounds our depths and echoes through our very being.

-Lindsey

Just Breathing (the Cinematic Orchestra ft. Fontella Bass)

Oh that song is singin,' singin' into me.
Over everything I used to be.
Oh, that song is singin,' singin' into me.
Slow and sweet, it carries me...

...Breathe into me
Breathe out through me
Breathe into me. (Cinematic Orchestra)

The giggly excitement of the shepherds and kings quieted, as one little angel stood up to deliver her carefully memorized lines.  I noticed, as I watched her, that I was holding my breath; perhaps in anticipation of what would surely be the cutest thing I’d seen all year, or perhaps remembering the nerve-wrecking pageant performances of my own childhood.  

There are many moments, in this season, when we might hold our breath: walking into a room full of strangers at a Christmas party, Uncle Joe starting a political debate over turkey dinner, turning around at the Christmas eve service to see everyone’s faces lighted only by candles, hearing that strange song on the radio that grandma loved so much when she was alive…

Today’s song offers us an important reminder in these last days before Christmas: Breathe.  Just breathe, in and out. Whether in a state of anxiety, stress, fatigue, wonder, the reminder of this song is that in all of these moments there is space for us, grace for us, to just be, to dwell in each moment, to breathe. 

 

In the varied moments and emotions of these days, in the rushing and in the quiet, there is a steady grace singing over us, reminding us that Love has come for us, just as we are. Or as the angel sang “I bring good news of great joy for all the people,” not just for people who have it together, not only for those who are full of Christmas cheer, not only for those who identify as Christians, but good news for ALL people.  

At the root of this story (and of our faith) is this grace: Love came to be born among us, and seeks still to enter our lives, to be born in each of us, all of us, every day. When we are quieted from the rushing, the expectations, the judgments, when we take a moment to just dwell in this grace, what song will we hear singin’ over us?

May it be a song of love, a breath of grace, carrying us, breathing into us and out through us.

-Lindsey

As swimmers dare

to lie face to the sky

and water bears them

as hawks rest upon air

and air sustains them,

so would I learn to attain

freefall, and float

into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace,

knowing no effort earns

that all-surrounding grace.

-Denise Levertov, The Avowal

Thurs Jan. 5 - Love, Love, Love (The Mountain Goats)

One of the more popular of recent years' holiday films has been Love Actually, with its celebrations and reflections on the bitter and the sweet of earthly love in all its forms: family, romantic, friendship and more.  The general message, neatly packaged, is this: earthly love is messy, beautiful, complicated, painful, risky, self-contradicting- deeply imperfect, but somehow, sometimes, worth it.

Today's song takes the same idea, but to a much darker place.  As this song points out, the melody we're singing might be 'love, love, love,' but some terrible, brutal things are done in the twisted forms of love we foster in our lives, and the echoing of those actions can haunt us.

This could just be some morose anti-Christmas cheer reflection on human fallenness and depravity, but I hear something else: I hear God's pity and God's grace, too.  I hear Jesus coming as an infant, acting and speaking as a man about 'love, love, love' (echoing Dave Matthews 'love is all around' refrain from our Christmas Eve post) and having all of us so woefully, tragically, and almost willfully misunderstand him for two thousand years -- and yet and still offering us a love which is so wildly boundless, so graciously vulnerable, so passionately freedom-seeking that we can barely turn toward and believe it.

I received an emailed image tonight that sums up pretty well where I think we as Christians have twisted and mangled the idea of love, and especially Christ's love, back in on itself in so many ways (HERE).  How can we hear this song as not only as a call to own our own broken witness to Jesus' love, but as an invitation to remember the Source of that love and the ways in which, as the song reminds us, 'now we see this / as in a mirror dimly, / then we shall see each other / face to face' ?

Love, Love, Love by The Mountain Goats (lyrics HERE)

The line about seeing 'in a mirror dimly' is borrowed from 1 Corinthians 13, slightly after the famous passage on love popular at marriages, which, if we read carefully, is less about romantic love and more about the kind of love which Jesus modeled in his relations with us: the love of enemy and outcast, neighbor and friend, sinner and saint alike.

If I speak in the tongues of humans or angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind.  It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.  It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.  

Love never ends.

                                        - 1 Corinthians 13: 1-8a

May we continue to hear God's 'Christmas' song of 'love, love, love' in ways that bring life and wholeness, but also remember God's pity and grace for where we have erred.

Wed Jan. 4 I Release and I Let Go (Florence and the Machine)

Christ has set us free to live a free life. So take your stand! Never again let anyone put a harness of slavery on you.
-Galatians 5:1 (The Message)






This song, and the music of Florence and the Machine in general, I find to be rich in imagery and emotion. Every time I listen it resonates with me and sparks some different thought, question or memory. Today I offer them, patchwork style, hoping that these words and this music will create some sparks in you, too.

 Florence and the Machine: Shake it Out

**Some strong language

I'm always dragging that horse around

All of his questions, such a mournful sound

Tonight I'm gonna bury that horse in the ground
I like to keep my issues drawn

cause it's always darkest before the dawn

Is this theme too late, we are four days in. People've started over already, haven't they? Begun already out-withed the old and in-withed the new? Have I begun already? Yep, begun and begun again.

Beginning as one point of time somehow isn't working for me.
The newness of this year feels blunted by my sameness; perhaps I didn't really intend to be changed, or did that step of beginning unearth some old pieces of my self that I didn't know were down there?

and I am done with my graceless heart

so tonight I'm gonna cut it out and restart

How can I still be holding that fear? anger? expectation? I let it go so many times.


A friend wisely said to me once, we should take a hint from our bodies. When there is something in there that is not good, the body does what it has to expell it. Some times we need to take our issues out and disect them or analyze them, sometimes we just need to know its bad for us and get it out, let it go.






That which we cling to, shapes us. Teach us to chose wisely what we hold to ourselves and that which we release to spiral away into the world.

Shake it out, shake it out, oh woah

and it's hard to dance with the devil on your back

so shake him off

"Shake therapy" is Kate's favorite thing. My friend didn't patent the idea but she may be it's greatest evangelist. When she finds herself carrying the detriments of stress in her body or when she is frustrated or angry, she will literally shake all of her limbs as hard as she can to release the stress that is harmful to her spirit and her muscles. When I have been present this shaking has transformed our frustration into riotous laughter (my favorite kind of release) on both our parts, and I believe there is something to it.

I release you, fear... I give you back....
You are not my shadow any longer.
I won’t hold you in my hands.
You can’t live in my eyes, my ears, my voice my belly, or in my heart
-Joy Harjo

(inspired I say) I release you, my fear and my self protection. I shake you off, lies of inferiority and I unwrap tight fingers from you, bitterness. Then I prepare myself to do this again tomorrow.

Cause looking for heaven, for the devil in me
Looking for heaven, for the devil in me
Well what the hell I'm gonna let it happen to me

There is a kind of grace that we need in letting go, it is hard. And there is a kind of grace that we receive in letting go - the free-fall kind, the just-be kind, that grace where we don't have to work as hard as we think we do, where we can be who we are, where we can chose to let something go over and over and over, trusting God each time to move, further and further from our grasping hands that which is harmful and to place in them, instead, something new.

So, as Florence says, "what the hell, I'm gonna let it happen to me."










Gentle God, uncover in us that which needs release, strengthen our hands to open, to let go and to receive.

-Lindsey

Thurs Dec.29 Lightwork (Lupe Fiasco)

But now, says the LORD—
the one who created you, Jacob,
the one who formed you, Israel:
Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name;
you are mine.
-Isaiah 43:1

          The self-reflective nature of this song is resonating with me today. Beginning with Ellie Goulding’s opening lines “I had a way then, losing it all on my own. I had a heart then, the queen has been overthrown," moving to Lupe’s jolting entrance with “So, what are you going to stand for?” He proceeds to answer the question of himself while reflecting on the history and culture that inform his choices. The song is packed with allusions and commentary, which may or may not ruffle your feathers.

         Regardless, for me, the model holds. This is the time of year when we reflect, look at our lives, spare a moment for a little critical analysis. For me this is less than comfortable territory and, many years, gets relegated to the minutes that elapse between some party-goer asking about my New Year’s resolutions and me shoving food in my mouth to buy thinking time. But what if that wasn’t it this year? Can I take some moments to look at myself and assess honestly? What has been overthrown in my life? What is calling me home? What do I see that needs to be illuminated? And what am I wrestling? Maybe these aren’t even my questions but they are an entry point.

 Lupe Fiasco (feat. Ellie Goulding and Bassnectar)

**Some strong language

One way we hope forward is to summon the courage to question ourselves.  

          Though it is not the case for our friends in the southern hemisphere, I do frequently reflect on the placement of Christmas (and in fact celebrations in many religious traditions) during winter months.  In the short, dark days when we become sedentary and quieted and ruminative, comes a celebration, a hope, a light. It is that light of Christmas that illuminates my reflection, that hope that gives me courage to question and boldness to look honestly at myself.  For when Christ , Divine Love, was born into the mess and poverty of a stable, it meant that Divine Love could dwell in the mess of my life too; and if God’s grace is great enough to hold the world in a reparative embrace, then that grace can also surround all that I discover within myself.

So, I am taking some moments this week to live into that love and grace and ask some questions-

Where am I?  How am I? What am I standing for? How am I affecting the lives of others? How are others affecting my life?

 -as I hope forward into the New Year.

May we question courageously, secure in the hold of God's grace.

-Lindsey

Sun Dec. 18 - Stake a Claim (Ryan Adams and the Cardinals)

Names are important to me. I am named after two of my great-grandmothers, one from Syria, one from Mexico. One a proud Orthodox Catholic, the other a proud Presbyterian. One who braved emigration and raised her family in New York, the other who raised a family on a farm in northern Mexico. Both strong.  Both women of faith.

These two names from my great-grandmothers make up what is traditionally called my "Christian" name, but there's another part to what I consider my true Christian name. At my home church, when a baby, child, or adult gets baptized, they say, for instance, "Anna Marina, child of the covenant, I baptize you..."

This is my second name. I am a Child of the Covenant which stretches from a man asked to count the stars in Genesis, has a twist in the middle, and picks up in my tradition with Jesus of Nazareth. I am a Child of the Covenant since before I knew what it was, before I claimed it back, before I did anything to deserve it.

Why is this important? Because generally I don't do anything to deserve it.  Because mostly I spend my days screwing things up, getting things wrong, and making a mess. This is no self-loathing; I'm just a human, and that's what we do: we make a spectacular mess of things. Life is hard on us, we're hard on ourselves, and at the end of the day sometimes all we can say is: wow, that's not what I wanted to do at all.

Born into a Light - Ryan Adams and the Cardinals ( approx. lyrics HERE)

What I try to remember during Advent is that I've been caught up in a story that began before I was born, and which will carry on after me. That my mistakes matter, but they're not the end of the world.  That my "worthiness" has nothing to do with my belovedness. That I was born into a Light, and am therefore both known for all my shortcomings and also surrounded by the glow of grace. That my name is 'Anna Marina, Child of the Covenant,' and that is a name and a bond that will not let me go, no matter what.

It's a rich, amazing inheritance, but it's also one that I sometimes hide from because it's a little embarrassing. Jesus? Well, yes, but...

So I also challenge myself: if I've been given this gift of a name and an inheritance of grace, how can I take courage and claim that tradition back? To be bold and say again, "Yes, I believe in all the slightly strange but wonder-inspiring stories in this ancient book. Yes, I believe that God's Spirit is at work here, in this Bible, in this broken Church, in my patched-together, imperfect life. Yes, I believe that this little baby who grew into a flinty, challenging, grace-filled man was God. Yes, I claim this wonderful, foolish, backward truth, because it claimed me, and because it names me."

May we remember our claiming, our naming, in our Advent walk and gather our spirits and voices to claim the story and the name of Christ in return.

                                 -Anna

Sun Dec. 12 - Trusting the Future (The Davis Sisters)

"Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life...[and] the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month.  And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.  No longer will there be any curse.  ... There will be no more night.  They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light..."
          - Revelation 22: 1-5

Let's talk about the Second Coming for a minute.  (Stay with me!)  As a progressive Christian, I have to admit that even writing these words makes me a little squeamish: there's WAY too much cultural baggage on this train.  Yet abandoning any talk of God's ultimate promises because of those Christians who revel in gleeful violence and self-congratulation may actually be the bigger sin.  So call it what you want: Christ's Return, the Final In-Gathering, Love-Made-Manifest-in-All-Creation... I'm going to take my faith and the pain of the world seriously enough to say that the power of God's love is in its tenacity: Love has ultimate hold of this world, and will not abandon or let us go.  

Many of the Advent songs in our first week seem to hit a similar note: "we need you God because things are pretty messed up around here!" and maybe this feels too much like Lent. But while Advent isn't Lent, Advent isn't a big party, either. Advent lives in a very strange and wonderful in-between place: in-between hope and somber waiting, in-between already and not-quite-yet, in-between eager anticipation and humble thoughtfulness.  

We'll Understand it Better acknowledges that we actually "live" Advent every day of our lives.  In the trials of daily life and our unknowing about the future we grow uncomfortable, so we try to create explanations, tactics, rules, boundaries.  We also try to take ecstatic prophetic visions like Daniel and Revelation and turn them into road maps and recipes.  But maybe what we need to survive in an Advent world is less absolutist theology and more trust in God's intentions: In Advent we practice trusting the future instead of dissecting it.

"We'll Understand it Better By and By sung by The Davis Sisters -- full lyrics to traditional song HERE

Maybe the most revolutionary thing we can say as progressive Christians about God's final promises for the world is that WE DON'T KNOW what it will look like; but we do know what it will feel like.  It will feel like the overshadowing of history by Love: scary and real and gorgeous (and deeply humility-inducing) - and ultimately... healing and grace-filled.  The wait for this time is an ache of need and a humble remembrance of our own brokenness.  The wait for this time is also full of humor and grace, love and peace-filled waiting because we trust the future, and live as though God's promises are already being revealed among us.

May we practice our trust in God's future, remembering that God's love in Christ is not a cold stone of violence but amazing song of wholeness.  And one day it will reveal the honesty and glory of all Creation.  Amen and amen.

                                   - Anna

Fri Dec. 9 - Eyes Wide Open (Iron and Wine)

In [Jesus] all things were created... he is before all things, and in him all things hold together."
                            -- Colossians 1:16-17 selected

At a young age I realized this eternal truth about great pop music while listening to Paul Simon's Graceland album: a truly great song is one where I can mishear the lyrics and love both the true and false versions equally well. This is true of most Iron and Wine songs, and Walking Far From Home is one I particularly love precisely because there are so many delightful and thought-provoking things to mishear.

The delicious mystery is what keeps my eyes and ears open, not just to this song, but to the world.  I have no idea what the ultimate meaning of the song is, but I sense that it has something to do with awareness, loving the broken and the lost, and hope.  These are all ideas that remind me again of our theme for this week: what helps?  What helps with our longings and our brokenness?  What helps with the waiting?  Iron and Wine reminds me that what helps is keeping our eyes truly open to what's going on around us, taking in the grace and the grime.

Walking Far From Home is like a lullaby for the world as I'd want it written: sad and gorgeous, compassionate and hopeful, tragic, honest and humane.  For me, it speaks of our essential identity as wanderers in this world, and yet of the ways in which we are ultimately drawn back together in God's embrace.  It invites us to open our eyes and celebrate the beauty of Creation, even in its broken state.

The lyrics are worth reading HERE, but it's also good just to "mishear" the first time around... what do you hear?

This song invites us, in the words of Mary Oliver, to be "a bride married to amazement,/ ...the bridegroom, taking the world into [our] arms."  Or, to take the challenge further, as Mother Francis Dominica states, to remember that "Nothing in your life is so insignificant, so small, that God cannot be found at its center."  This song challenges me to look for beauty and meaning (manifestations of God) in all places, even the strange and painful, the outcast and despairing.  I may not see God immediately, or even at all, but at the end I will have looked with my whole eyes and my whole Spirit, and maybe in that way will have embodied God's presence in that space.

I like to think that Jesus' healing ministry began with his unflinching gaze upon the rejected, the sinners and the lost that acknowledged their deep humanity beyond their brokenness.  Conversely, any of us who have sat at the side of a stranger who was ill or dying, or a friend who had become lost in their own despair knows that sometimes the only possible response is to look, to look with love and grace and peace into the mystery of this one human life which touches all human life... and with that look acknowledge that life is more than just the meat of things; that there is an awe-ful beauty at the heart of our lives, and it is there, sometimes, where we are able to fall back into God's embrace.

Saw a wet road

form a circle

and it came like a call, came like a call

from the Lord.
                                 - Iron and Wine

May we allow ourselves to look fully and deeply at the things we love and the things that hurt in these days, seeking God at the center and knowing peace along the way.

                                           - Anna

Wed. Dec 7 - Telling Better Jokes (Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros)

Photo courtesy of Anand Balasubramaniam

In Spanish, one way of saying that someone is really funny or quick-witted is to say "tiene mucha gracia."  Gracia basically means "wit" or "quickness" in this context, but the same word also means and is used for what you'd guess: "grace," as in God's grace.  I love the way humor and God's work in the world are so intertwined in this one small word.

One thing that's been helping me a lot recently is thinking about how funny the Bible is, or at least, many parts of it. Sometimes I wonder if humanity doesn't realize that we're God's straight man, and God keeps cracking jokes we don't quite get.  Ever heard the one about the big fish?  What about the man who had a wrestling match with God?  Or what about the one where God walked around as a human and told jokes all day long about the amazing, backwards, looney grace of the Reign of God and no one understood?  That was a good one.

I'm not trying to be flippant.  All of these stories are ultimately deadly serious, having to do with forgiveness and death and struggle and fear and hope -- but so are all the best jokes.  The role of the jester in most Shakespeare plays, for instance, is often to tell truths in the form of jokes and riddles, not to be obtuse, but to reveal what's hidden by flipping it inside out.

Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros have gained a huge following in my area, mostly based on the exuberance of their music and lyrics, but what I love most is their dual interest in celebrating wonderful things like connection and love, and also talking about terrible things like war and brokenness.  They even admit in their "manifesto"-style song, Janglin', that, 'once we were the jesters... and now we're out to be the masters/ for to set our spirits free.'

"We want to feel ya' 

(We don't mean to kill ya'!)

We come for to heal ya' janglin' soul..."

                     - Janglin' by E.S. and the M.Z.  (Full lyrics HERE) 

Janglin' by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros

There's something freeing about recognizing that life's seriousness and pain has an edge of humor to it, that the grace of God sometimes comes in the form of a joke.  One of my favorite meditations on the resurrection, by H.A. Williams, compares Jesus' rising to a punch line: all the solemn important Powers that Be have put down the Man of Nonsense and are congratulating themselves... while not knowing that he has risen again and is gaining even more followers than ever before.  They were trying to stop the nonsense of Jesus' inside-out stories of radical love, and don't know they just helped him create the most inside-out one of them all: one that traveled all the way to the cross and back.  As Williams says, "if that isn't funny, nothing is."

What if Advent (and even Lent?) had more jokes in it?  What if our ultimate goal as Christians was to tell more jokes: with our lives, our priorities, our hopes?  What if we weren't so stuck on serious and were able to welcome God's promises with relief instead of angst?  What if we let the humorously "weak" powers of love and forgiveness do some powerful healing for us and others?  What if we recognized that the jokes themselves (wolves lying down with lambs, the meek inheriting the world) are the biggest threat to the Powers that Be because they use ammunition that no vest can stop: truth and a little bit of grace.


The wolf shall lie down with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them...
                                    - Isaiah 11: 6

May we tell better jokes and ease our hearts with laughter at the surprising Grace of God who, at Christmas, came as a baby instead of a regal King - not in spite of the difficulties of this world, but because of them.

                                 - Anna

Mon Dec. 5 - A Strange Grace (Mediaeval Baebes)

Ne had that apple taken been

That apple taken been,

Ne had never our ladie,

A'been heav'ne queen.*

Blessed be the time

That apple taken was,

Therefore we moun** singen

Deo gracias!

* Queen of Heaven    ** may

The first week of Advent, the A.M. Project thought about how we long and need our way into Advent.  This second week, we'll be thinking about: what helps?  What helps us not just get lost in the necessary crying out during Advent; all our rightful needing and longing?  


Adam Lay Ybounden is a medieval poem I learned in college, and it's one of those theologies that makes me squirm a little: it basically argues that the"Fall" in Eden (eating the forbidden fruit from the tree) was a good thing, because if it hadn't happened, Mary would never have borne Jesus Christ.  Given the traditional concept that humanity's Fall brought all sin, suffering and death into the world (though not exactly my view), this still sounds like a pretty bum deal -- all respect to Mary and Jesus, of course.

But listen again:  what I hear when I listen more carefully is PLAY.  The poet is playing with the stories of the Bible, turning things on their ear to see what shakes out, and saying, "See?  Look at it from this direction!"  You don't have to agree with the affirmation to see the benefit: it makes us look twice.  And maybe, if we dare to affirm that there's something wonderful about Jesus' story (virgin birth and all?) that's so meaningful, so beautiful, so valuable that it would move a poet so many hundreds of years ago to write "thanks be to God" to whatever set this story in motion... maybe it can amaze us, too.

Poem/Song Lyrics HERE

We should keep wrestling with our traditional theologies, especially noting the ways in which they have "gone wrong" in history, furthering bad practice, harmful attitudes or false justice in the world.  But maybe we shouldn't throw out our ability to play with these same ideas, upend and re-tell these same stories, filled with strange God-in-flesh babies and virgin births.  Maybe there's something in a slightly-embarrassing drawer of Church theology that might offer us a strange grace... an insight, a "huh!" of surprise or delight... that makes it worth another look.  In the end, maybe it's our ability to play that will save us from despair, not only in the Church, but in upending our views on the world, looking again, and playing with the myriad possibilities of change and Creation.

"Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly..."        
                                          - Colossians 3:16

May we wrestle and struggle and ponder our way through these days, calling out pitfalls and errors, but 'being not afraid' to play, to mine the richness of tradition and story for insight, truth and grace.

                                - Anna