Tender Was the Night


Dear Eugene,

Last evening after dinner I was working on my lawn again.  The shrub hedges around my backyard can now be properly called trees.  I am no arborist but I know if I am to ask a little child she'll point at them and call them "big trees."

Well, it's too late now.  I know I will need to hire someone to do the cutting.  My Green Bin can't contain the fell of even one cut and my green thumbs are getting old.

Yeah, I felt old last night.  When a heart is tender the limbs go with it.

This past weekend God broke my family down so to grant us a breakthrough.  Now we are entering, opening up a new field that is strangely familiar, if we have only taken a glimpse of it in our dream individual and collective, to recover a lost memory.  Things are righted but there will still be wrongs.  It got easier and it will get harder.

You, Jesus, I said, the Master of everything.  Even of irony.

Cynicism and stoicism are the two main roads we take to come to terms with brokenness of our own and of this world (and we often straddle both).  I am already feeling very bad for what I am going to say but I will still say it: It means we either say F--k it all! (with weapon of mass or local destruction on our hands) or we go F--k Me (with the smile of Buddha on our face).  Dirty language is hardly the most offensive part of our broken life.

I felt weak and old walking on my lawn last night.  Something in me had died, been cut off.  The one who did the cutting was neither cynicism nor stoicism.  Those evil twins never hand in any good garden work; they only trash paradise.

God is love.  Love weeps.  The night was tender.

Yours, Alex

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