Alison Hodgson

Expert on the etiquette of perilous times.

I Heart Eugene.

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Oh Eugene Peterson!  I treated you bad (ly).  I made judgments about your work without even reading it.  Oh prejudice!  Please forgive me for being a jerk.  
Yesterday I read what you wrote in the introduction to your book, “Subversive Spirituality”:

The Christian life, in one of its main aspects, is a recovery of what we lost in the Fall.  We happen upon, we notice, we reach out and touch things and ideas, people and  events, and among these the Holy Scriptures themselves, that were there all along but that our ego-swollen souls or our sin-blurred eyes quite simply overlooked – sometimes for years and years and years.

And then we do notice: we sight life, we realize God and hear his word, we grab the sleeve of a friend and demand, “Look!  Listen!”  More often than not our friend has been looking and listening all along and treats our sudden enthusiasm with courteous condescension.

I’ve grabbed a few sleeves in my time too.
Keep it up. 

Mental Health Assessment Part 2

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You have to see THIS.  Go to the theater immediately.  Now!  Now!  Now!

You don’t have to cry, although I SOBBED and Paul had to wipe away tears several times, but you must laugh or, at the very least smile.  If you can walk out of the theater unmoved, call me and we’ll get you some help.
Go watch it today.
*To view the trailer, click on the red guitar.

You Can’t Have It All

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But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam’s twin is blood

-Barbara Ras

from You Can’t Have It All

I posted this poem not quite a year ago, in November. This morning, reading it again it struck me that today I have an eleven-year-old, a black dog and August. The eleven-year-old I only have for another month, the black dog, only God knows and August, just this one day until another year.

Oh, and I have love.

Today I want to have all that I have and abundantly so.

May you as well.