More from Eyjafjallajokull - The Big Picture - Boston.com

More from Eyjafjallajokull - The Big Picture - Boston.com

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I.

I. they caught you right outside the door

Sent some thug with a knife

Because you were on your way to new friends

Because you dared to break away

Tribal clan neighborhood revenge

In the name of honor

In the name of revenge for shame brought

Some twisted sense of justice

Some twisted little minds of cowards

Goon squads with knives and religion

Don't know where they are

Not back in the homeland anyway

Export their honor issues and love of a fight

Love of violence they actually like it

It makes them feel big feel powerful feel in control feel like men

What kind of community is it over there

that sends pathetic clowns with phallic weapons to attack

women on the way to be with friends

with a whole clan-neighborhood and culture who approves the act?

I. there is another community over here who will take care of you receive you love you

You belong to Something bigger called Love

Who speaks freedom to be believe change grow worship live think

Shame revenge and twisted honor nailed to a Persian instrument of execution and torture

To free goons idiots cowards thugs sinners me us all

I am still here...

Well, it has been a while since I was over here on this space, was in another space, dude!...Mostly Facebooking it, but my Facebook page was not, as this one, designed by my son Patrick...I guess I had a few readers over here, now I have like 48 photo albums on Book o' Face. I have trouble remembering to Tweet on Twitter, as if that was at all of the least ultimate importance...

Still here in Stockholm, Sweden, and loving it more all the time, the place, the people (most of them), the work bringing Good News to this land...But I also have a growing interest in helping the Love Revolution in Christ go forward in specific places I have recently spent time in and continually find myself praying/thinking about: Berlin, Oslo, Prague, Nantes, based on real human contacts and new friends in these places, not just my usual enthusiastic wonderment at most every place I have been (Zwolle, Dresden, Luleå, Lübeck) or want to go (Tokyo, Oaxaca, Reykjavık)...And San Francisco is still no.1...

But it's cool, if quite difficult emotionally at times, to have our kids in Santa Cruz, Nantes, and Stockholm simultaneously, and Skype-conference. You don't know how life will turn out looking when you're 52, but it is all grace from God, another year/day/minute! I am still grateful!..

Kvinnodagen 2009...

Tomorrow is World Women's Day ..Världskvinnodagen.  I have just finished decorating cookies for an event in the living room of good friends in Aspudden...I also finished a sermon to be given at Tomaskyrkan tomorrow on a woman from the Mediterranean coast of Lebanon who came to meet Jesus one day while he was trying to get a little down time by the sea-side in a friend's house.  She was distraught and desparate, fearing for the life of her daughter, who was under the influence of demonic forces...She knew something about Jesus, she was from a Phoenician, Greek-speaking background, not at all up on the details of the Jewish Messiah, but only knew that this must be the One who could help her...She could have gone to Eshmuns temple only 3 miles away, the pagan god of healing available to all her peers...a new outlet opening near you!...maybe she had...and it didn't work?...

Jesus sees in her what He calls a great faith, she knows it is He who is God with us, it is He who can help her, she has come all this way, all Jesus has to do is say the word, the Word, and it is done...She knows that we all live and move and breathe and eat and love and laugh and enjoy good times from the gracious hand of the One true God of Israel, and that He is right here on this beach...

Her daughter is healed, set free, from a distance, totally wireless...This Gospel story has a happy ending.  I think of all the women crying out for deliverance, for themselves and their daughters and granddaughters...Like the often clueless disciples who also yelled out to Jesus that she ought to be sent away, she's really bothering us, bringing in the downer vibes, the men in charge of many of these women's cultures, leaders, or the men who dominate and oppress them day after day, the idiot possessors of power in their land, just tell the women to shut up, stop crying, stop screaming, stop having dignity....They are the demonic powers today, women's daughters terrorized, beaten, repressed, exploited, sold, bought, genitally-mutilated, harassed, held back, held down under glass ceilings...

What do I, personally and experientially, and as a man, know about any of this? Not a damn thing.  But I listen, observe, live and work with women, have my own daughters, a wife who herself has taught me so much...I recently saw the eyes of a mother who, like this one with Jesus, was terrorized in fear for the safety of her children in a faraway land, and for her own safety, because she, as a woman, had dared to decide for herself what she will believe...No, I don't pretend to know the half of it, nowhere near!...But I see Jesus, who proposed a different attitude, who elevated the status of women in those days, who does so today in the living out of His Word in community, whose very words judge our world cultures, bringing men and women back into right loving, repectful, dynamic, beautiful relationship with each other and with the One who made us in the first place!

So my sisters, Eshmun isn't going to be able to help you, I am afraid, I am learning to understand your collective movements and alternative lifestyles and gender issues, and every so often you hit dead on to what Jesus has in mind, and I will gladly share your outrage and striving for dignity and respect and the end of violence, oppression, and exploitation...Yet I believe the One who met that Phoenician woman--I'll call her Rita--and helped her is ultimately the only Hope for us...

I celebrate and pray and stand with you today...

Alleluia...

Lift up your hands and say 'Alleluia!'...

On with the Love Revolution...

Now on with the Revolution from below, from within, from inside, revolution of love, the New Society, the Alternative from God, one human heart after another, pay it forward 'cause He paid it backwards and for all time, we will not try to redeem what is fundamentally corrupted from selfishness, power, and greed, we will simply show the world how It Is Supposed to Be through Christ and His message, not a sub-culture without contact with humanity, but rather a new society within society, with and among our neighbors, walls coming down with the sledgehammers and jackhammers of the Good News...OK now you got me started!  Break for lunch everybody, then we meet again...

Pekka...

Today I got the news about a friend, Pekka, that, last week, his life came to an end...We were not close friends really, and long periods would go by when I didn't see Pekka around, but we have talked and hung out a little in the church café over the last 4 years, and we had prayed together a number of times, which is saying something...I sat with him the very first time I attended an all-Swedish language service back when I couldn't say much...He was from Finland, he was a very good folk guitarist:  once he played accompaniment to our friend Maria who was belting out soul-blues in Roumanian: wow!...He and I sat quite a few times and discussed music, he was a regular at our unevenly-frequented Jazz Corner evenings.  As recently as a month ago we were talking about the untimely death of a shared favorite jazz artist Esbjörn Svensson...Pekka sat out in the New Life Café a lot during meetings, and so I would find him there and stop and say Hi...The last exchange we had was around Christmastime this year, when we were talking about a family trip we'd made to Helsinki in July, and he asked about my son Patrick and daughter Claire, how they were doing and all...I appreciated that interest he showed...In fact, I will remember, among other things, the fact that I usually felt better after talking to Pekka:  somehow our short conversations, his eager, interested questions, even the subject (music, travel, Finland, America, guitars) would lift me up.  Thanks, brother!

Because he was a brother.  In Christ.  He was also alone.  I know he was, for many who knew him a lot longer, someone who had deep needs and struggles after a hard go of it in this life...A few had closer, regular contact with him, giving over and over again of their time and company in earlier times.

You know those people who are not really close friends, and you don't know real well, but you see them over a long period of time, have sporadic conversations, and they, on some level at least, become a part of your life anyway, they add something good, they enrich your life, and you are sad to see them go, and you will miss them.

And I am sad because he was alone out there somewhere.

I will miss Pekka. It ended here too soon.  But, brother, I will see you again some day, where you are now at peace, you are home among countless friends, no one is lonely, you are with the Lord, and someone is enjoying a new song you are playing....

Peace to the memory of you, our brother Pekka.

(photos: Pekka playing at 59 Minuterfest, 2006, and Östersjön seen from the Viking Lines boat to Finland, 2008 )