Without confession

After I John 2:18-27

The shadow rose from the spaces

between us, and left, its leaving

becoming a vacuum of light, allowing

us to see each other clearly,

leaving us with truth to understand

the gift. Denial and its murmur

have departed, an unexpected

unanticipated gift, a gift

that remains. It is food, this gift,

to sustain. It is drink, this gift,

to quench our thirst. It is fire, this gift,

to purify hearts,

sere souls,

heal minds.

Photograph by Pacific Austin via Unsplash. Used with permission.

"The Sussex Downs Murder" by John Bude

John Rother and his brother William own a farm and lime-producing operation in rural Sussex, not far from the Channel coast and Brighton. John leaves one weekend for a short trip, leaving his brother and sister-in-law in charge. John’s car is found, with a smashed dashboard and blood on the seat and John’s bloody cap nearby. But there’s no trave of John or his body.

Superintendent Meredith is called to investigate the disappearance and likely death. From the beginning, it’s a frustrating investigation, with little to go on except a few clues and the oddity of less fuel in the car’s gas tank than there should be. A local shepherd also reports a mysterious man in a cloak and cap being seen walking across the fields about the time of the disappearance. Meredith dutifully keeps plodding away. And then part of a human hip bone is found at a local building project, buried in a load of lime. The lime is traced to the Rother operation.

And then John’s brother William is found dead, an apparent suicide with a note in his pocket. But Meredith isn’t satisfied. Something is clearly wrong.

The Sussex Downs Murder was originally published in 1936 and has been republished as part of the British Library Crime Classics series. It was written by John Bude, the penname for Ernest Carpenter Elmore (1901-1957).

Elmore was a theater producer and director in Britain who wrote 30 crime novels under the John Bude penname. Most of the John Bude novels involved Superintendent Meredith as the detective. He also wrote fantasy and children’s stories.

The hallmark of this mystery novel is not a brilliant detective. Instead, it is the detective’s understanding what happened, finding clues, formulating a theory, discarding the theory when new clues are discovered, or events force a change, and keep relentlessly at it. To his credit, Meredith keeps an open mind (most of the time), and gains clues and insights from farmers, shepherds, shopkeepers, and even his own teenaged son.

The solution to the mystery becomes somewhat obvious about halfway through The Sussex Downs Murder, but that doesn’t detract from the pleasure of watching a puzzle assembled and the mystery solved.

Related:

John Bude’s “The Lake District Murder.”

John Bude’s “The Cornish Coast Murder.”

Photograph of Sussex hills by Rucksack Magazine via Unsplash. Used with permission.

"Journey on the Hard Side of Miracles" by Steven Stiles

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a new kind of evangelism arose in the United States. It took a number of forms, but it was collectively referred to as the “Jesus Movement,” with strong influences from the hippie movement. It was characterized by street evangelism, one-on-one interaction, and musical performances. On film, nothing captured the Jesus Movement better than the play (and movie adaptation) of Godspell; the play debuted off-Broadway in 1971 and the movie in 1973.

In the early 1970s, Steven Stiles was a young man active in his church in Santa Cruz, California. But he wasn’t a typical member of a rather traditional church. He had a heart for reaching his own generation, and he had a heart for reaching those caught in addiction to alcohol and drugs. And rather than waiting for people to find the church, he went out and found the people.

The story of that outreach is his book Journey on the Hard Side of Miracles. Reading it is like taking a journey back to my own youth and becoming a Christian.

Stiles emphasizes the traveling bus ministry he was part of led for several years. Young people from his church would board a bus and head to other parts of California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada and points east. They would do street outreach, perform with their band, hold Bible studies, and other activities. They opened their arms to all who would listen, including hippies, drug addicts, alcoholics, and other “undesirables.”

Their growing numbers at their church, rising faster than traditional members, inevitably led to conflict. A new pastor, backed by the elders, ended the ministry.

So, it moved to new quarters.

"Greenie," the first ministry bus

When Stiles talks about miracles, you have to wonder what he saw here. While not in the same class as healing lepers or the blind, things happened in his ministry that can’t simply be explained away as coincidences or lucky breaks. Like finding a building that had already been sold to another group, and the building becoming available; being led to walk in an open field miles from nowhere and discovering an industrial belt that would exactly replace a broken fan belt on a bus; being led away from one area to another, and discovering a national park staffed by Christians who were praying for a music outreach group to visit that very day.

It’s about miracles, and it’s about trusting God. But more than anything, Journey on the Hard Side of Miracles is about people’s lives being changed.

Dr. Steven Stiles

Stiles’s years in his outreach ministry became, in a sense, his professional career. He taught addiction studies for 10 years at Western Seminary in San Jose, California, and for 30 years at Bethany University in Scotts Valley, California. He served at the Clinical Director at New Life Community Services in Santa Cruz, California. He’s also the author of Thorns in the Heart: A Christian’s Guide to Dealing with Addiction, Recovery for Codependency, and Gotchyaa: Con Artists in the Church. He received his D.Min. degree from American Baptist University of the West.

Journey on the Hard Side of Miracles is a good reminder of what it means to trust God, even when that trust looks misplaced or downright crazy in human eyes. It’s also a story of people in ministry being used to reach people, including many considered “irredeemable,” and what happens in the lives of all concerned.

Top photograph by Cassie Boca via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Making the Time for Writing - and Honoring It

In On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts, Ann Kroeker and Charity Craig ask this question: To what extant have you arranged your space and time to honor your writing?

I joke with my wife that only three poets in the United States make a living from writing poetry, and two of them are Billy Collins.

Expanding from poetry to writing in general, how many novelists actually support themselves by strictly writing? Likely more than you find in poetry, but it’s equally likely that the number can be counted – it’s not huge. James Patterson. Stephen King. Some romance writers. 

The number is finite and knowable.

For the rest of us, we likely write whenever we can cram in a minute or 30 minutes or an hour. I write whenever I find a moment to write.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Christian Poets & Writers.

Poets and Poems: Athena Kildegaard and “Course”

Some 40 miles southwest of St. Louis is the Missouri Botanical Gardens’ Shaw Nature Reserve, more than 2,400 acres of forest, prairie, woodlands, and trails. It was first utilized in the 1930s, when air pollution became so bad in the city of St. Louis that the Botanical Gardens moved endangered plants out to “the arboretum,” which is what St. Louisans still call the reserve. 

On most days, it’s difficult to find a crowd at the reserve. One can walk the trails and perhaps pass one or two or perhaps as many as three people. Many times, I’ve walked the five-mile-round-trip river trail and not seen a single person or head a single man-made noise other than the sound of my feet on the gravel path. The trail ends at the Meramec River, and one can walk out on the gravel sand bars and simply watch the river flow. 

The reserve is a kind of natural sanctuary. It is that idea of natural sanctuary that permeates the 64 poems of Courseby Athena Kildegaard.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Top photograph: the gravel bar on the Meramec River at the Shaw Nature Reserve.

Dancing King Stories: The Tower of London

For almost a millennium, the Tower of London has stood watch over the city, a symbol of William the Conqueror who built it. Few buildings evoke such a mixture of emotions, The Tower has served as royal residence, prison, armory, mint, torture chamber, and even a menagerie of exotic animals presented to British monarchs. 

In 2014, to mark the 100^thanniversary of the start of World War I, the Tower was host to one of the most remarkable art installations ever – the planting of ceramic poppies in the moat, one for each casualty of the warm until almost 900,000 had been placed by that November.

From the time of William I to Charles II in 1660, the Tower served another purpose – the start of the coronation procession for each British monarch. Charles II was the last; his brother James II, something of a closet Catholic, was supposedly crowned privately in a Catholic ceremony and then proceeded from Whitehall Palace to Westminster Abbey for the “protestant coronation.”

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Photograph: The Tower of London seen from the Thames River, via Wikimedia.