6/28/2003 09:54:00 PM

i woke up this morning singing. while not unusual--i like to sing--it was what i was singing that threw me off.

i did not know what the song was at first. i was humming a melody and then singing "blah, blah, blah" for an hour before the lyrics came to me with such force that i was shaken and left wondering what was happening.

this is a confession on my part. something that i am embarrassed by at some level. "worship" as we have come to characterize it in this moment of the America i inhabit has often rung empty to me. this is the case partly because of my aversion to the clichéd cadence of the worship leader (who needs to be lead in this endeavor in the first place? "the first rule of leading worship is: you do not talk about leading worship") and partly because of the poor practice of theology and the arts that is characteristic of much that i have witnessed.

and so it is, in the context of this embarrassing self-exposure, that i share with you the simplicity that became weeping encounter for me this morning:

You are the Lord
The famous one, famous one
Great is Your name in all the earth
The heavens declare
You're glorious, glorious
Great is Your fame beyond the earth

For all You've done and yet to do
With every breath I'm praising You
Desire of the nations and every heart
You alone are God
You alone are God

The morning star is shining through
And every eye is watching You
Revealed by nature and miracles
You are beautiful
You are beautiful

in all that we get wrong--for the fuck ups that we are--there is something ambiguously reassuring about the beauty of the divine that we craft with our words and ways in a world that is as harsh as it is glorious; that is as violently grand as it is imperceptably gracious.

these paths we walk together speak to something that can never be brought straightway into language, but is known in the joy and pain of all that rips us apart--the anger of betrayal and fascination of luck; love's blinding seduction; the silent endorphin high of birth and tearing resignation to the enfolding into death. in these, and everything between, the inevitability of what it is to be thrashes out and demands a response... slaps us across the face and says, "LIVE goddammit! LIVE!"

this contingent place is prepared for you.
in all the pain of being alone
and silence of togetherness
i am ripped from the stories you live
and forever plastered into the noosphere of existence;
into the memetic evolution of the isms that your
ancestor worship, theisms and atheisms speak forth.

so speak on!
(and more, live on.)

amazing love;
that rain falls on the just and the unjust.

that we are without request or recourse.

amazing love.
you're glorious, glorious

you are beautiful.
...the famous one, famous one
great is your name in all the earth...