Alan’s father, the extraordinary Rev Ivor Lewis, played a key role in my earlier life. I also knew Alan and his brother Howard, at that time – during the time in Belfast, N. Ireland, known as The Troubles.

Ivor Lewis was without qualification the most remarkable man I have ever met. I first encountered him after returning to Belfast from London at age seventeen when I was going through some teen angst. I’ve been around many teachers over the years from different traditions, but Ivor Lewis was a vehicle for something so radiant and God centered that to be in his presence was a distillation of anything you might conceive of in relation to Christ. If that sounds like overstatement, it still doesn’t cover it. The man was absolutely remarkable. Consistently so. Never changed in all the years I knew him.

Enjoyed reading the post on Alan’s work.

Regards.

Many blessings on your continued work.

(And by the way, St. Egregious sends his own hearty: Amen, brother Halden!)

And now
After the end
Now at the beginning,
We shall speak yet again
Of Love.

(note* we or “will”?)

Anyway much obliged and I look forward to another great post next year.

I hear ya, about trying to live into a certain understanding of the Gospel proclamation (although, given my current loss of faith in language, I would suggest that maybe there is no disembodied proclamation of the Gospel… so, really, maybe what we’re learning — for the first time, over and over, as we go down this road — is what the Gospel actually is).

And I hear ya about not doing it right but still trying. For several years now, I’ve been living by that Beckett quote Zizek made famous: “Ever tried. Ever failed. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Ain’t that the way, eh?

And no, I can’t. Certainly not as some sort of level of love or radicalism that I have obtained. Not in the slightest. What I’m trying to describe here is the sort of pressure, the sort of call that I hear and want to learn to affirm and live into that the Gospel seems to proclaim.

How do I live that out? Well I’m trying to love the people around me and find ways to move into serving those who are suffering as best I can. Probably not doing it right, but I’m gonna keep trying.

Even still, that language still sounds too… flowery… vague… for me. Can you tell me what that actually looks like in your life?

I think I want to be a Christian again. Maybe there was more to it than I saw. And I never lost my conservatism, even when I obsessively explored the great unknown. Why does everyone want to lose their identities?

p.s. great verbed apocalypse.

The sins shouldn’t have to be wrenched from us and wrung out of us — they should just fall away in every moment of grace, shed like the dying cells of our flesh in the daily renewing of our bodies.