Embracing Fragility: Finding Strength in Community and Faith

"All those days you felt like dust, like dirt, as if all you had to do was turn your face toward the wind and be scattered to the four corners or swept away by the smallest breath as insubstantial. But did you not know what the Holy One can do with dust?" [00:01:19]

"This is the moment we ask for the blessing that lives within the ancient ashes that makes its home inside the soil of this sacred earth. So let us be marked not for sorrow and let us be marked not for shame. Let us be marked not for false humility or overthinking." [00:01:50]

"When we are in these kinds of feelings of sameness, we develop an awareness that we are living inside of forces that we can't control, that whatever was beautiful and terrible becomes so much clearer to us, and that we have the sense that something bad might happen and has already happened." [00:11:56]

"We marvel at good medicine, if we can get it, the invention of cheese dip, the wonderful evil in our children or grandchildren's eyes. I found my kid going up and down the stairs in a full suit of armor yesterday. I don't know how he got the armor. I'm thinking it was my parents." [00:13:58]

"This is the new way of being in the world, this sense of rising and falling or of looping around the same discovery, that these are beautiful days and these are terrible days, but we know that now." [00:15:02]

"But the truth is, we all have lives we can't afford. I do this every year, just as an exercise. 2024, the average American had an unpaid credit card bill of about $7,000. About $8,000 in savings for groceries or a hospital bill, and a median average, median of about $87,000 in retirement savings, which is to say, of course, not enough to retire." [00:24:17]

"If something goes wrong, a medication becomes suddenly incredibly expensive because of an evil tech oligarch, for example, or an aging parent needs care or a relationship or strained or parts of us breaks. It starts to dawn on us that everything would have to magically work all of the time for us to keep this up." [00:25:21]

"It is a miracle when we let ourselves in desperation be lowered into the unknown. When we let ourselves cry and scream and whisper that we are scared by the truth of our lives. When we feel like we have almost nothing in our control except this awareness." [00:38:53]

"And it is a miracle when we see the precarity of others and we decide to carry the weight of their stretchers instead of the fact that actually we had like pretty good plans today. Fun plans." [00:39:47]

"And when you do, you realize through God's eyes all of the things that we would rather forget that our independence is a sham and that we will always be good medicine to each other." [00:40:48]

"to ourselves we are healed we are whole we came through the roof but we walked out the door hallelujah and look if i'm very lucky the shingles will last and every chemotherapy and immunotherapy drug i ever took will keep working and i will never get stuck in a loop again and i'll become one of those people who complain that their dishwasher broke while i was on vacation and it's all very inconvenient" [00:42:23]

"and i won't tally up the price and force everyone on the airplane to listen to it i will become the person who barely remembers that there was ever a time to be afraid at all but i really hope that i will be more like the homeowner an hour after jesus and the crowd have left my floor littered with broken tiles and crumpled plaster and i will look up and find myself staring at enormous hole in the ceiling right to the blue blue sky or at least another five planets lining up no longer surprised or horrified by the fundamental christian truth that the roof always always caves in" [00:44:25]