I love summer. As I’ve been marveling on my little patio the almost-overpowering jasmine, the strikingly bright bougainvillea, the gently fragrant gardenias, the all-of-a-sudden reddening tomatoes—oh how exuberant, how explosive, what fullness, what beauty. On my little patio! Suddenly summer is here. I love the long evenings when things cool down for relaxed dinners and longer conversation. I love the colors, the sounds, the cool breeze in the morning. The beauty of summer is restoring. It is joy.

I’ve been wondering lately whether it might ever be possible again for our nation to rejoice. Yes, you heard that right, rejoice. I know some folks will recoil with revulsion. This smacks of a patriotism that denies our enormous faults and shortcomings. We need deep, ongoing contrition, not self-praising. To rejoice as a nation also evokes the nasty sides of nationalism, something the Western world has agonizingly tried to shed since the horrifying carnage of WWII. That dangerous kind of nationalism is seared into the memory of our civilization. We don’t want to go there again.

As we plug into the news every morning, we are often overwhelmed with how much sorrow there is in our world. Sorrow is the word Paul Tillich uses as the opposite of joy. I’ve been thinking a lot about joy, but as we look around, it’s fair to ask where is the joy? And then there is this: Are we actually choosing sorrow instead of joy? Or are we just not watching for the joy that lies all around us? Perhaps what we need is to change our angle of vision in order to see the joy that gestures for us to enter in.

In my last post I talked about how Michael Gerson characterizes the state of our public discourse today: “nasty, shallow, personal, vile, vindictive, graceless, classless, bullying, ugly, crass and simplistic. . . .” It all spells “the triumph of the boors.” This is not the talk of a great nation, Gerson contends, but rather “a sign that greatness of purpose and character is slipping way.”

I woke up yesterday at 2 AM and found myself churning over the current climate of discourse in our country. I sunk into a place of sadness, sorrow, and shame. It is not just that our leaders are failing us in this regard. No, we are all complicit at letting this vileness seep into our culture and even into our own homes. We should all be ashamed.

It’s time to talk about frogs. It’s time to think about, in Christian Wiman’s words, why a “moment of joy,” seeing a bunch of frogs, “can blast you right out of the life to which it makes you all the more lovingly and tenaciously attached. . . .” It’s time to think “how in the midst of great grief some fugitive and inexplicable joy might, like one tiny flower in a land of ash, bloom.” Sometimes it might be that tiny flower. Sometimes it might be those frogs. That’s the way joy works. Such a surprise in a “land of ash.”

“Where do we go from here,” we ask ourselves on this Monday morning after Easter. It’s as if we took off smudged glasses and wiped them crystal clean, for a moment. “I have seen the Lord,” says Mary Magdalene, before she dashed off to tell the world. Yes, we see! Yes, indeed, we have seen the Lord. He is risen. I have been handed new glasses. I see everything differently!

I’ve been thinking a lot about church. What is church? What is the main purpose of church? Why do we continue to go to church in this age of skepticism and unbelief? And then there is this troubling question: Is the church dying, as statistics seem to indicate, truly fading, declining in influence, becoming a kind of curiosity to our society? We find ourselves scratching our heads about where church is headed. Sometimes we are deeply troubled.

Hooray, my new book is finally out! My fabulous publisher Wipf & Stock (Cascade Books) sent me the first copies of the book last week. Yes, this project has now come to fruition. I am delighted to let my blog readers know.

I woke up on Christmas Eve morning this year with child-like eagerness. After all the waiting through Advent, now it was time to enter, once again, into the mystery of the manger in Bethlehem. There we find the baby cradled in his mother’s arms. There too the animals chewing on the straw. And there those startling, celestial choirs breaking out all across the fields. Something big is going on here. Oh such mystery. I was eager to return, once again, to the manger on this Christmas Eve morning.

I’ve been thinking about that manger Christians revere at Christmas time. It is a remarkable scene, full of tenderness of a newborn baby, full of the harshness of a winter night, the smell of straw, blankets to cover the child and mother, the odd assortment of animals. And I ponder how this lowly, marginalized family, caught in difficult circumstances, has come to represent a new beginning for the world. And from a manger no less. It’s a mystery, isn’t it? We always lift up in awe the miracle of a baby born, but this baby, and this manger, have come to signal new birth for all of us, new beginnings, new hope. The whole scene spread out across the world with the dazzling speed of light. And from a lowly manger.

It’s cool to be funny these days. We love to watch the late-night-comedian commentators shredding their enemies with laughter. Twitter is full of poking fun at people, always, of course, from a safe distance. We love the chuckles we get from exposing inconsistencies, misstatements, flubs, especially for important people in the news, but sometimes even for those close to home. We get a perverse pleasure seeing others brought down to size, belittled, humiliated. There’s a certain power here. We think we render ourselves more righteous, smarter, more capable than the ones we ridicule. We love laughter, but we’ve got to admit, sometimes, funny is not very funny.

I’ve been trying to zero in on the heart of the Reformation. Good luck, I hear you saying. This is what so many capable writers are doing, books and articles all over the place, especially over the last couple of years leading up to the 500th Anniversary. How can you imagine getting your head around this sprawling, unruly, complicated, pivotal moment in history. Even the great Reformers disagreed on what it was all about.

In the ancient teachings of contemplative prayer, it is common practice to enter into a time of prayer by repeating a word, phrase, or line. As we calm down our breathing into a deeper natural rhythm, we say something like “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.” This oft-used line is called the Jesus prayer or the Pilgrim Prayer. This short prayer has a lot of history, a lot of meaning, packed into these few words. I have used this line often.

I began again this morning a new cycle through the Psalms. This has been my practice now for five or six years. I read one or two Psalms a day. When I come to the end of the whole book, I start over. This is an ancient practice, of course, likely what Jesus did, surely the pattern for the Apostle Paul. It is such a life-giving, nourishing practice that nudges us toward human flourishing. Each morning we wake up, get ourselves reoriented. We are fed. We drink deeply. We are nourished.

Most of the time we think we are in control of our lives, perhaps especially when we are younger. When people or circumstances seem to threaten our control, we are ready to fight back. We’re strong, we tell ourselves. We do things so people will not see our weaknesses or know that we are afraid. We’ve got it under control—that’s the look we want convey. That’s the way we want to see ourselves.

The New York Times last Sunday asked two contemporary American poets to reflect on the long days of summer. The poems were accompanied with photographs inspired by the poems. What a lovely idea, I thought.

I come to my prayer corner early every morning. I sink down into my prayer chair. I always come with some measure of restlessness, some yearning of soul. If I did not come with a needy soul, I suspect I would not return very often. I desperately needthis prayer. To pray one must take measure of the curse of self-sufficiency. We feel our brokenness. Yes, humility is required before something can happen in the prayer corner.

I woke up one morning a week or so ago with Twitter going crazy over some very nasty news out of Evergreen College in Washington State. The by-then-gone-viral video featured my friend George Bridges, President of Evergreen, under vicious attack by a swarm of angry students. You could hear things like “f *** you, George. Why don’t you just shut up, George. You talk too much”—this to their college president. It made my heart ache. It almost doesn’t matter, in my opinion, what the issue is—this sort of disrespect and disruption has never been the way the university carries out its purpose.

I feel compelled to return to the hot topic of the “Benedict option.” I wrote about this earlier just as Rod Dreher’s new book, The Benedict Option: A Strategy For Christians In A Post-Christian Nation, burst onto the scene. This is the book, you may recall, that David Brooks called “already the most discussed and most important religious book of the decade.” A whole host of respected writers have since weighed in, perhaps the best, amazingly, from The New Yorker, a fair, thoughtful article by Joshua Rothman. With all this attention, needless to say, you get the feeling something big is going on here. Dreher has his finger on a lively pulse.