Jason Terry

I’m a wonderful friend and exceptionally supportive to boot

starting to wonder if this year is real or just a really bad movie plot

Was honored to hear a wonderful talk by Brian this weekend! I feel like I have a lot of theological unpacking to do. :)

Perhaps we begin by praying at meals. Before bed. In the mornings. When an ambulance goes by. Perhaps we make an effort to thank God for a beautiful flower, or a kind word, or the presence of a friend, or stranger. And perhaps that prayer will grant us more strength of faith, or a clearer sense of God's call on our lives. Perhaps it helps us see God more clearly, and more often, recognising consciously what has always been there. Perhaps we find, in this newfound sense of God's presence, the strength to do and be what we could not before. Prayer is not always about asking, but about being in the presence of God, and about allowing yourself to be changed by that encounter. "More and more by each glistening minute", as Jorie Graham would put it. Prayer is openness, and vulnerability, and longing. For me, prayer is reaching towards the vastness that is God, and, more and more often, being able to recognise God reaching back. As God always has, since long long before I believed.

In the famous painting of God creating Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, God is leaning forward, almost falling off his cloud, every muscle straining as he reaches, reaches, reaches. Well past the middle of the panel, hand outstretched. And Adam sits on the rocks, reclining, hand raised upwards, lazily curling a finger. AIl he has to do, is straighten his hand, stretch out his arm, lean forward an inch, one inch, and he can seize God by the hand, by the wrist. If he reached out to the same extent as God, they could press their foreheads together, face to face. Prayer is extending that finger. Stretching out that arm. Working to cross that gulf which we have created, with our petty preoccupations. With our desire to be, like the Pharisee, SEEN to be pure. But, as we know, "nothing may separate us from the love of God". All we have to do is reach out, just the tiniest amount, and there God is. Waiting. Patiently. For us.

Had the rare joy of preaching this Sunday, looking at Prayer. Here's a little bit of what I said...

"I DON'T NEED YOU TO FUCKING REWRITE WHAT I'VE JUST WRITTEN!"

California is just too far away. If I was meant to be in California, they wouldn’t have put it ALL the way over there.

Prayer Jorie Graham Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re- infolding, entering and exiting their own unison in unison) making of themselves a visual current, one that cannot freight or sway by minutest fractions the water's downdrafts and upswirls, the dockside cycles of finally-arriving boat-wakes, there where they hit deeper resistance, water that seems to burst into itself (it has those layers), a real current though mostly invisible sending into the visible (minnows) arrowing motion that forces change— this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself, also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go. I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never. It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.

"[...] This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. [...]”

- Jorie Graham

A slide dated February 18th, 1963 showing a headline reading SHOCK SEX REPORT FROM QUAKERS, referring to the then-new publication Towards a Quaker View of Sex.

This was a UK paper headline the day my father was born here in these United States. No wonder this is the faith I gravitated towards…

I hated childhood
I hate adulthood
And I love being alive

—Mary Ruefle, from “Provenance”

once you get that boyfriend organ the trade organ just ain't as good

It’s rare for me to see this place in daylight.

Wifeception.

I haven't!

Went to evensong at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco because @jayhulmepoet.bsky.social climbed it and wrote about it, and he was not wrong about the soothing beauty of the space.

How much whey could a Waymo mow if a Waymo could mow whey?

At a fundraiser in San Francisco:

PERSON: You look so nice!
ME: Oh thanks so much!
MY INTERNAL MONOLOGUE: It’s called being from the east coast, Mr. This is My Dress Hoodie.

Compression shorts are diabolical.

“When straight men aren’t giving grey sweatpants bulge anymore” An outraged toddler with a WTF pose.

Every Wednesday, I live in fear of the memes our intern comes up with for VIBE CHECK. She’s hilarious and diabolical. Anyway:

Congrats, The Atlantic and The New York Times, this is the country you've created.

If you need a gosh darn piece of foam on a box to be “smart,” then you deserve to have to bricked every now and then.

A hotdog and pretzel stand with large hanging bottles of mustard, ketchup, and mayonnaise. The bottoms contain squeeze tubes to dispense the condiments.

I have been traveling and today I present to you...the thing I saw in the Frankfurt airport.

Is it efficient? Undeniably. Does it probably work better than the normal way? Oh certainly. Produce less of a mess? Probably?

But the existence of Condiment Udders gives me a deep, aghast disquiet.

Photograph of ongoing demolition of the East Wing of the White House.

Monday's photo from the Washington Post

NEW: After The Washington Post reported Monday on the demolition of the "East Wing facade," a new picture obtained by Law Dork that was taken on Tuesday shows that a substantial portion of the entirety of the East Wing has been demolished.

Here's the thing I don't understand. You can't as much as sneeze near a historic site in Washington without like 14 commissions, councils, and advisory boards giving you the okay. And everybody now is like...yup, fine with us? wtf?

stick to polishing your silver

The cover of every elementary math text book in the 1990s:

That’s the other thing that baffles me about AI and creative writing, actually.

The work IS the joy for me. I don’t want to be able to snap my fingers and have a completed “product.” I want to be transformed by the process. I’m an author but I do this because I enjoy the rigor of being a writer.

The Pope tweets: "The poor are not there by chance or by blind and cruel fate. Nor, for most of them, is poverty a choice. Yet, there are those who still presume to make this claim, thus revealing their own blindness and cruelty. #DilexiTe" Someone replies: "I was so hopeful I could be a Catholic again after the disaster that Francis was, guess we just get Francis 2.0 now and I am heartbroken. How do I stay a Catholic now...I don't want to lose faith but I am. You belong to someone else, not God."

heartbroken to learn the pope sympathizes with the poor. how can i continue to believe in god

So much of contemporary technology is about creating a shiny object in an attempt to replace pragmatic but affectively more challenging practices like Talking to Others and Externalizing Internal Desires.

Aww yay! Thanks so much for reading!

So far S3 isn’t warming me up to him any