It's an embarrassing story of competition, petty rivalries, institutional greed, product marketing and silly consumer indulgence. And our individual and personal lives have their share of embarrassments as well. It is about who we are and how we are as individuals, families, churches. Written in the form of an individual's confession and prayer, again it isn't hard to imagine how it came to be used in corporate worship to voice the penitent shame of the gathered community. But reading through the anguish and the guilt, it becomes equally clear that something else is deafeningly absent .
Naked branches clatter in the wind as brittle, skeletal reminders of a leafy life that used to be.
A heaviness clings like an old woolen coat that provides more weight than warmth. As if gravity has accelerated its pull, our eyes can't lift themselves from their riveted gaze on our feet mechanically pushing one in front of the other. Heavy, hollow, cold and cut off. It is the world of the absent joy. I've always been amazed at how present that absence tends to be in the church.