On Thursday, July 23rd, join us at Beloved from 6:30-8:30 pm for a spoken word fundraiser to support some of Birmingham’s best youth poets!
This is a unique event featuring Birmingham’s own women’s spoken word collective, Sister City Connection, performing in concert with youth poets from Birmingham’s Real Life Poets.
Continue reading Sister City Connection: Spoken Word Fundraiser July 23rd
When Bob Dylan recorded “My Back Pages” for the album ANOTHER SIDE OF BOB DYLAN he was transitioning from folk artist to folk artist critic with his own career and his own songs directly in the cross-hairs of that critique.
The next album, BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME, revealed a much more nuanced and mature understanding of human nature and the role of protest. These albums and others that followed went from being protest songs of injustices in world events to protest songs about conformity to false images and ideals of self, beginning with the his own role of being the “spokesperson of his generation.”
Continue reading Lenten Reflection from Palmer Maxwell: “I was so much older then”
The title of this reflection comes from The Four Quartets by the American poet T.S. Eliot. Midway through the season of Lent—intended I think to be a period of reflection and prayer on the deeper meaning of our faith and the Easter event—I find instead that my mental state resembles more accurately the description Eliot had of modern life.
And each distraction carries its own passport and identification number marked “Priority 1” and stamped in large letters: A.S.A.P.!!!!
Continue reading Lenten Reflection from Palmer Maxwell: Distracted from Distraction by Distraction
“Remember and do not forget how you provoked the Lord your God in the wilderness. You have been rebelling against the Lord from the day you left the land of Egypt until you reached this place.” Deuteronomy 9:7
Honor your rebellion-
Know that it has no fixed domain-
Will not harm you-
Will lead you, rather, beyond the common vision-
To your true inheritance and appropriate reign.
Continue reading Lenten Reflection from Palmer Maxwell: Honor your rebellion
“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— Did you not know what the Holy One can do with dust?
Continue reading Beloved Lenten Reflection: Blessing the Dust
“And a cloud came, covering them in shadow; and there came a voice from the cloud, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved. Listen to him.’ Then suddenly, when they looked round, they saw no one with them any more but only Jesus.” Mark 9:2-10
I like to think of the forty day season of Lent as a season of “cloud and shadow.” Not in the negative sense of a dreary winter’s day. But rather in the positive sense of being covered and cloaked in the cloud and shadow of God’s word.
Continue reading Lenten reflection by Palmer Maxwell: cloud and shadow
If love is a blue-berry pie
to be given to all your neighbors
and friends and family:
what in the heck do you do
when all of the pie is gone-
except go around to all the
places you can think of, to
ask for another Blue-berry-Love pie.
Well, at the New Year, that’s what I did
Only I decided to
Look for love in all the most unexpected of places,
and to ask for it with boldness
And courage and pure honesty and truth.
I was not too thrilled when I only received
A few slivers of pie that added up to less
Than even a modest piece, quite frankly:
And I kind of belly-ached (no pun intended).
Now, months later once Lent came around I knew I’d have to
Give up something significant, so I decided, well,
To give up belly-aching
Only that created
A kind silence, a void to be filled;
So I began Celebrating:
Every little morsel of those
Pie slivers, as if each bite
were a pie in and of Itself.
That’s when the love began filling me up inside
Like the best home-made blueberry pie you’ve
Ever tasted, a little piece of heaven.
This is what Lent can do:
It can give us the opportunity to celebrate
Every sliver and morsel of life:
Giving up a little somethin’, in order to receive somethin’ more,
The Light of God, the splicing of a Ray,
that shines in us, through us, around us
The Sweetest of Gifts: An Electric Celebration.
-Shared by Greg Wood
