I went for a walk the other day just after it rained. Everything was cool and green and fragrant and growing, and the birds were each singing their own spring song, and somehow it all blended together beautifully into a rare, perfect, magical moment. Most of the forsythia (and magnolia) blossoms were ruined by snow in early April, but I came upon a lovely golden drift on my walk. And, I saw a neat stone cottage trimmed with lavender paint (I would like to live in a house like that someday). And a hill of pines filled with whispering spirits.

In my prayer book this weekend, the readings were all about love. I was struck anew by the vast difference between God's love and our human notions of love. Perhaps love is not something we can do--not a verb, as we are so fond of thinking. Perhaps Love is Home, "a House with many rooms", "a glorious City", a place to dwell. "In him we live and move and have our being." (Acts 17:28). 

"Evil has not an existence of itself. Its business is destruction. And like physical malignancy, destroying good is its work and scope. Evil is everything that God is not. It is everything that God has not created; evil is distortion to the point of deception...without reality in itself, but rather the absence of that reality which is the good...It can never have any expression of itself except for some form of untruthfulness...

The first lie that the world tells us is that it is a lasting city . . .Once we subscribe, even in small measure, to this deception, all things assume a disproportion. If the world is our lasting city, ipso facto and instanter, our values are changed." ~ Mother Mary Francis (†2006)

Back at home, I watched the birds and brought the piglets outside to play in the sunshine.

Honey loves strawberries. She gets the juice all over her chin, and Blossom helps her tidy-up.

♥♥♥