Marie's feast

Marie died on Tuesday and there will be a quiet gathering in her honor at a local arboretum next Thursday. (Her passion was English gardens. Soon after moving into the house across the street, she tore up the lawn and went crazy with color. It raised a few eyebrows, and then one by one people started imitating her.) I got a wee-hours idea to throw a neighborhood-wide dessert spread a la Babette's Feast following the memorial.

Feasts take days to prepare, and that's fun for me, but should I be doing paying work instead on those days? God doesn't do postcards. In the end, one has to decide. This is by his ingeniousness. Postcards don't demand relationship; struggling to remember the instructions he left does. In one column I can list reasons for skipping the whole thing. But I am 57 and I have skipped the whole thing all my life. The other column has only one entry in it: "Walk in love" (Ephesians 5:2).

The lawyer (Luke 10) wanted definitions from Jesus: "Who is my neighbor?" As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in The Cost of Discipleship, "The answer is: 'You are the neighbour. Go along and try to be obedient by loving others.' . . . We have literally no time to sit down and ask ourselves whether so-and-so is our neighbour or not. We must get into action and obey---we must behave like a neighbour to him. But perhaps this shocks you. Perhaps you still think you ought to think out beforehand and know what you ought to do. To that there is only one answer. You can only know and think about it by actually doing it."

To grasp that is to live life as an adventure.

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