Category: Hope

Christmas, Holly Week, Hope, humanity, Jesus, Pilgrimage, Poetry, spirituality, Theology, Theology and Life, Writing

Call and Response: Excerpt from Poems, Prayers and Unfinished Promises

Gary Furr

In December, Mossy Creek Press released my new book, Poems, Prayers and Unfinished Promises.  I have been so gratified by the readers’ enthusiastic responses.  From time to time, I want to share a few excerpts with readers.  Since we are in the Lenten Season, I share this prayer, found on page 48:

A Prayer for the Beginning of Lent

Based on Psalm 42:8-11COVER PIC jpg

As a Baptist kid in the South, I had never heard of Lent, but I understood “call and response” instinctively. Someone sings and you sing back to them. In southern gospel, it was often something the basses and altos did, little descants under the melody, like a man and woman when they really speak and hear each other’s hearts. That’s the Lenten journey to me—get quiet, listen and when you finally pick up the song, sing back. You really have to train your ear to hear it.

“By day the LORD commands his steadfast love and at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life. I say to God, my rock, “Why have you forgotten me? Why must I walk about mournfully because the enemy oppresses me?” As with a deadly wound in my body, my adversaries taunt me, while they say to me continually, “Where is your God?” Why are you cast down, O my soul and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.”  Psalm 42:8-11 NRSV

 

Continue reading “Call and Response: Excerpt from Poems, Prayers and Unfinished Promises”

Culture, Death, Hope, humanity, Memory, Suffering, Theology and Life, Tragedy

Where Were You When President Kennedy Was Shot?

Gary Furr

 It rolled at you across the land at 1800 miles per hour, hauling darkness like plague behind it….we saw the wall of shadow coming, and screamed before it hit.   

Annie Dillard, in her book, Teaching a Stone to Talk, said that she and her husband once drove across the mountains of central Washington state to a place that would put them in the path of a total eclipse of the sun.  Early in that morning in 1979 they pulled off the highway and waited.  She said: 

The deepest and most terrifying [memory] was this: I have said that I heard screams….people on all the hillsides, including, I think, myself, screamed when the black body of the moon detached from the sky and rolled over the sun.  But something else was happening at that same instant, and it was this, I believe, which made us scream.  The second before the sun went out we saw a wall of dark shadow come speeding at us.  We no sooner saw it than it was upon us, like thunder.  It roared up the valley.  It slammed our hill and knocked us out.  It was the monstrous swift shadow cone of the moon….it was 195 miles wide.  No end was in sight—you only saw the edge.  It rolled at you across the land at 1800 miles per hour, hauling darkness like plague behind it….we saw the wall of shadow coming, and screamed before it hit. Continue reading “Where Were You When President Kennedy Was Shot?”

2001, 9-11, Death, Faith, Family, Forgiveness, Hope, humanity, Memory, September 11, Suffering, Terrorism3 Comments

Remembering 9-11and 9-15

Gary Furr
1963 cover 1963 by Barnett Wright

So now here it comes again.  For many, a very painful day, still and always.  For all of us who were old enough to witness it live, a memory permanently engraved, an ugly tattoo over scar tissue.  Yet with time, inevitably, the intensity is not the same.  This is an odd week for those of us in Birmingham.  Sunday, we will have a painful memory remembered from fifty years ago.  The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was bombed just before services began.  Barnett Wright has written a wonderful remembrance in words and pictures of that fateful year, 1963, that changed America forever, and Birmingham with it.  Those painful memories still rankle or stir devotion and sadness, depending on the person you talk to about it. Continue reading “Remembering 9-11and 9-15”

Faith, Forgiveness, Hope, Love, Prayer, Reinhold Niebuhr, Theology2 Comments

Saved by Faith, Hope and Love

Gary Furr

For many years, I have pursued various ways of feeding mind, heart and soul early in the day, mostly to keep myself out of the very large ditches that erode the shoulders where I tend to drive.  This summer, free at last of a ton of outside pulls, I am undertaking a small daily discipline of a prayerful reflection on a quote, thought or scripture.  They’ll be short, and to be good to myself, I’ll do it every day unless I don’t, in which case, you’re on your own 🙂

It can be found at facebook, but thought I’d let my friends here know, and I’ll be back to the blog now, also.  My writing soul is starving from “doing.”    The daily quotes can be found on facebook.  Click HERE

Today’s reflection to kick it off is from Reinhold Niebuhr, about faith hope and love.  Thanks.

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Saved by Faith, Hope and Love

“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. 
Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. 

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love. 

No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.” 
― Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History

I first heard this wonderful quotation from my friend Fisher Humphreys, Continue reading “Saved by Faith, Hope and Love”

Bluegrass, Children, Christianity, Conflict, Culture, Forgiveness, Gospel music, Holly Week, Hope, humanity, Justice, Leadership, Love, Modern Life, Politics, Poverty, Race, Theology and Life7 Comments

Standing Up for Children in Birmingham, Alabama

Gary Furr

Several years ago, Dr. Penny Marler approached me about participating in a program where pastors might become

Rev. Arthur Price
Rev. Arthur Price

friends across differences—race, age, denomination—and learn from each other.  Rev. Arthur Price and I decided to make that journey together.  He is the pastor of historic Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, where, 50 years ago this fall, people driven by hate and fear set off a bomb that killed four little girls who had just prayed together.  The episode set off a national revulsion to the radical racists and helped put America in a new direction.

kthompson_PKDHAZ6R
Rev. Keith Thompson

Over the course of that few years, we became friends, Arthur much younger, a different personality, a native of the North, me a son of the South.  It was one of the richest experiences of my life, and it is documented on the website of the Resource Center for Pastoral Excellence.   (For more information about the project Rev. Price and I did together, click HERE)

One of the side blessings of that friendship was connecting our churches.  We visited each others’ deacons meetings, had our congregations together for fellowship, and continued our friendship by having breakfast together regularly over the years.  Last year, we began to talk together about doing something positive that would mark this anniversary by affirming that we are in a new day and that the faith community is part of that.  We were joined by another friend, Rev. Keith Thompson of First United Methodist Church downtown.

After the massacre at Newtown in December, our sense of commitment was heightened.  Whatever strikes at our Continue reading “Standing Up for Children in Birmingham, Alabama”