Tabitha

“A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it. In other words, the boat I can feel so lonely in actually holds us all.”

Mary Karr in the Introduction to The Liars’ Club 10 year anniversary edition

“The opposite of murder is creation—creation, which is the telos of love. And because art, true art, is an act of creation, it always transforms its subject into itself, even if the subject is murder. An act of darkness is not the same thing as a work of art about an act of darkness.”

“And though attending to what we hate in common is too often all the rage (and it happens also to be very big business), noticing what we love in common, and studying that, might help us survive.”

Ross Gay, Inciting Joy page 10

I want to find my place

amongst the people of Advent

but I can’t quite decide who I am.

I want to be pregnant with God

but it takes such a toll on the body.

I have given birth to things before

And labor is hard and untimely //

I want to welcome angels and say yes,

to anything.

but if I saw an angel I would hold him

hostage and send a ransom note of questions

In the idolatrous worship of Mammon and Molech, there can be no room for beauty. The old gods of greed and consumption do not give us beauty to behold. They attempt to turn all that is beautiful into all that can be objectified and consumed. In the place of wonder, they give us lust. This is because they know what the ancient Christian saints and

“To make things that don’t exist yet—and don’t need to exist, because that is the very definition of art—and to send them out into the world is wildly, impractically, gorgeously hopeful.

“This is my way of saying there is no creativity without hope. Creativity is inherently hopeful, and the reverse is also true: Hope is inherently creative. Hope is