The Switch.

You can now find me at http://annemariedimond.wordpress.com/

Wordpress isn't anything too new, I just like it better. Sorry blogspot, sorry google.

Wordpress is just so gosh darn user friendly.

On the Writer's Pen

Its a dangerous thing for a writer to pick up a pen. And dangerous to put it down, i suppose. In the first case, there is danger in what might be said. Though, dangerous things are said all the time. Its no different to write them down. It is perhaps better to write them down than to keep dangerous things inside. And that is the thought that leads me to the second case, the case of the writer who retreats her pen back into her pocket. Whether her motive be lethargy or fear, the result is similar: dangerous things stay inside. And along with them, the safety that comes from un-penning dangers with a pen.

The Living Room is Not a Place to Live

This is the next poem in the "series" (only a series because its the only terrible poetry I write), after "Quiet Light."

The porch is a nice place to sit,
if you're comfortable.
It seems like we should be,
my twin
and I,
those with the same faces often are.
But the confusion keeps us from depth
of understanding.
So, come in.
The living room is an area for furthering knowledge.
Not all together comfortable,
it's more of a parlor.
Stiffer,
but a start.
We speak in pleasantries.

Summer Update.

This is a really long post. Be forewarned.

Hello my dearest friends and family,

Well, this is an update on my summer. Sorry I haven't gotten one out yet, and sorry in advance that I may not get another one out before I leave here. This is a full summer, but also a restful one, a life-changing one, a living-learning one, and a heart and mind-expanding one. I wish you could all be here and meet my friends. By friends, I mean the people in the community I live in (college students here to learn about urban ministry and serving in all different kinds of internships), the people I work alongside (8 other interns and 5 staff members on Dry Bones staff), and the people I have met on the streets (hundreds of street kids...ranging from little kids to 50-year-olds). I love these people and I have fallen in love with Denver because of them. I don't know whether or not I will ultimately end up here, but it certainly has a piece of my heart.

I am not going to plunge into facts about my days. Suffice it to say, I have class on mondays (soul care, social work class, and movie discussion) and fridays (history of denver and urban centers conglomerate/urban theology) and I work all day on Tuesdays-Saturdays with Dry Bones. I build relationships with the street kids(ages 14-25ish) and help host/teach/act as a bridge for the suburban youth groups that come in weekly on what we like to call “vision trips” (some of them think they are coming on missions trips to bring Jesus to the city...they quickly discover that He is already there...and will be there when they leave...and is bigger than they ever imagined). It's really sweet. I LOVE giving what we call “turf tours,” which are tours of the not-so-oft-seen-parts of the city, a tour that talks about what the city values, gives more of the perspective of the street kids, and teaches about many of the struggles faced by those on the street, physically and mentally. I wish I could take you all on one, tomorrow. So that's that. When the youth group leaves we challenge them to get to know their city in this way. On the tour we first pray the simple prayer that the Lord will “open our eyes to see the city as He sees it.” We send them out hoping they will pray the same in their places of occupancy.

Great. Now on to my mental/heart life:

We are taking a class called “City of Joy” on Fridays with an old friend of the family, a brilliant Denver Seminary Professor, and a wonderfully kind man, named Jeff Johnson. One of the most poignant lessons thus far (though most of us confess we love every class and could listen to the man talk for hours and hours) was one he taught in a park by his house. He opened up to Judges 19 with a heavy content warning and, according to my journal from later that day, this is what was taught- “Jeff Johnson taught a beautiful and poignant class yesterday on Judges 19. The passage is about the brutal death of an unnamed woman, a sex slave, at the hands of a Levite (who claimed to love her, and was on a journey to “speak tenderly to her” to convince her to return home with him), resulting in subsequent wars for hundreds of years. This began with a call to action in the form of 12 mutilated pieces of this woman's body going out throughout the land after she had been gang raped by men in the tribe of Benjamin on their way through their land.

Apparently this gross misconduct seemed, to him, to warrant an equally gross action. When the people saw it they said “such a thing has never happened or been seen since the day the people of Israel came up out of the land of Egypt; consider it, take counsel, and speak.” They did not do the first two. The people simply “spoke.” They declared war on Benjamin, the initial perpetrators of a crime against the woman, and killed all their men. There was not a pause to reflect on the pain and atrocity, just quick action. Suffering met with more suffering. When the Levite was cutting up the woman, it says that he (in Hebrew) chose the body, took it, broke it, and sent it. This language seems to directly parallel Christ's bodily death, as well as communion language. Also, this unnamed woman is from Bethlehem. Typology? Is Christ telling us that he is the suffering, nameless, sex slave, brutally murdered and betrayed by those who claimed to love him?

Jeff says yes. I think I say yes too. This is theology from below. This passage teaches us to pause and reflect, like the Israelites did not, on the atrocities in the world, in fact to identify with them, feel them, not perpetuate them by quick action or demean them by speedily moving past them. Sit in the pain. As Dry Bones philosophy goes, grace, like water, flows down. Grace pools up in the low places, in the bleeding and broken places. We sit there and are overwhelmed by grace flowing down....

Read Psalm 10
Read Matthew 25:45

Jesus gives us permission to put him into the story of Judges 19, into the cry of the Psalmist and into the lives of people in the low places in our daily life.”

Jeff taught us this lesson in a park, a park he later shared was the site of a murder of a 21-year-old woman, unknown by most. We sat uncomfortably in the heaviness of that event for a bit. We silently prayed for the unnamed and the faceless in our own communities, we spoke the names of those in the low places, the people the Jesus taught us to care for. Those people seemed all of a sudden so very sacred, the kind of people that Christ would identify Himself with.

I meet Jesus every day on the streets. The heroin addicts, the prostitutes, the HURTING. There are lots of stories like this in the Bible, but sometimes we don't read it like this. We read it for rules, for laws to govern our lives. We are learning this summer to read the Bible with a divine imagination, and from below. A theology of the suffering, a theology that, for me at least, takes a LOT of imagination since physical struggles are pretty far from the physically blessed life I have had.

These things are, however, transferrable to everyday life. Everyday we are so near to the privately hurting and broken, somedays we are the hurting and the broken. This summer is a summer about learning to sit in those hurting places for a little longer than may feel comfortable so that I can be an agent of grace or experience that grace myself, the grace that pools up in the low places.

May the Lord bless and keep you, make his face shine upon you, lift up his countenance upon you, be gracious to you, and give you peace.

Love you all a ton and a half,
Annie Marie Dimond

P.S. You should really check out this website. My picture is on it...if that helps:
drybonesdenver.org

Dry Bones Denver

Check it out folks. Watch the video on the home page--this made many a team member cry, and we haven't even met most of these people yet.

http://drybonesdenver.org/updates/home

Still lovin' this place.

It's Colorado Time.

This Denver place is cool.
These people are cool.
These ministries are cool.
The backpacking trip I just took into the mountains was cool.

Dang, folks.

Seriously. I have been here less than a week and I am blown away by the devotion of the people I have met to love the each other, the least of these, and the city of Denver in general. No imperialism. Just relationships. Not "here I have this for you, this is what you need." Just "hey, lets be friends. I'll meet the needs you ask me to meet, and you'll meet the needs I ask you to meet. That's what friends do."

I love it. Here is the mission statement of Dry Bones Denver, the place I will be interning 40-50 hours weekly: "In the context of relationships, serving and loving in the way of Jesus, we meet the spiritual and physical needs of homeless youth and young adults. We seek to equip, inspire, and deploy believers to relieve suffering, facilitate reconciliation, and free the heart to love."

Everything happens in the context of relationship, just how it should be.

Happy Mother's Day, Mommy

My Memory

I have a terrible memory. This morning my friend told me that I actually wrote that poem in college. Though I have no recollection of it, and though i found it in my high school file box, it seems that I wrote it in my interpersonal communication class.

I could've sworn I wrote it in high school. Man. My memory is that of a 95 year old woman.

Quiet Light

[I wrote this in high school. I don't do poetry. There is no rhythm. I like it.]

noiseless,
hum of the porch light.
unfortunate, for her.
not for the doppleganger,
though.
a perfect decibel.
silence exudes from her halt;
not screeching to or grinding to,
for that matter.
the self similar knocks at the door.
it is loud, louder,
when it's quiet,
but not when it's louder, loudest.
she rewishes the noise,
from the twin,
who has not such powers.
the luck.
the light was on, welcoming.
switch was broken,
would have been off,
maybe.
the luck.
come in, I guess.
never a good time for them to break.
switches, that is.
nor to meet herself,
on the porch.

Straight Outta the Echo

For those unaware, the Echo is our student newspaper. I wrote this article the week before National Student Leadership Conference, which was, for lack of a more creative word: AWESOME, and also called "RE: imagine, RE: create, RE: new". But, more on that later. Here is the article:

This is the section of the paper that, in general, deals with art as we most often conceive of it—movies, music, books, television. I would like us to move behind much of what we consider good art to the place from whence it came. The creative mind.

To be fair, we should probably back up one more step and ask where our creative minds came from, but that's beyond the scope of this little piece. We will just answer the question—we were created by a more perfectly creative mind, in whose image we are also made. And because of this fact, I come to what I really want to say: it is not just the “artists,” as classically understood, who have a creative role to play in this world. We all do.

After all, what does the best art do? Bring joy, heighten awareness, make us ask difficult questions, help us contextualize, impress us with the power and capacity of the human mind, enrich our lives in a variety of ways, juxtaposition things to reveal a new perspective, et cetera. I do not want to diminish actual works of art and their role in our lives, only to say that if you find yourself in a similar place as me—with an inability to paint, draw, compose music, or write a good story—this does not diminish your responsibility to creatively act in the world.

We don't talk like this often, so it might be a bit of a challenge to discover what this actually means, and then looks like. Fortunately for us, the Creator who made us, made us in a variety of ways, with a variety of passions, gifts and backgrounds and an infinitesimal number of ways for our creativity to manifest. We should start trying some of those out. I can't really imagine what life would be like if we taught and encouraged thinking, dreaming, relating, speaking, and formulating creatively. I like to call it “life art.” Maybe that's not a very creative name. No doubt this kind of creativity already occurs, but no doubt there is a lot of room to grow into this part our true selves.

Some might say that life wouldn't change too drastically if we didn't have art. Or, that we don't need art, so we sure don't need this “life art.” I beg to differ. Surely, life would still be full of circumstances in which we encounter deep pain, confusion, darkness, and sorrow. But, I think that creative approaches to dealing with the difficult reality of what we have faced, are facing and will face in this world are life giving.

Life art (as well as art classically understood) can bring context for our pain, clarity in or confusion, light in our darkness, and redemption to our sorrow. It gets to us in ways that other things can't. It surprises us. It changes us. It is so very unnatural that it jars us out of our normal ways of being, thinking and doing, and renews us, and we need that. If we all did it, it might be a bit like creating a life-giving culture that we could draw people into, kind of like the Kingdom of God. That seems important to me.