bierkergaard

"Being a writer is a bit like being in a war sometimes. Careers are strange, with unexpected gains and losses. People are on your side until they're not. The blank page can feel like a battlefield. It's good to have an ally to talk it through with, and Ned Vizzini was the best kind of ally to have in that particular war. You wanted him in your literary trench."  Writer Cecil Castellucci  in a tribute in the Los Angeles Review of Books of Ned Vizzini Ned Vizzini has committed suicide. He had written poignantly about his Depression. I think we do a disservice in some ways to call Depression a mental illness. For Depression is a reasonable response to an unreasonable world. Watch out who we call mad. We all are madder than we think. Perhaps the mentally disturbed only are affected more profoundly by a broken world. The banality of evil. The normalcy of the abnormal. We have to legitimize Depression in order to face it squarely. Usually, people have good reason

John 10:22 Now it was the Feast of Dedication in Jerusalem, and it was winter. I came across this verse as part of my morning devotional. I have made it a practice to go back to the Bible and read the verse mentioned in my morning readings and try to get the context of the verse as one would a star in the sky or a jewel in a crown. I don't know why I found the mention of it being winter to be so poignant. Seeing Jesus in my mind's eye in the winter weather and seeking shelter in Solomon's Porch/Temple has both prosaic and profound layers. We had four snows in the last week so I had been primed for wintery reflections. On the practical level, Jesus in His humanity, is cold. Jerusalem, due to its elevation, experiences colder temperatures than most of Israel. It is truly a "City on a Hill." And it snows. With the profound layer, the Temple was the epicenter of Jewish culture and the ground zero of Jerusalem. About a century and a half before, the Maccabee