I came across two things today that I felt were worth holding in tension:

Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car – Iron & Wine

Love was a promise made of smoke
In a frozen copse of trees
A bone cold and older than our bodies
Slowly floating in the sea
Every morning there were planes
The shiny blades of pagan angels in our father’s sky
Every evening I would watch her hold the pillow
Tight against her hollows, her unholy child
I was still a beggar shaking out my stolen coat
Among the angry cemetery leaves
When they caught the king beneath the borrowed car
Righteous, drunk, and fumbling for the royal keys

Love was our father’s flag and sewn like a shank
In a cake on our leather boots
A beautiful feather floating down
To where the birds had shit our empty chapel pews
Every morning we found one more machine
To mock our ever waning patience at the well
Every evening she’d descend the mountain stealing socks
And singing something good where all their horses fell
Like a snake within the wilted garden wall
I’d hint to her every possibility
While with his gun the pagan angel rose to say
“My love is one made to break every bended knee”

On tragedy being interwoven with hope in the resurrection of Jesus:

The truth incarnate, present in the human world, is instantly, inevitably, entangled with the luxuriant tendrils of human fantasy and self-deceit. Throughout the ministry of Jesus, we are reminded of the longing of the disciples and ‘multitude’ alike for a saviour congruent with their projections and aspirations. There is no breaking-free from this web, because entanglement in it is inseparable from human being — the conditions of imperfect knowledge and imperfect communication, combined with the urge to structure and subdue the world and tame its contingency. And thus truth in this world is a stranger, essentially and profoundly vulnerable (so the Fourth Gospel reiterates again and again): its connection with or participation in the world involves rejection, crucifixion outside the city gates. Yet it has entered the world, it has allowed itself to be linked with the sphere of destructive untruth; and even if rejected, it cannot be annihilated. If Calvary shows the links between truth and untruth pulling the former down towards extinction, Easter shows us those same links, the same interconnectedness of the human world, reversed, so that truth draws untruth up towards the light. Our connection with truth, with Jesus, has led to the cross; his connection with us remains, indestructibly, to assure us that our betrayal is not the ultimate fact in the world. We may betray, but the world characterized by betrayal is now interwoven with a reality incapable of betrayal. God’s faithfulness has worn a human face, through Calvary and beyond. The incarnate truth, ‘risen from the dead’, establishes that faithfulness as the ground of inexhaustible hope in the world, even in the midst of our self-deceits.”