Fighting the Windmills

From New Seeds of Contemplation - Thomas Merton

2009-03-07T07:05:00.000-08:00

"The wax that has melted in God's will can easily receive the stamp of its identity, the truth of what it was meant to be. But the wax that is hard and dry and brittle and without love will not take the seal: for the hard seal, descending upon it, grinds it to powder.
"Therefore if you spend your life trying to escape from the heat of the fire that is meant to soften and prepare you to become your true self, and if you try to keep your substance from melting in the fire - as if your true identity were to be hard wax - the seal will fall upon you at last and crush you. You will not be able to take your own true name and countenance, and you will be destroyed by the event that was meant to be your fulfillment."

Petunias

2009-02-28T07:22:00.000-08:00

There was a crumpled fan of gray, dispelling a residue of ink-smelling dust, near indistinguishable on his veiny fingers. A dappled wisp of gray hair, the same gray as the fan-and-crumple of the paper protruded into a vertical pose fanning out from one smashed diameter of pillow hair, swaying back and forth from the occasional shift of his skinny head. His eyes behind thick glass were half way closed, mostly from the simple act of looking down to read but partly from looking down into the burdens of the world. Wrinkles folded on top of each other at the bottom of his face, skin under his cheek bones were beginning to sink in: a sign of his deteriorating health of which was always a cause of argument between him and his housekeeper, Ophelia, who had "recently taken an exceedingly neurotic interest in his appearance and presence," as he would so vehemently explain. Each feature of his face had a protuberance that made his eyes sink in and sadden.

This was the posture of the every-morning at a table for two next to a dirty window opening into a garden of blooming petunias amidst sprouting weeds of what used to be a flower bed. The petunias stretched out their pink and blue petals, bathing in the seventy five degree morning sunlight. Swiping a small spider off his newly pressed white Polo shirt, now wrinkled at the belt, he took a bite of his plain buttered toast. The fragrance of freshly brewed coffee still lingered in the kitchen, flowing out of the window into the morning - into an exuberant filled reality totally other-than the stuffy kitchen.

For ten years he had been alone and been waking to the same buttered toast and for ten years had given his first thoughts of the morning to the world and its events; to the subtleties of the global political climate; to the adherence and confident assertion of his conservative democratic views, bloomed from an evolving career as a radioactive physicist, turned into upper management, turned into speaker and much sought after counselor in the academic world of study for liberal human rights by religious moderates. None of this was a planned destiny of his choosing of course, and the relative ease of "open doors" put him at rest in the morning as he always rested in the security of his planned day, given him by Ophelia, just as secure in her salary, although relatively meager.

Carrion Comfort

2009-01-04T20:21:00.000-08:00

A poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins:

Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist - slack they may be - these last strands of man
In me or, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb
against me?
With darksome devouring eyes my bruised bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to
avoid thee and flee?

Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and
clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy,
would laugh, cheer.
Cheer whom though? The hero whose heaven-
handling flung me, foot trod
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one?
That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my
God!) my God.

Prone to Aching

2008-10-25T07:18:00.000-07:00

"I've ached once in my life," she said, dusting off the remains of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich onto the cool concrete of the sidewalk, now looking grey in the blue air of November.

"Oh don't be ridiculous! You're always prone to aching!" She was on the opposite end of the bench for the sole reason that she hated peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

"No, truly... it's been once. Every time I think of it, it comes again but I attribute it to nostalgia. I don't count that as another time," she said finishing off the last bite of P,B &J and wiping a sliver of brown peanut butter off of her upper lip, now cracking as her glove swiped across the open skin.

"Miriam, all you do all day is sit in that museum and ache, if you ask me. What do you do in there anyway?" Her New York accent was thick. The thought crossed her mind to lend Miriam her chap-stick, but disgust prevented her as she thought of getting it back with slight smears of peanut butter and bread crumbs decorating the edges of the soothing peppermint wax. "That's what I'm always like," she thought, "flat out selfish... paralyzed!... can't even reach into my purse and grab my...."

"I watch." Miriam now turned her head to look into her eyes across the bench, yet sunglasses prevented this. Miriam's eyes slightly opened with their piercing crystal blue gaze, as if trying to pierce through the darkness of the sunglasses. Her stringy hair looked as if it was depressed from not being able to keep her head warm as it fell strait against her skull, ears, then barely... lightly touched her shoulders. She knew she was not ugly and had been fairly pretty all her 26 years of life, but she was now dying, and on this grey-blue November day her eyes seemed to stick out of the stillness of the newly leafless trees, abandoned sidewalks, and thin, frosty air. They seemed to be the only thing alive, being alien to this world - two spheres of unknown origin, freshly arrived from the heavens. Just one glance at them reveals that they have seen many mysterious things and are wise with what astronomers only dream of, yet are infants in the environment of earth. Even to her body they seemed alien, and now their slight bulge and fixation upon her friend across the bench gave the entire park a silent life, alien to its background.

After a long pause, Miriam's friend snatched up her black leather purse beside her on the bench, quickly stood as though leaving and irritably tightening her purple flowery scarf that wrapped over her head, turned to Miriam with a sudden grinding of her shoes on the cold concrete and said, "What do you see?!"

Miriam looked down to her fading tennis shoes and rubbing them together spoke softly, "I saw a painting today of a woman with sunglasses and a head covering. It was one of those women from the 20's and she had a suitcase with papers flying out of it as she was trying to hold onto the leash of her little dog. She had on high heals. She was beautiful, like you, but I know you never wear high heals. But her sunglasses and scarf reminded me of you. It was wrapped around her beautiful hair. And she was trying to hold so much, it was all falling apart." Miriam's lips curled into a smile. "And her little dog barking at... well at who knows?" Looking half way up into her friends white, powdered face, staring into the leaf-covered grass she said with a slight giggle, "I love the cute little dogs that make you drop everything."

"So that's what you see all day, cute little dogs?! And what? I bet now you're goin to say how I'm that lady and how Joshua was that 'cute little dog,'" she threw her hands in the air with two fingers bending twice, "and how he made me drop everything just like that lady. I know who you are Miriam. Don't try to let me think that you see everything from one cheap-ass painting you saw in a museum because I wear a scarf like her! Tons of women wear scarves! What's your deal with scarves, anyways?!"

Miriam was looking down at her tennis shoes again, now bending them on the side, studying the fading purple stripe, "Maggy, if I'm a blade of grass, no a flower of the field, then so was Josh. But the woman... the leash was so tight, she wanted him so near and it's what made her lose everything when he was called somewhere else. But... but even when everything was in a mess, she held her scarf onto her head, so tight, so beautiful. But isn't the glory of a woman her hair, even if it is messed up?"

Rage began filling Maggy yet by the time it reached her eyes, it came out as tears, "It's Magdalena! You call me Magdalena! Only Joshy called me Maggy! You call me Magdalena! And if you ever giggle again over the death of my Joshua, I'll... I'll...!" She became overwhelmed with weeping as she began to run away down the empty concrete sidewalk. Down a short hill, falling into a valley the path curved into a long, natural tunnel of trees, their leaf-less branches reached over the path like human arms grasping the end of the adjacent fingers. As tears and wind flew through her ears she approached the tunnel full speed, flying down the hill. She did not notice the trees' erie gaze as the tunnel engulfed her.

Grey November was even darker here, and she lost her balance from the weight that seemed to press down upon her shoulders and fling her to the ground. Her scraped, bloodied hands now shaking felt for her scarf that had fallen off her head and was sagging behind her neck. The weight and the shaking prevented her from being able to find enough of the scarf to tighten it back upon her head, and she began to crawl towards the end of the trees to the busy street of New York, yellow taxis and woman just like her, walking their dogs. Miriam's eyes kept beaming in her mind and all she could see was her staring through silence, giggling, laughing at the end of the bench.

Finally she reached the street and crawling on all fours with mask-era running down her cheeks, she fell on the sidewalk, face into the concrete as her sunglasses bounced off. With her scarf now completely stripped away, fallen on the side of the path, her hair was long, flowing down to her waist. Her eyes, glistening with tears were as blue as Miriams'. Her make-up now running off her face revealed Miriam's cheek bones and even chapped lips.

There was now no rage. Peace filled her as she lay face down upon the sidewalk, her hair sprawled out upon her back and upon the sidewalk. She even smiled now as she thought of Miriam's peanut butter and jelly. She almost wanted one.

She did not mind the strange looks of passer-byes. She let her blood and tears run upon the grey concrete. No one stopped. Embarrassment and shame filled every heart that passed her. She felt it but did not mind now. Dogs on leashes sniffed her... the owners yanked and kept going.

As she lay there filled with peace that she did not understand and joy in the presence of men, she felt a hand softly stroke her long hair and until she died she never forgot the voice she heard that day - a sooting voice amidst the embarrassment and shame of all,

"Maggy." She knew it was the voice of her Joshua.

An Eschatology of Lovesickness

2008-08-08T08:20:00.000-07:00

"But because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your heart.... Are you deliberating together about this, that I said, 'A little while, and you will not see Me, and again a little while, and you will see Me'? Truly, truly, I say to you, that you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice; you will grieve, but your grief will be turned into joy. Whenever a woman is in labor she has pain, because her hour has come; but when she gives birth to the child, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy that a child has been born into the world. Therefore you too have grief now; but I will see you again, and your heart will rejoice, and no one will take your joy away from you."

John 16:6, 19-22

"For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now...."

Romans 8: 22

"The attendants of the bridegroom cannot mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them, can they? But the days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast."

Matthew 9:15

"If you find my beloved,

As to what you will tell him;

For I am lovesick."

Song of Solomon 5:8

No religion, no philosophy, no set of ideas, institutions (religious and non-religious), no way of thought can compare to the aching heart of one who misses the presence of the Son of God on earth. Have we grieved for His absence?

Have we been in labor? What are we birthing?

The bride roams the dark streets of the city, desperate with love, thirsting to just catch one glimpse of her beloved. To anyone and everyone she says, "If you find my beloved... If you catch one glimpse of Him that I do not see, tell Him that I am grieving, tell Him that I miss Him, that there is a hole in my chest gasping for Him.... Tell Him, it is death without Him."

And isn't the earth under this curse of "death without Him?" Has not all of the Creator's life giving creation been under the groans and sufferings of the pain of futility; the pain of death. Yet, if we miss Him, if we desire more than anything else to look into His physical eyes, there is a love that is "strong as death" (SS 8:6). How is it stronger than death? This love will bring Him back, and "the last enemy that will be abolished is death" (1 Cor. 15:26).

When the world rejoices, we will lament, for we know that nothing is right until He comes. May our joy be made full when the season comes, the dark night is over and we see Him again. May our joy be made full in this hope and no other hope. This is the blessed hope (Titus 2:13). Our "joy will be made full" if all our hope is for this day - the Day of the Lord when He comes back for a groaning and lovesick Bride.

Our humble King will return because of love. Do we miss His loving arms? Do we groan?

From "Letters to a Young Poet" by Rainer Maria Rilke

2008-07-22T09:13:00.000-07:00

"The necessary thing is after all but this: solitude, great inner solitude. Going-into-oneself and for hours meeting no one - this one must be able to attain. To be solitary, the way one was solitary as a child, when the grownups went around involved with things that seemed important and big because they themselves looked so busy and because one comprehended nothing of their doings.

"And when one day one perceives that their occupations are paltry, their professions petrified and no longer linked with living, why not then continue to look like a child upon it all as upon something unfamiliar, from out of the depth of one's own world, out of the expanse of one's own solitude, which is itself work and status and vocation? Why want to exchange a child's wise incomprehension for defensiveness and disdain, since incomprehension is after all being alone, while defensiveness and disdain are a sharing in that from which one wants by these means to keep apart."

The Table

2008-07-09T07:09:00.000-07:00

I have missed You again today. Amidst me trying to be Your hero. I have missed knowing that it is me and You. All I've known is an us, and feeling as if I bring nothing to the table - table of community leaning on our one-legged humanity, feeling strong and communal, and I think I could turn over this table. Everyone thinks they have to bring something to it. I'd watch as all the somethings fly in the air, tumble to the ground, and splatter blood - life and effort. Why do we put this into these things - very living and life?

I Never Wanted to Make Sense

2008-03-27T04:47:00.000-07:00

And there was nothing else to say.

To see the breath of what You take away,

And I gave a pinched hand to them

And a smile.

And laughed with the greatest of my least

Fulfilled singing eyes.

"I never wanted to make sense,"

And burn incense to these fleeing gods

Of minds doubling upon themselves.

Dawn has pulled over my clouds

-something was there-

Nothing seemed to make it to the "hows"

How I'd free the burning, shove it off the table of the high places,

And put it before You on the altar,

Before what You've said.

The Sounds of Nothing Are Better; and I fell.

2008-03-20T08:24:00.000-07:00

And my mind is rushed by the feelings of conundrums. "You're creating something new," they said. "No... I've fallen into something old."

And I tried to make it sound better, but I couldn't. And I kept falling. Into -nothing- of praises and His beautiful Judgment. Into blackness of

Light, to Him. And I grinned feeling the wind and weightlessness. And I smiled with gladness for the first time in a long time - of thinking, "No one knows me, remembers me, likes me." And I was weightless into His arms upon the Throne within nothing of me - into singing, whistling wind... and stillness of falling; slowly turning but not knowing which way I've turned.

And I said, "I will not publish this."

And I couldn't make it sound better.

A Poem by St. John of the Cross

2008-03-15T09:24:00.000-07:00

He who is sick with love

Whom God Himself has touched,

Finds his tastes so changed

That they fall away

Like a fevered man's

Who loathes any food he sees

And desires I-don't-know-what

Which is so gladly found.

For when once the will

Is touched by God Himself

It cannot be satisfied

Except by God;

But since His Beauty is open

To faith alone, the will

Tastes Him in I-don't-know-what

Which is so gladly found.

Tell me, then, would you pity

A man so in love,

For he takes no delight

In all of creation...

I will never lose myself

For that which the senses

Can take in here,

Nor for all the mind can hold,

No matter how lofty,

Nor for grace or beauty,

But only for I-don't-know-what

Which is so gladly found.

Lines

2008-03-14T18:47:00.000-07:00

His hands were grey; hairs seemed large and protruding and some were growing out from the normal pattern of hand-hair, wanting to attach themselves to some imaginary veranda on his skin, like vines. He pulled the dirty, black collar of his over coat tighter up over his neck when the draft swept through the cafe, and sipping a large gulp of his black coffee, he breathed in the deep, soft steam of the double roasted arabian aroma - tingling where his nose canal opened into his brain, filling the underside of his forehead with rushing blood and warmth as his eyes closed. Glancing at the empty page, the piercingly straight lines bullied and mocked him. They were still, cool, and silent as he swept his wrinkled fingers through his stringy hair - dark black at the roots, becoming dingy as it frizzed into ripped cotton balls, floating wildly in every direction, framing his face in a sun-burst of grey.

"Do you see these lines?!"

He had a deep voice with an edge of grinding, like a Stone Age wheel traveling an ancient dirt path, slowly, heavy; taking time to crush every rock in its path, and yet an overtone of innocence sung over the deep, calculating growl like the high pitch of the axle squeaking within the wheel.

"Too perfect, too perfect!"

His bewildered blue eyes flashed around the cafe as if to demand an agreement. But only forks and knives clanking against white ceramic plates, cutting through syrup, omelets, and the monotone murmur of mixed conversations. Two or three guests sitting near him at their tables of ones and twos impulsively glanced up to the back of his bulging, hunched figure at the bar; his black coat streaming down heavily just short of the floor, half of his wrinkled, whiskered face appearing behind his collar; the guests now saw only one melancholy blue eye surveying the restaurant with ferocity. Flushes of red swelled up over their faces as they couldn't help feeling embarrassed. In their minds they pinned him with imaginary judgments; one by one sticking them into the flesh of his back with tack and paper, flying to him by paper-airplane, unfolding automatically as they approached his back, soaring straight and perfect over heads and tables quickly, effortlessly - a majestic scene of paper archery. And then a sudden turn to their breakfast as if nothing had happened; they forgot of him altogether and tried to remember where in their conversation they had been interrupted.

Turning back to his coffee and lines in front of him, he mumbled softly, "Perfect...hmmmf! Hughmmf..." He leaned his face close to the paper, eyes half squinting, scanning the empty page back and forth with vehement intensity as if reading an article about an outbreak of war near one's neighborhood.

"Phinehas..." A gentle voice broke the swelling of his anxious inner dialogue, and a hand landed on his shoulder, gliding back and forth over dirt particles on his coat, causing a subtle massage of peace into the stiff, black fabric. The voice spoke again as if awakening him out of a dream, "Hi Phinehas! How are you?"

His eyes tried to focus as they followed the thin, slightly muscular male arm, to a rolled up white sleeve of a buttoned, collared shirt, to a thin, light body, to a sunken olive face and large grey eyes magnified through thick bottle glasses with black plastic frames of a man standing behind the dark wood counter of the bar. The eyes melted Phinehas with so much happiness, comfort, familiarity, and peace that his throat rolled into a bulging lump. But with a slow swallow, he shoved it back down from whence it came, and keeping with his bewilderment he squirmed his face into even harsher wrinkles of disgust and blurted out,

"In heaven's name, can you even believe the perfection?! Well, of course you can't! You're too young and disgustingly perfect yourself. All of us are that way when we're young, don't worry, it's nothing, nothing at all - natural you know.... And perfect! All were perfect until.... I say! Have you ever seen anything like it?! Well you can't until... you can't until you've seen, I'm telling you! And I'm telling you truth upon truth! If they would just splatter and spill... but of course they will not be written upon. And they mock me! Do you see?" With this he waved the paper in front of the man wildly.

Releasing a breath and sigh, the innocence of his voice shimmering through as the wheel slowly came to a halt, he asked, "Well how are you anyway...I'm horrible and ugly." The ringing tone of voice suddenly changed the atmosphere of the cafe.

"Not as fine as you're doing this morning." The man's eyes shone bright through his glasses, the skin under his temples wrinkling as he smiled and slowly scrunched his eyes into a grey brightness that seemed to make them even larger than before, totally overwhelming Phinehas with a contagious joy springing up and splattering on the back side of his chest and rib cage; then it quickly disappeared, running off his flesh and organs, leaving no residue.

"Cohen, please leave me...I'm writing, do you understand?" He spoke now in a monotone. His shoulders relaxed; he shifted his weight on the bar stool.

Cohen quickly took his hand off of Phinehas's shoulder, slowly stripped a white towel from his waist belt and began drying and polishing a bar glass. After a few moments of peaceful, releasing silence that echoed back and forth between the two of them, Cohen looked up from his work and with almost the exact same smiling expression as he had looked at Phinehas just a few moments before said,

"It is good to see you Phinehas!"

His face kept beaming, and this time the brightness never stopped bursting forth from his huge eyes. The wrinkles, the smile, the eyes were held in a suspension that seemed to stop time and the murmur of the cafe and the clanking sounds of silverware - a suspended hold of tension almost falling into resolve so beautiful that to just stay in the tension would be peace and beauty and life, and to resolve would be the going about the stuff of everyday after death. Phinehas, without even looking up from his paper, felt the impact of the magnified eyes like two beams of lead smashing his shoulders into the back of his chair, holding them back as to force him to raise his head and look directly into the eyes for the first time.

Phinehas waged war within himself. His entire insides were caught a blaze with fire, licking, burning for him to raise his head from his page of empty lines. His pumping red heart was loosing strength as it pumped coldness like sonar, pushing back the beating heat - one after the other: pump... pump... (and burning rage of softness)... pump... pump.... Even while he was fighting, even while he thought he was winning, pushing his head down further and further as it hung low, he felt a tingling warmth of the fires raging within him manifest itself in a tiny ring under his blue eyes. He closed them tight (underneath his eyelids the blue shined like aqua emeralds, casting marbled designs of the freckles in his eyes onto the dark backside of his eyelids like an over-head projector - making constellations - making a universe of tiny silent majesty), and from the far edge of his eyelid, there appeared a clear substance, streaking slowly across his eye, rolling over each eyelash as speed bumps. It made its way to the inside crevice of Phinehas's eye; up against his nose it curled into a glimmering tear and suddenly changing its slow pace, glided down his cheek bone with darting swiftness, slowed through his thick whiskers, and stretching itself from the end of his chin into a dramatic pose as a sleek, slender olympic diver, it fell into weightlessness - suspension - joy... and splattered sacrificially on the empty page of lines... perfect lines.

In the Midst

2008-02-18T19:12:00.000-08:00

There is no place for poetry here.

Everyone has crowed around with. Beer,

Talking and laughing, creating filled lightning praise

Of answers and yelling. Telling jokes

Bullied into a broadcasted song.

Where I forgot what I...

"cheers beloved, cheers."

Through smeared glass I heard,

"quiet beloved...quiet."

And I wiped away everything between us, and

"come beloved, come."

O grace,

That you would look upon my making sense

And leave it for swine.

My pearls are You staring into my eyes, close to my face;

when I feel You breathe.

O intoxicating solitude,

Through a blare of crowding glasses (the stuff of intoxication)

Be near.

Here I can understand Your quietness.

Our Home

2007-03-30T17:46:00.000-07:00

Been thinking recently about Home...that is Eternity. I have to preface this with the fact that I'm just starting to really learn about what is coming ahead, but I have to say, It's amazing! When it's really a reality within us, I mean really! Think of the nicest place you've ever been to - by the beach, beautiful sun, beautiful ocean. In the Millenium, creation is going to be restored! You don't have to settle for the nice resorts, nice house, nice comfort now (although it is good and I'm not saying to despise it). What awaits you is way way way more incredible than these things. These things only help the imagination. But that's the mystery - it's like looking into the heavens at night and it's glorious, but we can't really fathom what is out there - I mean way out there, but it does provoke our imagination. Maybe this is what our desires do. We can look at the most beautiful, luxurious things of this earth and say we don't need them because our home is FAR more glorious! This is huge! And we will be there with ressurected bodies! This is not just some neat little side note to those following Jesus, IT IS OUR HOPE! When it is alive in us then it makes it much easier to say no to fleeting pleasures of this life. We were meant for pleasure, and eternity will be our endless pleasure. It puts meat to the idea that Abraham, Moses, etc. were "strangers" in this world and knew that their home was somewhere else. This is REALITY, it is not ethereal. The earth you walk on, the oxygen you breath will one day be reconciled to God fully and the supernatural realm of heaven and the natural realm of earth will meet - they will be what God inteded for them. This is His purpose. He will see it through WITHOUT violating our free will. And this is why His will in our lives is so huge! This is why we must seek out what His heart wants to accomplish, because it really does matter how we respond to Him because He chooses (always has, from history past, i.e. the Bible) to work His purposes through human beings who VOLUNTARILY love Him. Yes, He is sovreign, yet He wants to work through us! It's incredible! Do you know why He wants that? (this is what I think, and I'm on a journey to know it with all confidence) He wants it for OUR glory. He wants to serve us, to come under us so that we would know the infinite goodness of Himself. He wants us to partake in His kingdom and share it with Him. What glorious thing has He prepared for those who love Him, who love the Son! There is a tension right now in whether or not we fully commit to see those things come to pass - I'm beginning to really believe this I think. And He wants nothing more than reconciliation - for eternity - for all wickedness to end, and for His glory to fill the EARTH. I think it is always what He wanted.

Thoughts?

Questions for a Kingdom Coming

2007-03-29T11:56:00.000-07:00

Who's peace will you testify to?
Who's heart will you crave?
Who will brave through this tunnel of light?
Who will call Him righteous?

Who's peace will you lay down?
What broken sword have you found?
Turn it, turn it around and plow for His Word.

For hope comes as we've made it to come -
Only growing in what we've prepared.

Who will decide for the glory of a mustard seed?

Begotten

2007-03-25T20:47:00.000-07:00

Through forests you moved,
Through heaven's breaking clouds...

breathing every step,
stretching through earth,
deepening every foot step.

Heart that broke your precious treasure,
possesion prized for glory
filled with dreams through every silver lining,
every touch.

Glory and honor and wisdom and power
belong to our
glory and honor and wisdom and...
speech couldn't breech our blindness?

why aren't there signs for this?
prophet, prophet, speak!
Listen to what we never see,
Touch our tasting to...
...Him be glory. and. honor. and...listen...

oh frightening idol revealed,
the terror is your illusion.

A Song of "Sleeping at Last"

2007-03-17T19:27:00.000-07:00

Heaven Breaks

It always starts like this,
A harmless and simple thing to fix.
Contagious and spreading quick…
Like cracks in ice,
Wholly claiming our lives
While we sleep.

We’ll pray for Heaven’s floor to break,
Pour the brightest white on blackest space,
Come bleeding gloriously through
The clouds and the blue.
Forcing one place from two,
Killing formulaic views,
Only love proves to be the truth.

When heaven meets the earth,
We will have no use for numbers
To measure who are and what we’re worth.

When Heaven meets the earth,
We will have no need for mirrors
To tell us who to be
And where we fit into this awkward point of view.

When angels meet the earth, may our bodies be light.
When angels meet the earth, may our heavy hearts untie.
When angels meet the earth, may our bodies be light.
May our bodies be light for you.

Thoughts From Possum

2007-01-13T12:15:00.000-08:00

"Never judge a man till you walk a mile in his shoes. Then when you do, you're a mile away from him and you've got his shoes."

His

2007-01-06T20:01:00.000-08:00

Been realizing lately that in my dreams I truly want to love the world, but love is actually somewhat dreadful in reality. It is dreadful when looked upon by your flesh - without resolving, "not my will, but Yours" and after...joy is set before us. But make no mistake about the cost; the journey and road of it all - a death. But this is His glory, these are the purifying fires of love.

Anyway, I'm realizing that too...that we do have a flesh. We do what we do not want to do, and Jacob was called Isreal after he wrestled with the Lord, and that it's the wrestling we don't like.

I'm also realizing that I want to look artistic to you. Even now as I'm writing this blog I want to seem deep, mysterious, creative. He told me the other day that I will never be what I am not, and He told me to rejoice and be glad, for He is my Maker!

So I write to you tonight as His little one. Please, nothing else.

Thief

2007-01-02T09:30:00.000-08:00

It's quiet here

and I'm not creative here,
and I make nothing here,

and my hands have been cut off
because I have stolen.

Listening is all He breathes on me,
and as I am breaking
I cannot here what you think about me.

Disclaimer

2006-12-01T13:37:00.000-08:00

So if you're bored at this poetry, I gotta say, sorry. It's ok, though...you can be. I just don't really know what else to write you. The other day, I tried to sit down in front of my fireplace and tell you incredible insights into what I was learning; incredible revelations I was having, but then I forgot them.

And I tried to tell you about how, this one day, we all went out on a stroll and some of us started arguing over what to call a certain tree, and then over what to do with a certain boulder, and then over what to call the aroma of the dirt we were smelling...and then we all died. It was one day, really, only one! I saw a picture of you in the sand along the path we were walking on. It looked like one of those old timey pictures of our great great grandparents with their staight faces (it was superficial to smile in pictures you know) and their pitch forks and stuff. But you looked so sad, even more sad than our great great grandparents, and it was a picture of only your head, and I thought, "I should paint this." And so I did! It's wonderful, hanging over my fireplace now. I know, we've talked about when you come to life sometimes and sit with me next to the fireplace and we talk all night about the stars, the universe and the speed of light. But you don't want to hear about that, you want to hear about why you cry.

I'm telling, I've been working on it: painting and repainting you, but tears always come and they wash away half your face. But aside from all the painting, I think I've got it: you hate being a painting or a photograph, or anything that keeps you from talking about the speed of light. I just don't know how to keep you here. It's quiet here, the silence is actually beautiful, but I've realized that anytime that silence breathes over us next to the fireplace, you want to leave. I've told you, remember, that these walls are made of the beauty of everything, but they are nothing as much as they are beauty and so you may leave when ever you so please.

Please forgive me...I don't know how to say it...basically, I'm begging you to come back. Here there is speed of light for all of us and we can remember when we died and all of the argueing was over.

This Man I Saw

2006-12-01T13:05:00.000-08:00

so...who's the pauper and who's the prince?
I know, it's Christmas -
hence
the kingdom's in our midst, I said.

I said it all.
I walked, falling off
his scizophrenic preaching,
"I know what's it's like," he said.

"My brother and his masters," he didn't tremble
at anyone's thought, thimble, or thumb biting potential

"He's got a masters in it,"
but who's master said it?

I said it...
all.

Fall from his inconvience (I'm telling you),
he was a grievious
embarassing babbler,
over his glasses, talking to no one
out the door, looking rather...fine.

and you will say, "I hated him,"
and I will say, "I hated myself"
at this perpendicular angle of my seat
against this
concretefloor of a painter's
door

I cocked your mouth and shot it right at him
if he wouldn't have ducked over his glasses

this place has never seen
the vertigo of my mind,
I gleened, stood horizontally in the presence
of a ghost of his kind.

The painting washed away
with halls of decking,
and the door closed,
he and his glasses left (they were the big kind, the ones from the 80's)

I wanted him to be a prince,
his bags and his voice void of the price of the praises men
said,

"He is a king."

again...

2006-10-17T15:58:00.000-07:00

I ran again...

I fell again,
and he talked in his deep Spanish accent,
walking through the swinging glass
of past pressure-
slipping through dimensions
of the resounding sounds
-folded behind the entrance
of the portal to my memory...

and I bowed again
*(my head slightly in front of my computer)*

and I pretended again
I didn't see him.

and again and again
from below this heep of sheep,
I felt the warmth of his voice
and the swing of the glass
and the echo in my head of captive thoughts

and again and again and again

I'd bow eternally again.

2006-10-11T11:35:00.000-07:00

So, all is well on the Starbucks front. It's really not a bad job, with great people and great benefits and all that, and all the punching buttons and all the steamed milk and all the coffee knowledge from Central America to Indonesia and sometimes I wish I could sit back and watch myself and my green apron, and I would live just behind this Starbucks smile and credit cards and thank yous, and I would leave a space (about an inch and a half - one inch for them and half for me), and the air would be stiff there and it would be like insulation for my quietness and insecurity and my smile could be smuged off with a paper towel and basic-H and I could see it from the inside while bombs rage under the North Korean earth, while my dog poops in the house, while my cousin is injured in Iraq, and while I forget how many pumps of syrup they want.

Inside there is silence.
And echos of confidence falling
Through the foam of screaming
steam scalding
the milk of the flowing
bodies of consumers...

and my hands they drink
and ask for refills.

2006-09-16T08:00:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting in the public library, and I'm realizing,
"This is the place where people go
who are the most ordinary
of fantastical sameness."
And this changes into white-walled cinder block,

beauty bent over broken.

And this changes into simple.
And this changes the boring of your
walled perspective of jobs with money;
of kids grown straight out of the suburban air
-like aliens.

And takes you through the dust
of used xerox copy machines
and takes you to the old lady, pissed off
and where is my university?

It's gone;
slipped through my fingers -
ash from the altar
of the angel's incense.

and the hum of the computer,
and the clicking of stranger's fingers,

but paper butterflies hang from the ceiling
and my ordinary gives me the feeling
that they would stoop down,
wings pulsing slowly,
and take me to the Deep Heaven of this place.

2006-09-08T17:11:00.000-07:00

Ideas of earth
revolve in my mind
around the sun of a page
and a galaxy of bindings
-the gravity holding things together.

Pages of light
viewed as history.
Time before you
in words insecure
-words under the influence.

And what if I wrapped up this bookstore
and called it the Bible
and what if I took their heads...

and what if I forgot history
and what if I forgot about getting a job
and what if I forgot the praises of men

and what if I saw the over-weight lady next to me
-smile-

and what if believing was right in front of me,
waiting for silence.

And here I love my enemies
and here there is an enemy.
And here the earth looks flat
and here I walk across the water of it
and here I fall off the ends of it.

And there they fall away from gravity
as I turn towards the sun,

I'm floating,
and it consumes me.

2006-09-07T12:34:00.000-07:00

From Perelandra by C.S. Lewis:

"When she had at last been made to understand what 'creative' meant she forgot all about the Great Risk and the tragic loneliness and laughed for a whole minute on end."

2006-08-20T16:37:00.000-07:00

She danced in the dark last night,
raised me to the height of my

feet shuffling against the kitchen floor

and what light could hide behind the midnight

laughs of knowing?

showing
what uncomprehended Word

that walked in, took my hands
and placed them around her back, dancing
and placed them on her moving skin
and placed them on the midnight light

of my feet shuffling, and her laughs of knowing, and what the world could not comprehend

2006-08-20T15:32:00.000-07:00

My pastor today explained the entire history of our church from start to present. All the stories were great, incredible even but there was nothing like what he said about the present.

This was my last Sunday here for a while as my wife and I are moving next week. I've been around my church for about 5 years, off and on. My history with it has been a sea of storms, ranging from bitterness, cynicism, flat out pissed-off, feeling condemned, feeling worthless, feeling burned, worn out, hating its frivolous culture, to loving people's idiosyncrasies, being refreshed, feeling more love from people than I have ever known, feeling the presence of God in tears, in tears knowing that I am loved, convicted and wanting to love more. I grew tired of trying to live up to the swaying in my mind, the blistering ache in my heart that told me I shouldn't hate, but I couldn't help myself, tired of faking passion, tired of emotion in general, tired of feeling bullied into spirituality and I said to hell with it and spent about a year and a half in the dark room of myself; a created cavern of isolation disguised as sterile solitude. But there was nothing sterile about the infectious presence of existential anxiety every night alone in my room (if I wasn't having a blast getting high). And anxieties of exitense it was because I found myself not questioning the authority of my cell group leader, but questioning the power I held in my hands to end the anxiety and finally be with Him. I was obsessed with the possibility I saw clearly in my mind; a closed curtain right behind the cocked barrel of a shotgun in my mouth.

Years have passed since then, and as my pastor came to the present words of God that have been spoken over our fellowship after all the super-spiritual highs of obedience, miracles, and rejoicing, I wept:

"Do not forget your first love"

In the present, in front of hundreds of new faces and hundreds of family faces my pastor repented and confessed that he had forgotten his first love. My pastor who has honestly said some of the most offensive things to me, some of the most convicting, some of the most loving and some of the most challenging. My pastor whom I have seen for years as a person desperately in love with Jesus, one of the most I have ever known, here, now after a history of fleeing from his words repents to me.

I wept because I would be leaving him and these people once again, not running from them, but running after God and following the voice of Jesus, and just as the treasure was so brokenly shown to me I must turn and walk into the wind that strips me naked, vurnerable before the God of the desert, the God who wants to show me who I truly am, the God who will speak to the curtain behind the gun barrel and with tears scream, "Come out!" The curtain will open, and I will not speak of who I will find there. He is not the I of my existence. He is not the one walking still with the dust of aloneness hanging upon the emptiness, the delusion, the straddling of ideas, the anxiety. This one has already seen the end of the barrel. This one has already been crucified.

2006-07-06T19:42:00.000-07:00

Gaza City Invaded

The endless fight goes on, but this time with an all out invasion and 22 Palestinians killed over 1 Isreali soldier. One act with centuries of history to back it up; with an ancient trail of passions that, honestly, I don't know much about.

My Christian pysche tells me that I should back Isreal up with all my heart, and I really want to, but my conscience (along with my ignorance) will only let me go so far.

Who is the oppresed and who is the oppresor? Injustices have been inflicted upon both sides with equal brutality...am I right?

As I sift through the words of the prophet Isaiah, the central theme all over the page is exile, then restoration. Are these words playing a part in the battle that rages across the world as I type in my air conditioned house in suburban America? I read the ancient Scriptures about the destruction of the Isreali State and it just so happens that since then, in the very century in which I have been born, the Diaspora is reconciled and Isreal's State forms again, of course causing another exile - that of the Arabs in the land. This has happened in the century of War, the century of the machine, the century of propaganda, the nuclear century where more destruction of the human race is possible than ever before in history.

I do not pretend to know much about this and I am certainly no scholar, but I only come with questions.

As a Christian I have never truely dug deep in the historic Old Testament. The works of the prophets were books filled with the prophesies of Jesus and reassurances of his Messianic calling. I hadn't ever truely read these books and surely not with a mind open to understand what was happening historically. Now, of course, I'm older, and the prophet's voice of what I read in my peaceful quiet time rings like a war siren in my head as I scan the BBC articles.

No, this is not something to understand by reading a single Wikipedia article, but I can understand injustice and grieve over it. Even if I'm ignorant. Sometimes things are hidden from the "wise and prudent."

All that to say, I hope to be very wise and prudent in the affairs of my world, especially in the affairs of the chosen people of God, whether I like what they do or not. I am a branch, grafted in to drink from the nourishment of the olive tree...I pray I am not arrogant, nor ignorant.

All the more I wait for the Prince of Peace to establish his kingdom on the earth, to let the new Jerusalem be delivered as a bride adorned for her husband. All the more his coming is near, and this is my faith and this may be the only end for peace in that region; for peace anywhere, our hearts included.

For out of the heart comes so much deceit and who knows what we are capable of doing reacting out of the insecurities, lies, frustrations of our wounded and unhealed hearts. Even if innocent blood is on the hands of Isrealis and Palestinians both, it is on this American's also...who will heal us from this condition?

Whether we say yes in this age, or in the age to come it is Jesus Christ our Lord.

2006-07-02T13:11:00.000-07:00

"Who is blind but my servant, and deaf like the messenger I send? Who is blind like the one committed to me, blind like the servant of the Lord?"

Isaiah 42: 16 & 19

The "real world" flashes before me in all of its deceit. I see so much. What is it that drives its anxieties into our heads like brain surgery, a mad surgeon content on one thing: hopeless confusion.

And here is what passes within us to "be what we were suspossed to be," here is all that we think we are, concluding into one passive passion, one not fully conscious, one filled with the stuff of everydayness; here is what the great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber called the It-world.

And when it passes before us we have a hard time distinguishing it from the You-world; the world of encounter; the world of true persons encountering each other. I will not say that this is the only place of reality because the It-world is a part of our lives, but let us not confuse one for the other.

The modern machine has become our friend, not our tool. This is confusion. This is the place where true persons become a mass of resource; souls become shovels to break up the ground for no seed, but for more mechinization, seeds require waiting.

And who will be blind enough to see? And who will listen like the deaf? In one of Jesus's parables, these were called in for the Great Banquet because those originally invited had things to take care of, houses to attend to, payments to be payed for, the "real world" to look after. So the lame, the crippled, the blind were called (Luke 14).

There is a world that tempts me to brush over the invitation with a wave of my hand and hurry off away from the "fanatics." It is a world I must enter into, but how will I be lame enough, desperate enough to blindly accept this invitation when it comes to me on my way to such important meetings, such busy details, such crucial worries? Will I fail enough to be lying on the street, begging for food when it comes? Will I fail this world? Will I be hungry when it comes?

May hunger, may lameness, may blindness, may crippledness, may desperation truely be my yes.

It is in the arms of Abba where we can truely know our condition. For the love of Jesus is what brings healing to our wounds. May we not forget where the Lord found us, and where we wait eagerly for the glory we hope for.

2006-06-23T06:56:00.000-07:00

"We think we know what we ought to be doing, and we see ourselves move with the inexplorable deliberation of a machine that has gone wrong, to do the opposite. A most absorbing phenomenon which we cannot stop and perhaps deploring! But it goes on. And as Christ said over Jerusalem, we do not know the things that are for our peace."

-from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Thomas Merton

As I sit in a coffee shop, reading the words of the prophet Isaiah, I can't help but let it get under my skin. Desperately crying out, roaming around for years totally naked, exiled, crying out to the people of God to not rely on strong armies and the strength of Egypt, everyday this man was ravished for one thing: the word of God. The more I sip my Toffee Nut Latte, the more I feel absolutely oblivious.

"He humbles those who dwell on high,
he lays the lofty city low;
he levels it to the ground
and casts it down to the dust.
Feet trample it down-
the feet of the oppressed,
the footsteps of the poor."

Delusion is a scary beast. Its very strength lies in its ability to deceive, but more so, to deceive with the mask of righteousness. In the race of modernity the world flashes before us in instants of technological progress, forcing our minds to keep up, forcing us with its instant comfort, scaring us to death of not being comfortable, filling us with anxiety if our comfort is different than the rest. Before we know it, what have we trampled upon to asert this membership of society? There is no time for reflection, no time to ask, no time to understand what happens to me as I whore myself to my work, my degree, my certificate for only a resume and a pat on the back. And all of this of coures is for the good of yourself: so that you can uphold whatever little you hold in your hands now.

Do we know that it will burn? In our nakedness, have we sought the word of the Lord, or have we forsaken the words: "what is first will be last and what is last will be first?"

I have known too many people walking down whatever road they walk down for the single purpose to ease one anxiety about their life. It truely saddens me, although I can completley undertand how we are controled by such fear. (There is more at work here than I can say, and I know that I am speaking of a very large generality.) But I know the feeling of being caught up in the spirit of this world. Before you know it, your nakedness is a foriegn thought to you. Your weakness is written off with, "I'm not really like that," "I'll be better once I finish this thing I'm working on," "I just need to suck it up." We adhere to the words of Merton: "...we do not know the things that are for our peace." We cover up our anxiety with more and more things to do, more and more keeping up with the modern race, and we never strip ourselves naked before the Holy One of Isreal. Before we know it, the false gods cosume our lives and the thought of denying the help of the strong Egypt and surrendering everything to the unseen God of the promises of Abraham fills us with anxiety. The entire point was to have the opposite effect.

What has given us temporal confidence will be taken down. I want to agree with the prophet (although I myself may take offense at his words) the day of the Lord is near when all delusion will be uncovered and all of us will be naked, just as he made himself. For God longs for us to throw away our covenants with death and to embrace Him only as He has forever been in the posture for an embrace, even in all of our filth, if we would just turn to Him.

Thoughts?