Aweikinin 23/01/2015

From Galatians 1:1-8

“Freedom!”

H,

Well, I would not want to start that controversy but it is clear that there are many things that are a “lie about God.” I do not mean an honest lie or a mistake from good intentions. I mean the sort of thing that is against the nature of God and more akin to the nature of fallen man. We are spared the stupidity of guessing what God would do here on earth. He came down and showed us. He set us free from the guess work of men by showing in real terms the things He truly means and truly wants. He points to Himself in history and says “follow”. There is no one else to follow. This is the grand act and culmination. This is Moses and Elijah and David and, yes, Hehe, Joshua finally fulfilled in one person.

It is not that we do not have ‘leaders’ but they are only instruments to a much larger reality. We follow the holy Lamb of God, raised and exalted as the only way. We lead each other in love as a community not as personality cults. The real thing is here, the imperfect things must give way. There is too much abuse in this system of ‘anointed’ man for it to be the perfect plan of God. It reminds me of that time when the Israelites demanded a king when all God wanted was to lead them Himself. His language, through the prophet Samuel, about the burdens a king would place on them shows His heartache over a people that did not understand the freedom He offered in terms of intimacy without barriers and with fewer intermediaries. Are we any better? We struggle with freedom and we desire to be chained to the coattails of others, human like ourselves, and thus to rise and fall with their human darts at glory.

The leader is a victim too. In being looked up to he becomes trapped by his own ego. He is told he is to know everything so he makes up the rest. He gets strange fire and dispels it on personal problems and personality quirks. It is soon no more than a business transaction. He gives some supposed direction in God and he gets glory of the vain kind, followers, sidekicks and a financial base. He can do and undo, abuse and misuse and he is above all reproach. They follow and follow through even scandal and eagerly await his robust replies to questions he cannot even begin to grapple with. This is not sheep and shepherd. This is not Christ and His church. This is wolf and sheep, as Christ himself called them. This is not freedom. This is bondage: the abdication of personal responsibility to personal agendas. This is not the Church. This is a church, typical and small and lacking any real power. We might as well look for answers in magicians and the improper reading of the stars.

Freedom is what is offered: To be free to worship in spirit and in truth, with all our foibles and quirks and issues and with all the growth ahead of us. It is the freedom to talk to God, to look at Christ revealed and follow, to dwell in the companionship of the Holy Spirit and bear the true fruit of the eternal life. It is the freedom to receive divine love and to share it with one another as the constant communion of a family walking home together.

Aweikinin 22/01/2015

From Galatians 1:1-3

“Freedom!”

H,

Well, that is the thing about freedom we fear the most. Not really for ourselves but in the need to control it in others. There is that very flawed need to say to others to be careful with the grace of God while we are not. Freedom promises us, also, crucial release from our own stupidity.

It is like this: once we agree that we are on the right path toward eternity we are faced with a latter realization that we often fall off that path and make a dozen petty mistakes per second. We see our lives as the light reveals them and we know then that we have a long road ahead of us.

We may have that initial spurt of self righteous do gooder-ness or a few of our habits we may find were not habits but things we did to fill the time. Now we have a different sort of time and a different set of impulses we are learning. We may even coast on this for a while and enjoy that lengthy period of joy where we see stars in everything and bounce about thinking everyone is wrong and so wrong that our assumed right is such a badge of honour. Who needs drugs or drink or sex when you can be high on your own private supply of self?

All these we take to be our life hidden in God and it is glorious. Till, thankfully, we hit a brick wall. We experience the odd hint now and then that we are not as close to perfection as our light feet has led us to believe. We come up short. We remember that the authority for all this comes from Christ and put up against that great glory, if we are honest, we shrink in comparison. Flaws become apparent and reappear. The honey moon is over and the real grind of daily holy living sets in.

Now, we feel trapped. We know we are not good enough but we cannot go back. We have been unplugged and life is now defined in shades of white and black. We are trapped by knowing the truth. We are trapped by many voices. We are trapped by fragile egos that love to be right and to be right heard.

Now, at this point, gasping for real air, we are ready for the freedom that was first offered to us. There is no more a tape to our greatness. The journey to be finally free from self and sin can now begin.

              

Aweikinin: a poem.

About freedom

If I took a picture

Of your soul

Would you be singing, dancing, making a fool of you?

Or trapped in a joy-less round

Of accusations found

But never truly discovered

If I took a picture

Of your heart

Where would it bleed?

A rainbow or a bloody fist?

Tell me, again

About yourself

When you are not afraid

Of the things you dread

When the things you want

Are not all dead

Tell me, again

About your quest for freedom

If I took a picture

 Of your life

Would you smile, frown or be absent?

Always the former two preferred to the latter

This present shadowy sadness, you must outrun

Pick up tired soul, hearts and bones

Take a shot of something

Keep on walking

Toward freedom

Toward God

Aweikinin 16/01/2015

From Hebrews 11:1-40

           

H,    

Well, I agree completely. It is not in any way a complete story. We are allowed and told to embrace this incompleteness. It is still only on our page. The beauty of the good news is that it is relevant to the individual but made whole and complete by the community of faith being built up. This is why we are told to never be selfish, to never react in anything apart from love, to be gentle, kind, patient, to put God first and then be selfish for others as we are to ourselves. It does not presume that others will be good to us. It tells us the opposite, that God is the reason and the reign of the whole parade. We do all ‘good’ as worship or we might as well be ready to get angry and disillusioned and bitter. Faith does not require less action but more daring feats outside the human experience. If we act as the world does how can we be a light in that darkness?

All the above is well and good but how is it achieved? How can we reach the heights of these things when we know the slimy depths of our-self? This is road we are meant to travel. This is the undiscovered country of the people we are meant to be. We begin with the eternal premise that God is good and, perhaps, we will end with the overwhelming reality that He can make us good in time and beyond. We are certainly not here for fame, money or awards. We are not here to be proved right in many of our manifest stupidities. We are here to be transformed, daily, into the kind of people who have always stood out in the murky shadows of a cursed world. We are here to learn in fullness the thing they only knew, on earth, in part. We are the fulfillment of that promise to Abraham that brought God and man close again. It is not ritual and it is certainly not mere tradition but an act of love that joins all of humanity, finally, in a great hall of faith.

That family waits for us in the multi-verse beyond and all our roads lead to the great reunion with our family beyond blood and bone. A family of faith built in love, where hope is finally everything realized and everything full.

Aweikinin 15/01/2015

From Hebrews 11:1-38

           

H,           

There is an ugly part to the whole thing we never own up to. We think in terms of “glory” as the unveiling of something beautiful but this is as far as our eyes can see. A true love story, a true one, has a lot of time for weakness, serious acts of stupidity and grace and love above all. It is not two pristine bodies and powerful hearts meeting. It is the redemption of something unloved and unlovable by the greatest idea in the universe.

We have been socialized into dressing up and out. The things that are most interesting to God about us we probably cover up the best. We rehearse lines and read from a benign script that misses the pull of grace or the majesty of what is real. Paul, that most maligned apostle, got it at some point. He connected the power of God working in ordinary lives to the willingness to let in the ugly. “For when I am weak, then I am most strong”. Are we ever more strong than when we have been on our knees before God owning up to our ugly? The unnecessary weight lifts off and for a minute, before we try to get pretty again, we can feel the lightness of soul we need to deal with the heavy world. Was Christ ever more beautiful than when he was beaten beyond all recognition and his humanity reduced to a shameful death?  But all this at the will of God, for that coming glory and for love, the only thing that is beautiful in itself.

This is a faith for the ugly people. 

Aweikinin 14/01/2015

From Hebrews 11:1-31

           

H,    

I do understand your point about the state of heart that is faith, the not giving up to despair and the crucial act of looking up. I guess we can add to that the now famous “works” of faith. The things that faith leads you to do and, more importantly, the kind of person it makes you.

It has been really drawn through the ground and into the murky swamps of human agenda, but it is a beautiful thing when a heart responds to faith and the body and mind follow. It is not to be dismissed. So often the fear of doing something wrong cripples any attempt at doing it right. And we know that fear is not a part of love, the greatest of all, so it cannot be in our acts of faith. We cannot be afraid of error to the point of inertia. We have to allow ourselves to be compelled into these great works that we are always being told lie within us.

There are a number of problems with following through on this. On the top of the shelf is the human need for control and clarity. We have a God-complex that envisions knowing the end from the beginning in every situation and since we are not omniscient, this will not happen on this side of the story. So, we get frustrated and muck things up and then just make things up to call faith.

The other problem, which I should have brought up first, is the act itself. From our spiritual ancestors we see that the acts of faith were all done in response to God. They did not go looking for acts to do. They were called and appointed and anointed and all that metamorphosis took place before they got on their mostly un-merry road to do great deeds. The thing is in the listening, knowing and being led by the omniscient one, not pretending to be that one. There are voices always heard and things always done in the “name of God”, that have nothing to do with the character of love. We are human and we can always make a mistake about what God wants or where He wants us to go and we can always misinterpret scripture. What we can rarely get wrong is what ties all His truth together: the Character of love as revealed in Christ. Against such love there is no law. We cannot be wrong if we attempt to love in the conscious grace of receiving His love and transmitting it to others. This is all the “great works” we are all called to do. 

Aweikinin 13/01/2015

From Hebrews 11:1-16

           

H,    

These days I vacillate between hope and despair. It is mostly a matter of waking up and how I start the day. I read bad omens like mood and good omens like getting the tea-milk balance just right or a good day of writing against a bad day of trying. It is all hopeless at ten pages of dust or bright and hopeful at five minutes of inspiration. You see the problem with all that? I have reached the limits of mere hope. Faith is what is needed now.

It is faith that allows us to see the opportunity for change in every stumbling block. It is the thing we need now in the presence of this dark mould of absolute buffoonery that leads our country. That is high talk. What about our own day to day encounters with the limits of our control? Those brushes with our own weakness and bumbling acts of failure that we are more forgiving of because we know the full story. Well, put that in the bag too and let us trudge up this hill to try and make sense of things.

Lately, I have had the sense that I am completely alone. I do not mean this in any metaphoric sense but in real terms. I meet and talk and share but my heart is hardly in it. I always want to be somewhere else. So, of course, I never want to be anywhere. It is too easy a thing to get caught up in the faults around you, in the high jinks of governance and the low rustles of work and career. It is a necessary escape from the absolute questions of character and truth. If we do enough and make enough progress it is easy to not handle who we are and the way we treat others. The only signal we have of falling is that we do not have those necessary acts of love in the way we live. We can change a government but we cannot change ourselves. We can provide for all things but we cannot elevate anything into wonder.

I am reminded of those patriarchs we study in the bible and their incredible journeys of faith. The stories become so familiar that we lose the miracle in each of them. We lose the epic nature of Abram becoming Abraham by seeing a nation when he did not have a child or Moses seeing deliverance for this nation when all they and he knew was the reality of slavery and the safety of the slaver. Or us, right now, believing in perfection when all we see is fault or in good when all around is the evil dark. We give up on ourselves, on others, on our nation and on the idea of the regeneration to come because we do not know that the journey is not a story in the living but only in the telling. It is more about the character it will breed than the things it will do. This is not an empire of walls and gates but a coming glory built on love, truth, kindness and a clean heart that sees only forever.

In that sense, we are always in the walk of faith. We might not like the lack of a movie score or the dirt and grime of coming awake to our lack of and need of God in a real, communing sense. We do not want to think we have made no progress all these years. Our minds are still results driven and we are counting years and seeking milestones of greatness. It is a time for heroes but the best of them come from the worst of vulnerability. It always starts with a call to kneel and ends with a lesson in worship. We are not that light that we once were but we were never that. We had flashes and thought we had reached the peak. The ascent is just beginning. 

Aweikinin 12/01/201

From Hebrews 11:1-6

           

H,    

It has been a fair more than “two days” since I last wrote to you. It has been awhile. I am sorry. Your old messages were left unanswered as I went off the reservation first as a holiday and then as a sort of pilgrimage and finally just pure indulgence that only got interrupted again by grace. Yet, as you know once you have had the light, in any real way, nothing can take that place in your heart and life. You either stumble meekly through life in a state of obvious denial or you learn slowly the humility that comes from being loved and forgiven and always accepted back into the arms that hold the universe in its place. It is wisdom to always choose the latter over the former.

So, to which of your letters can I summarize all my replies? Well, probably the age old question raised in ancient doubt: why do we believe? It is the one I am less equipped to answer but most alive to talk about. I do not have a walking reason for looking up to grace and finding it full and beautiful. Well, I do but not one that rings through all ears and answers all questions. It is a deeply personal stump speech I have for my soul that is much more than dull words and it crosses the line from bold declaration into necessary consolation that happens to be truth. It is the way I dealt with or was led away from an existential crisis I encountered in young age that put my soul in inertia and caged my spirit of the wilds. The simple but critical doubt we all get about the meaning and value of life. When the answer was put to me, and accepted, as a benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God also known as love in full flow, a real deity and not one I knew but one that knew me, it answered all my questions and filled all my places of empty doubt at once. This may sound like an all-cure that frames life but it does not do the magic trick of numbing the mind or forever putting the heart in a vice. It is much too real for that. It is an entry point; a start on a journey that I believe will put everything in its place and tell us our place in everything. I have wandered from it a billion times and the thing I get every single time is not the defects that make me leave but the lack of imagination that takes me out into nothingness when fullness is on this road. I always, like that prodigal son, remember that there is nothing out there on that road of utter selfishness that compares to the freshness of the love presented to me and experienced when I meet the first of all principles: the reality of the love of God and what that will make all of us in time.

Amen.

P.s. two quick things have taken hold over here in the days of silence: the darn cold and the black hole of politics. On the cold I can tell you nothing about it, you are in the eye of the storm but these winds from the Sahara are a chill to any bones, the only question is the severity or the degrees. Keep warm.

On that second matter I can tell you even less. There is a great urge for change and there is bleakness about the cost of not having that change happen as soon as possible. It is a perilous time and those times always bring fear and quick feet. It may do good to be still. This ball keeps being dropped. Lives are swept up in frenzy and there is an unfolding tragedy everyday reaching fruition. “These are the times that test men’s souls”. Maybe we should just do all we can and should do to allow the grace of things higher permeate this low estate of being. May we all find those little steps that collectively signify a loud march away from the abyss.

Amen.