17/11/2016

Adavuruku,

“The lightness of being yourself”

The most fascinating thing for me about being where you are right now is how you get to completely experience the lightness of being yourself. We are not conditioned like that when we enter into the great faith. We are taught the opposite and told to act “as if it were already true” in so many ways. I do not know why this has taken root. The most spiritual of things has become a cover under which you can seethe and suffer but never show weakness.

I remember once telling one of our fellow fools that I was having recurring night terrors. His reply was that it was a sign of spiritual maturity. And that is the whole problem right there; the need to put up signposts for “growing” and measures for “glory”. The brilliant metaphor about Church being a hospital of terminally ill patients slowly getting well is forgotten and we have in its place a mental asylum where the in-patients wear white coats and pretend to be the healers.

It is enough to see this in my own soul. The pull of weakness reminds me every day that I prefer consolation to completion, I prefer license to discipline and I prefer placebos to real medicine. You no longer have this squabbles. It must be like an old and healed up wound you see and remember the pain of the injury but it is all a joke you can share now free of any sort of lingering terror of that moment.

To be complete must make incompleteness seem like another country.

16/11/2016

Adavuruku,

“In celebration of the ordinary”

I wonder about the state of our own souls in the battle against the need to feel special and outstanding. We have tied up the inherent feelings of value and self-worth to the great flaw of intense competition and seeking to have a special place over the fate of others.

Everything is designed to make us compete and compare. We judge our progress with our years and our place in the rat race by social mobility. It is not enough to be your-self if that makes you no better than anyone else.

I am not even speaking of the world when I say this. I am talking about the church. The cathedrals of holiness have become harbingers of self motivation.  You go there to get a fix, to feel uplifted and to be told how special you are in terms of the “plans God has for you. Plans of good and not of evil. To bring you to an expected end.” But the end is in the now, we are told, and the end is a high building and a corporate jet or two and travel and money and holy things like that. And of course it works for some because it motivates them to reach out into the ether of the world and claim a piece of that space for themselves. It is motivational but it is not always truthful.

That the human soul is special is unquestionable. That one soul is superior to the other is as nonsensical as those who believe that God has mansions for some and bungalows for others. We want to believe that it counts to the exclusion of others and this stops us from being brothers and sisters in the true sense of the word. We are trapped in the idea of competition so we forego companionship and read into the holy script our own ideas of being the main character in the reel of our own lives.

I imagine on the other side there must be a celebration of being ordinary going on all the time. I know the extra-ordinary gospel has come from our restless hearts finding solace against the solid putdowns that attend the normal life span on earth. Up there, where all is bright, there is no need to stand on ideas about yourself. You are fully alive and so need no other lights to take you home. You know and you are so there is no need for other definition. I imagine.

Here we live in loud desperation to make an impact. But the impact has already been made. No other foundation can be laid. We are either disciples or apostles to the truth. Mostly we are both. We have to unlearn this need to be exceptional at the expense of ourselves and others. I do not mean we cannot be brilliant but that brilliance can only take us so far. Genius does not create eternity. And purpose is not to build towers of Trumpness with a Christian twist. We are here to accept God’s love and then to share it. The rest is cannon fodder and window dressing. The church is not going to shine because we own the biggest businesses but because our businesses reflect the heart of God. And I don’t mean charity and honest accounting. I mean a place that radiates that palpable glory of the Divine Heart and Will. This is being worked out in men and women across the world as the clock winds down. We are not here to be shiny but to radiate the light of all ages. We should be doing that not building monuments to ourselves.

Well, I have gone on for a bit. I know you know this so I am not preaching to the choir but to the book of books. I will stop now.

We keep looking up to gain the peace you have already attained. 

15/11/2016

Adavuruku,

“The thing above all other things.”

It must all look different to you on that other side. The tide must turn a different shade of blue. It must be almost troubling to see us struggle but immediately offset by this feeling of “okayness”. 

Of course I am guessing. How can I possibly know the thing above all things in any real detail? My stabs in the dark make huge assumptions about the shape and form of life in the white place. I am sure you all have better things to do than watch us pretend. Maybe you catch the highlights during dinner.

 It is funny how it all seems to matter now. Every single annoyance or desire or hope or fear or dream is distilled through this huge apparatus of our own need to feel something or everything at once. The human body is made for hunger and the human soul is defined by a hunger of its own. Only the spirit can be truly free. There is something in that; the idea that we are more than the body and the soul and we can reach for the higher things. Still we have these elastic bands that snap us back in place. Make us human. Then we are dead.

I am trying to ask you something and I think I am failing. I will hear no answer now. It is all worked in as faith. I cannot fathom what death is like and I cannot fathom what life after death is like but I think of you as living presence. I have never thought of you as dead. There is a luminous quality to the space you left behind. There is a presence where there is no presence. You are living proof of many things. One could take it as the idea that people live on in influence and in love. I take it as that other thing: the end is not the end.

 Live accordingly. 

14/11/2016

Adavuruku,

“A profound spiritual crisis.”

You will be horrified to know (if that part of you can still do this) that you are a character in one of my books now. You are a spirit guide to one of my doppelgangers in the story and we work on a farm and talk of things to do with eternity. I read these books now and again to sort of catch up on all the things you might say to me if I ever encountered you in the great hall of faith.

This morning, as I washing dishes as part of my morning ritual against despair, it occurred to me that over the last few years I have been experiencing a most profound spiritual crisis. It was so hidden from my view that I only got hit by it as I examined the acts and words from me that I do not recognise anymore. It hit me that perhaps I was off the anchor we all believed in and I am now afloat on a sea of rubbish with momentary sparks of light. This does not excuse my evil. Being in a crisis does not mean you do not know what you are doing. It just means this is the reason you are doing it.

I tried to quickly trace when I might have slipped out from under the light and I realised that it must have started sometime after law school. Life breaks us all, the bearded one once said, and he would know, but sometimes it breaks us off in tiny pieces at a time so we do not notice. Perhaps finally I have begun to notice my missing parts.

What does one do with a spiritual crisis?

I have started to pray more. I do not think that the act alone is what will cure my ills and so many of my ills will not be cured on this side of the story but it is the first act of submission to realise you need direction on how to get back home. There is a long journey ahead of me but when I get lost I will remember you and all the saints ahead who made out of the crisis of being human something beautiful and eternal in God.

And then I miss you, you fool.

10/11/2016

Adavuruku,

“The day before.”

It is November so I always think of you. It has been eleven years since you slipped into the glory. It comes to me in this sudden feeling of loss. Like the saintly writer you introduced me too, on that bus to Kubwa, says: when you lose a friend you not only lose them but the part of you that was only them. I am bleeding parts in November.

It is funny because you were the most difficult of friends but I can’t even remember that. There is a vague sense of clashes and things that don’t matter anymore. In the end the things that matter remain in memory and all the heated things pass into nothingness. All I remember now is the day before. The things still left hanging, plans of world domination, the sense of a group that did not choke or stifle but enlightened me in leaps and bounds to be more like an individual without the fake freedom of being selfish.

What else can I say? This door you slipped into has informed all my writing since. You were an excellent poet and I think if you put your hand to prose I might have needed to find a job in editing. There was a way your life folded into literature and you understood how the ephemeral and the practical could shake hands, become friends and build something worth the true foundation of all things. It may seem like I am making a point of making you bigger than you were but that is the point. Death removes the unimportant. I now only remember you as the day before.

I do not measure the loss. I measure the life. I measure the effect it had on my life. I do not remember the imperfection. There is no sullied hand or fallen heart anymore. All that remains of you now is all that you could have been.

And are right now.