“The Grief and the Silence.”

H,

I don’t want to tie this up neatly because so much of life as we see it is unresolved. We would have to take some really strong painkillers to make any sort of order to this chaotic existence plausible. It is bent and we cannot fix it. We need faith to see a new order emerging, we need hope so we can feel something above the present mire and we need love so eternity makes sense as the final unspooling of things.

 I am slowly coming around to this at the end. The idea that this is not the end. Of course you know it in theory. You read the good book, the characters there seem to be living in some alternate reality but are present and you have this idea of the Christ risen. You might even feel that the drama about His death was unnecessary. Why all this crying and all this fear?

No book is a life though it may contain scenes of real life. In life we will face the real sadness, the crippling loss, the grief and the silence of death. That there is a larger picture will not occur automatically to the grieving heart.

We already ought to let ourselves and others grieve as they can. It is not a slap on the face on any gods and the only God we say matters is not as small minded as we are. He is not small minded at all. He can take the slings of: where are you? What are you doing? He can answer when we ask about the silence.

And answer He will. I have never put a question up there that did not come back down in an answer. It is not always the answer I want. Sometimes it takes a while to hear it. Silence is just the expectation of the voice. 

“The Grief and the Silence.”

H,

Is there a time to stop grieving? Life presses back on you very hard. The lessons we are supposed to learn: the fleeting nature of everything, the immediacy of love and care, and the things we should do and say as quickly as we can, these lessons are left at the graveside. It is a glitch and not a reboot of the whole system. We may be changed by it in some superficial way but our character is a harder sell. In a few hours we move on to the next thing. Sadness is the only remnant of the experience. The new habit is perhaps to hold on to life more dearly, to be more careful with our health and to avoid the pitfalls of the fallen life.

Yet we are not on earth for any other purpose but to learn to receive love and to give love freely. The rest are ancillary pursuits. 2^nd Corinthians 13 has clarified that point for us. We should not worry, the Christ says, about food or clothes or housing. Material progress for the Christian is related to spiritual progress. I do not know how that all works out in every life. I only know how it has worked out in mine. I do not know how every grieving soul makes their peace with the silence of the missing person. I only know now that I can see more clearly than I did yesterday. Death shows us the silliness of fights, of grudges, of keeping quiet, of regret and of thinking “tomorrow will be the day that I will say what I should say or act as I should act”. The Christ told this to us: today is the only day you should concern your active selves’ in. Tomorrow lies in silence. Tomorrow is in God.

“The Grief and the Silence.”

H,

There is a lot of advice about grief. It has this fantasy about it: the idea that it makes you wiser for the pain. Is there any wisdom in pain? Probably that you do not want to feel that way again. All the advertised cures are about the end of it. Time will heal, eternity will correct all the crooked lines, and it will all make sense in the end. It is all designed to keep you walking away from pain and into some sort of hope.

Well, that is better than the alternative. Stewing will do no good. The normal face of it, the everyday nuts and bolts of feeling empty and bitter and sad is surely helped by time. You forget that you are grieving sometimes. You make jokes, you dance, and you find levity in moments away from your own consciousness. Then it hits again. There is something at the back of your mind that comes slouching forward. It reminds you that there is real loss here.

There is nothing wrong with feeling this loss. Isn’t the most enigmatic phrase about Jesus this: He wept?  Not just for his friend but at the idea of death and decay and loss and the great ravaging of the human experience by original sin. It is absurd that we die, Camus says, and we come face to face with it through grief. It cannot add up. It does not add up. It should not add up.

I am ranting. Forgive me. Early nights and early days. A little insomnia and the threat of thinking on these things too much. Yet, there is a joy. A peace. The smell of water. If grief is slouching then truth is walking confidently. I can see words again. Things matter again. I can remember him and all that jazz we had once. I can close my eyes and be on that farm again. Siblings beside me, his smile behind me and the future all forward like eternity. Joy is knocking at my door every day. I will learn to answer more. 

“The Grief and the Silence.”

H,

It has been the strangest two or three weeks of my life. You know all the details. Tragedy has not come as a gentle rain but as a raging storm and I am overwhelmed by it. I cannot say I am normal. There is no method in this particular madness.  There is no way to shut the door on all feelings and when I pick them out one by one there is nothing. I find myself unmoved by life, numb and in serious danger of letting all that is left slip by me. They say that God seems silent in the worst moments. I am silent too.

It is not that I am hiding some received wisdom or I am calmer after the event. I genuinely have nothing to say. All my thoughts are jumbled up together and amount to nothing. All my words seemed forced. I act like a character in a play about grief and I watch my own performance from the safety of indifference and only belt out the most stinging criticisms.

 This cannot be how to deal with things. In my infancy, in my first sparks of grief on earth, I had the same reaction. I cried off other tears, I felt empty off the physical loss itself but I was no closer to being in the reality of what was lost. I had nothing to say and so I made it up.

I would like to say that time makes it better or more real but that has not been my experience with it. It goes into memory and people around me refer to it and I say the prescribed lines but nothing changes. I am stuck in that dead room with no air and so silence.

At least now I can write about it. Now, I can see what is happening. This is the one in which I am involved in the finer details. I must cobble together some sort of response to it. I do not live alone anymore. The grief is expected but the silence simply will not do. 

“God is your home.”

H,

We need to make the move from the singular to the plural and then to the singular again. This is the whole essence of the Church. It is not the end of individuality but the end of individualism. We must come to community as individuals but make our way as a Church. We may not all think the same thoughts, or hold the same sacraments as vital or agree on doctrine but we are going in the same direction and we share the same home.

There is no longer Jew or Gentile but there is also no longer poor or rich, sick or well, man or woman in the divisive sense. All come must come together and act in one heart: the heart of the creator.

This is not some utopian construct but the people we will forever be and how we will live in eternity. This is what God is doing. This is His Kingdom, the Holy light of all ages.

We are coming together not to be ruled by the whims and temperaments of “anointed” or charismatic men or women but by the love of God shed abroad in our hearts. We eat at the table of grace as equals, all in need of salvation, all being transformed, all connected into the singular by the vastness of our God. We sit at His right hand as one, like Christ and with Christ, the Holy adoption is to make all women and all men children of God in the most direct sense.

The world seems far from this grand picture, I know. This is why we are pilgrims and not earthlings. Things never feel quite right. We are not here to stay. We are on the road home. 

“God is your home.”

H,

What of all this joy we hear of? Where is this abundance? Where is this peace? How do we get into wholeness and holiness? How do we come alive like an unquenchable fire?

We seem to keep waiting for this moment when all these things will be true. The way the world seems none of it is true. We would need to build high walls and deaf ears to make it so. We would need to construct a community of believers who only see the good in things, who mistake fear for faith and who deny the worse side of the human experience. We would have to believe that God is playing dice with our tiny speck of the universe and some have it bad while others have it very, very good. We would have to agree that the latter group have learnt the wisdom of grovelling. We would have to get our praise on. The bulls are now the dance steps. The sweat is now the blood. The priest is now the Bishop. We will have an experience and then all will be well.

The problem is we have to stay in this false house for all our lives. We cannot reach over this wall of deception.

The whole of Christianity is summarized in this: receive love and then give love. If we are going to build a dam then we do not yet need this water that ends all thirst. We have to engage with a world in pain or we are not the light or the salt or anything at all.

Remember, that God himself came down and was put in chains by a tiny empire compared to the powerful nature of the whole universe. It is like a feather killing a bear or a pebbling bringing down Mount Everest. God humbled Him-self (and Her-self) to the pain of the world. This is your home. In this, you will find all joy and love and everything else thrown in. 

“God is your home.”

H,

There has always been this hint of a feeling that all is not well. I know you have felt it quite a bit throughout our decades-long trek on earth. I cannot even remember when it started. I used to think that it was tied to some material problem: a lack of something, a peculiar problem or the sting of one of my many weaknesses. After a while I realised that even on the best of days, even in the midst of joy and love and all the grand feelings of our age, an undercurrent will slowly show up in my head and heart. I would begin to leave the moment I was in and take this feeling of unease on a journey of discovery to find what was wrong.

It took my years to realise that it was the simplest of things really: I was not at ease with life on earth. I do not know how many people feel this way and how many have the great distractions that abate this feeling. I can only say that I feel it more and more as the years go by.

In the past we would call it the weight of the hours of living and give it some holy relevance. We would use it to justify the bottle and the philandering and the being wrong because there is some stupidity going around that makes poetry out of real pain as if that is the only solution it needs.

The solution is this: we are not at home and God is our home. 

“The strange feeling of success.”

H,

It is not doom and gloom. The good news is a portrait of joy not of repression or despair. We are not trying to get people to bow their heads in shame but to raise them up in hope.

There is no wrong direction in God. There are no quick fixes but also no fatal turns. We will all make our mistakes. This is not said as an excuse but as a fact. We are transforming from one kind of being into the other. We are learning to live in the light. Falling down is just part of the process. True love waits. True love forgives. True love does not give up. We will not fail to become the full expression of God’s nature upon the earth and beyond. We will live forever in the light.

Is this the part when I say: “but”? There is none of that. Only bad theology based on fear and not faith. To fear the lord is to acknowledge His place in your life. It does not mean you are afraid of Him. You should not be. That distance has been covered by Christ. There are many things we do not yet understand about the ultimate deity. It is a matter of time. We have all the time in the universe. We will get there.

The moment you look up to God you are already thriving, advancing, living in the true beauty of what the world really means. There is nothing like it. It is the strange feeling of success: that we are already there and we are here to remember all our steps into heaven and into the arms of our loving father.

“The strange feeling of success.”

H,

We have a deep fear of failure. There is a nodding, snivelling, massive monster on our shoulder always asking us to prove our worth and telling us we cannot prove it because we have none, at the same time. We have doubts fostered by the insecurities of others, cutting us down with words and glances that make us feel like a small, repugnant extra wheel in the great grind of life. We have, more deeply, our own experience with failure. We have all reached the limits of our competence and felt the overwhelming crush of defeat as we attempted to do something worthwhile.

The world teaches us to hide what we are bad at and to only speak, only declare, only live in and only promote the things we are good at. This way we can be intelligent (even though it is only about a few topics), we can be competent (even though it is only wrought through aptitude and the experience of learning specific things) and we can be considered successful at something (regardless of its value to anyone else). We construct this mirage of success as a cover for the fear of failure and thus create a world of faces and face value.

The Kingdom, the real one and not the alchemy spun gag or self-help manual peddled as wisdom nowadays and suffixed with “principles”, runs on something more eternal than fear. It is not a quick fix. It will take your whole life. There is no public barometer for progress and there are no milestones you can put in a book and sell to others. It is the knife that cuts to the bone of our humanity. It is the truth that puts an end to all the lies we might tell. It is powerful enough to change every life but gentle enough that it will not break in. It will come in at the pace of the believer. It will take the space granted but keep expanding. Success in the kingdom is learning to be the sort of person who lives forever in the light. Success is learning to be like the Christ. 

“The strange feeling of success.”

H,

We are constantly battling the voice inside that tells us we are worthless. Outside events might add to that horrid chorus. We might take a few wrong steps or have moral failures or fail to live up to some imagined potential forced on us by the opinions of others and our desperate need to be seen. Then we acquire this feeling of failure. We begin to flounder down this rabbit hole of self-recrimination and shame. We hide, we fall back, our voice falls to low pitched growl and we are constantly crouching toward some version of new hope.

We have not given up, yet, on the fallacy of success. We are not humble only humbled. All it will take is a sweet turn of fortune and we will re-emerge into the light clutching on to old ideas of our own greatness and counting the wilderness as a learning curve. Then, we will show the doubting crowd what it means to survive a few years living off the grid and pulse of real life. Then we will silence these “enemies” that have spat in our face with words that cut so deep only advancement can truly heal the wounds.

Of course, God wants no part in any of this. A self-help class or two is probably more useful than a visit to the bible or any community of believers seeking truth. Self-belief is a powerful tool in this limited world. We can rise to new heights believing that we have operated under some vague principle that is really hit and miss. This has nothing to do with God. The life He wants in us is not one that is from the crowd or to the crowd. It does not require proof in any physical sense because “those who have eyes, they will see.” He is trying to bring back to earth the spiritual life and not promote any affirmation of what a fallen earth calls progress. It is far too easy to make material progress a sign of spiritual depth. We can cover a lot in tinted glasses and well-worn clichés about “purpose”. The life in God is much too intimate for that. There is no hiding place afforded from the things that are really wrong with us. Wealth may be a defence on limited earth but it is not a cure for what truly ails the human heart and soul.

“The strange feeling of success.”

H,

I keep thinking of the old scorn with which any kind of material success was held in our Christian circle. It was branded as wrong to make progress on earth because it meant you had taken your eye off the great ball of making heaven. It also meant that you had made some compromise with the fallen world, you had taken one of the devil’s offers and now you had the world but only that. Add to that the odd story of the man who met Jesus knowing who He was and declaring same but failing to make that truth more important than property and you have a real picture of how strong the pull of the things we own can be.

We do not even have to go that far. A brief glance into our own forays into owning stuff and we can see tales of making the thing more important than the reason for the thing. We know how a few notes in the pocket can make us defensive against the real suffering in the world. Wealth has this side note to it. It aims to protect itself. It is always telling you how much you need to protect. It tells you to avoid waste at the price of sharing. It tells you to multiply it with ‘wisdom’ with the stinging memory of lack hanging in the ominous background. It tells you that you are special, that you have somehow scaled the impossible wall and so you are a leader amongst your peers. It tells you poverty is a curse and prosperity is a blessing so the sinner-saint dynamic is in place on some level. Tithing, giving, serving, following and believing are tricks of the trade. Wealth gives reason to the anarchic state of modern life. Tragedy becomes a failure to follow kingdom principles.

The strange feeling of success cannot be measured by the temporal wave of the present state of things. We aspire to live on the higher plane of things. Success, in the general sense, is not enough for the Christian and it is certainly not required for the Christian life. It has no advantages and is no sign of favour. It might be a sign of purpose but not much more. The point Christ was making to the rich man who had much was this: everything material is subject to the spiritual purposes of love in God.

“Doubt.”

H,

We are free to have doubts. We have been told to test all things, doubt all things and hold on to what remains true. It is part of the process. There are no certainties because we do not know enough. We see in shadows, life is obscured in the great mirror of images. Some of these images may not be real.

We cannot deny that we feel off it many times. It is not always a grand adventure and it has not yet felt like it is complete. It is still a thing in progress but sometimes we move in kilometres and other times we move in centimetres. We are never quite on it. It seems elusive and our Creator can sometimes feel aloof.

These are just the disciplines though. We cannot have emotional states over inner witness. Emotions go up and down. What you know can be set in stone. What you learn by experience can be imprinted on your soul. It cannot be shaken off. Imagine how much the horrors of this world are smeared on the souls that experience it. Imagine how much joy is needed to replace that old stain with something new and eternal. This is the process we go through.

Doubt, of course, will rear its head over and over again. We still live on the limited side of things. We sit in the joy of experiencing God to get strength to keep walking. We are on our way home. Doubt is just a temporary companion. We will leave that little gargoyle behind one day. 

“Doubt.”

H,

This may be with us for a while: doubt. There is this silly idea that we must never doubt anything. It is not true. We will doubt everything. The more we see ourselves in the light the more we are aware of all that former darkness. To believe that evil is darkness receding is fine but to not be honest enough to wonder why it is so strong in the first place is covering up the places where growth is needed. A closed up wound is out of sight but festering.

My prayers nowadays, as little as they may be, are all around doubt. I keep wondering about everything we know, we think we know, everything we heard in the secret garden of words, everything we think we heard. I wonder about the slaughter of innocents, the horrible acres of war on the planet, the terrible hurt children suffer and the illness in the human spirit that makes all this possible. It is easier and much more profitable in the secular and spiritual worlds to ignore what is bad and focus on what is good. Personal stories and familial progress can cover up the true horror that is human history, the present state of many souls suffering and the future that seeks to advance the good story over the real story. We are constantly looking for hallmarks, heroes, exemplars, neat endings and tales of progress. When we hit the great stone of all stones, when we come face to face to something we cannot explain, then we fall back to the old rhetoric of change, the old mantra about choice and the curious logic of the dialectic over the humane. We put things in perspective so it looks like the dark is not winning.

These are all thoughts of my doubt and I know the dark is not winning. I just wish I could connect with what He says. I wonder what She thinks of the world and how much She still cries over it. I wonder that They think about my doubt.

“Of Ambition and Destiny.”

H,

There is always the problem with practicality. How do we feed our children? How do we make a way in the world for our voice to matter? How do we become the exception to that old quip about lazy Christians and poor church rats?

Now only the first may have any real significance. We do not need to have a voice in the world beyond being more and more like the things we profess. The old slanders hold no water when one is really engaged in the business of heaven.

Still, there is a material reality that has to be faced. The world, like Caesar, demands its coins. This is a difficult one to answer because words cannot capture the desperation, fear and compromise that poverty may bring. There are so many questions that money can answer quite well. It is a lie to say otherwise. In our own experience we can only point to the esoteric nature of our walk and say: we got by somehow. There is not one single practical answer to the question of how to live the spiritual life with material awareness. This is the wisdom we are given though. We are to walk the higher path of having but not having at the same time. The things that we have must be seen as transient so we can truly appreciate the things that we will always have.

Jim Elliot said it best: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”  And he paid the ultimate price for that belief. We have no answer to that. There are no half measures here. The  Spiritual and material must merge in our minds so effectively that the former always leads the latter. Not in tithes and offerings and silly “prophetic seeds” but in how we value the wellbeing of our family, how we balance the books in favour of the needy and how we treat money and wealth as a tool and not a destination.

Our ambition and destiny is to be more like a person we know and have come to accept as way, truth and life. Once we grant that first premise, the rest will follow suit.

We will not be perfect in anything at the start. This is a lifelong thing. We should not give up because we will fail at it many times. We must keep our eyes on the prize of becoming that other person written into our hearts as forever. We will learn to share as they did. We will learn to feed each other. We will learn that sacrifice is the great currency of the kingdom. We will learn that love takes everything and purifies it and gives us everything back again. 

“Of Ambition and Destiny.”

H,



There is that rush you get when salvation finally comes to your soul. It is a feeling of invincibility. Those of us who finally succumb to the Pentecostal bite are told we are kings, princes, sons of the most high but we will die like me if we do not learn the lingo. If we do not act as if. Suddenly all our fears have a purpose: to lead us to learning the strange language of exceptionalism. We are not like everyone else. We do not have the same experience on the earth. They are food for Satan and we are servants of God. There is a hedge around us and a light within us that makes us walk on the higher path. And our destiny is sure. We are going to live forever in the high places with God. All we have to do now is make a living that contrasts with the dead lives amongst us. All we have to do is show these zombies how it is done and some of them may choose the brighter path. The ambition and the destiny come together into purpose.

Now, the point of all these things has been lost in the gulf between doing a thing and being a person. Blaise Pascal said: ““All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” The lack of contemplation is always a recipe for misuse of principles. We form dogma out of our own fallen hearts because we cannot sit still against the wave of criticism, self-doubt, failure and boredom. We need to have a thing to do because we are scared of being.

If we are told that there is only one ambition and there is only one destiny it would shake us. Well, there is only one ambition- to be like Christ- and there is only one destiny-to be with God. It does not matter how old you are or how successful you are. Christ even made the point that material wealth is more of a hindrance than a help. It does not matter if you leave you mark on the world and it will count for nothing if a few years after death you are only in a history book. All are but a minute compared to the real thing that is eternity. All the things we fear have no bearing on the eternal life in God. “Death, what else have you got?” the apostle dared to say.
“Ordinary Life on earth what else can you offer?” we should dare to ask ourselves every day.

“Of Ambition and Destiny.”

H,

I keep thinking of those early days when the road seemed somewhat simpler than it is now. I am now tempted to quote Hemingway again mostly because you hate the repetition but: “life breaks us all…”

Have we not been broken by the common wheel of everyday life and adventure?  Are we not struggling for balance in the twin goals of servicing both ambition and destiny?

I hate to put things down into two simple ideas but just for now let me frame the thing on my mind in this way: human life as an empty hole that ambition fills sporadically or human life as a reach for something sublime and away from the everyday tedium of solving immediate problems.

What has been our ambition for so long? I know I used to have these pipe dreams of world domination. I believed in the great advance of public acts and notoriety. I saw a better world as a natural state of the world in my image. But I was nine or ten with two much literature on the subject to comprehend what the outside world was really like. After a while, after a few years, I had a community of opinions of who I should be. I adjusted. It was in with the Law and out with the Journalism because my talents were weighed on an imaginary false scale and I was told to adjust upward. And I did. I always thought of it as not being alone. I wanted to be common by then and by that I mean I did not want to stick out of any class or group. Ambition became survival. In the wider world of expectations I was paralyzed by fear, by doubt and by the idea that I was indeed different but not in any positive way. I was the proverbial sore thumb and my ambitions could not be said because they were dumb and somewhat sinful. Not that I had plans on sinning (that always just happened) but I thought the very idea of ambition was sin.

Ambition is where you want to go and destiny is where you will go. If you are a free will sort of person it is about ambition. You will even summarize you ambition as your destiny. That is you will say that accepting your destiny will give you some real ambition. If you are of a more esoteric bent you will find yourself looking for signs in the metaphysical sphere that tie your destiny and ambition together. You will say talent leads to goal and goal leads to acts and acts become habit and habit becomes destiny. Now, it is not an either/or proposition. I routinely find myself in both places, thinking of the weight of my decisions as well as looking for signs in the ether of some greater reality to come.

All of this is easier than just sitting still. All of this is more natural to the hurried state of modern life than taking a chance on asking the right questions about your own soul. The life we live now has told us that paying for the things we need and do not need is the call of the moment. It is ambition to be in the black and it is destiny to make progress without the pilgrimage.

I have no easy answers to this question except that I know the disquiet in my soul does not go down with any victory or any defeat. Negative or positive vibes do not adequately feed my very human but existential hungers. I suspect that if I wrote down all my goals in life and ticked them off one by one I would still feel this disquiet. I suspect that dealing with daily life head on will not cure it and I know hiding under the bed from troubles will not silence it either. My ambitions are too small for it and my destiny is still too unknown to comfort it. I still have to look up and find meaning in connection.

That I have not been doing at all. That I have to remember is the call to wake up. Ambition is where I want to go and destiny is where I will go. Both are beyond my immediate grasp. All I have is the promise of love and the doubts I bring to Him on my knees and in my heart.

“In and then Out.”

H,

We are not called to the inner part of things so we can ignore or run away from the outer part of things. The one flows into the other. There is no escaping into God and higher “purpose” to the detriment of kindness, patience, humility and the other fruits of a life lived in God. The gifts of God are always inferior to the fruits of a life in God. The former will not get you into the Kingdom but the latter is what the Kingdom is all about.

We must go in for sure but we must not get insular. The world is where the light is to be shown. We dwell in the light so we can shine in the dark. The arms of God are not for constant consolation but rigorous discipleship. There is nothing weak about love, about honesty, about giving a damn or about change. There are no higher callings on the human spirit and in trying to navigate the world without this inner compass we find that it is much easier to hate or judge or dislike, to lie, to become indifferent and to stay exactly as we are.

The great call is to find our peace, our dwelling, our very home in the heart of the Creator. The great calling is to make that the way we see everything else. And everyone else. 

“In and then Out.”

H,

It is hard to carve the role of intimacy out of the culture of fear. We are told we are to fear God for His severity and appease Him for His goodness. Of course there are many reasons this makes no sense. First of the all the root word “fear” as used here is more akin to acknowledgement, cognisance or respect than fear. It is more like saying “trust” than “shiver before”. And it is not to stroke some universe building ego. He does not feed on His children. All instructions to “fear” God are from a place of peace. The idea is that you are better off if you do. It is for your benefit. It is you that will move up. He remains eternally unmoved by anything.

The second point is that there is nothing we are told to do that is outside His own nature. He only asks us to be more like Him. To make this point, He came down. He came to show us this original intent. He does not tell us to be selfless so He can be selfish. Claims that God cares for nothing but His impersonal “Will” make no sense at all.

The God we can all get into is beyond the stoic representations of Old Testament interpretations or the closer inflections of New Testament prophecies. There is a vastness there that no sixty six books can truly capture. That we are to see Him in there as a guide to a very narrow path does not mean that He is bound within those pages. He is bound by nothing. We are the ones that need to walk the narrow path. In Him it becomes a wide path to keep us from slipping. In Him we become eternal beings of inherent being. This is how we must see ourselves now. This is how we live out of our hungry hearts. We are eternal beings of inherent value loved by the creator of everything. 

“In and then Out.”

H,

It is funny how you always tell me: “do not be afraid.” I always immediately think: “of what?” I never feel I am afraid of anything but that is mostly because I am afraid of everything. Well, not everything, most things. I have always had this feeling that the sky is about to fall. Not only that but I know the specific reason why it is about to fall. This fear, this idea that the future most hold only bad things and the present will have no solution, is at the root of all my faux predictions about why my world is about to end. I should be told to curb the fear. I have a lot of it.

The thing about fear is that some of it is actually true. There is a fear of things that might happen and then they do. We are crushed by an expected end. The idea, however, of the Christian worldview is that no fear is fatal if we live in the light of God. The expected thing coming to pass is not the end of the story. It is a line, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter. The book is long and never ending. We have to put our fear in the context of the eternal nature of the sacred life. It is not that we will not see the outcome, it is that we will see way beyond that.

There has to be an inner life of faith to speak to the outer feeling of fear. Fear makes us inert. Faith makes us plausible, proactive. The only cure to crippling fear is a faith in something above fear. To the Christian this is in God, in that view of history and in the picture painted of the world to come. All things will resolve in the sacred curve of time into reality.

This is not an easy view to take. It is not a stand that living on earth will help you get better at. It is not enough to take the easy placebo of positive thinking couched as faith. It is an invitation to find real faith in the arms of your father. Not to be fake but forthright. Not to put on a smile but perhaps to start with tears and on your knees. To be open to the inner life of God is the best way to face the outer world. No one will do this perfectly. There will be ups and downs. It will take a minute. Yet like all real cures it is not a one-time event but the trajectory of a life lived in faith.

“When everything matters.”

H,

To the great struggles we have with daily life and daily death we cannot afford to give in to the idea of futility. The idea that nothing will ever change is silly but the idea that choices change nothing is dangerous. It is also a lie. The Christian practice is based on the foundational idea that we can change. In fact, after I have fallen from one of my numerous high horses and succumbed to some ignoble act, the first thing that comes to my mind, and I count this as the counsel of the Holy Spirit, is the idea that I can change. The comfort that I will not be this way forever. Some say that this sort of thinking means that we are taking grace for granted. Well, first I think that there is nothing more important than taking grace for granted; counting on it and expecting it to always be there like oxygen and gravity. We do not weigh our steps over physical laws. It is silly to do so over spiritual law.

The second thing is realism. We are constantly falling down. Covertly or overtly we are always breaking some of the literal law of love and well-being. This is not a consolation it is a fact. The law is put before us as a mirror of our own grotesqueness. It is a measuring line for the depth of our depravity and our foiled attempts to love. It is not futile to love or to make choices to love. It is futile to think that failure to do so is final and then nothing matters after that. Everything will always matter. Our struggles are a sign. Our failures, our successes, our seeming failure and our seeming success. It all counts in the beautiful progression of love through time that will culminate in the restoration of everything.

This is the bullion of our faith. All the evil in us and in the world will be addressed. That is what judgement is. It is the rising up of the great and eternal flag of justice over the temporal fever of our present nightmare. The disciplines of God extended through all of history and put in practice by love and grace.

My heart breaks over death, rape, murder, the slaughter of innocents and the general darkness on our patch of earth and beyond. My heart bleeds when these are in my thoughts as victim and as perpetrator of the most violating acts. I long for the sword of God. I long for the new heart in me and the new heart at the centre of all existence. I long for a world where everything matters again. 

“When everything matters.”

H,

It is because everything matters that we are free to be part of this great adventure while freeing ourselves from the burden of pride, the need to be seen and the ego that propels us to think we are the centre of things. The human experience is not at the centre of the universe. The human soul is not the most important thing that ever was. This does not mean it is nothing. It means it is part of everything and will find its true bearing by being in everything eventually. Imagine it like this: in the ocean there are no drops of water separate from other drops of water. Everything is one thing. Vast and endless in quantity but one thing tied together. This is what I believe eternity is. The binding together of all things into one.

Free of that speculation, which is all it is, and free of trying to outshine and outdo one another, we can learn to be part of one another and bound into God. There will not be a missing drop, a missing part of the great flock of Christ or a missing person. The burden, we are told, is light because all we have to be is who we are. All we have to do is be.

Imagine this: not that we are free of consequence or that we do not see the world as something worth saving but that we know what final consequence is and our faith and fate in it is to be a person more like our original, natural self as we are being forged into eternal identity. That the troubles of the world do weigh heavy but that is only us forming into God’s heart. That we fight crippling inertia and vigorously pursue our own path and that is only walking with God. That we learn to be of service to others and love them not as tools or emblems of our value but as fellow travellers and as part of a family in God. 

“When everything matters.”

H,

Everything matters but we are not in control of everything. There is a vast difference between empathy and megalomania as much as there is between wisdom and indifference. We are not in charge of everything and in fact we are not in control of anything except that space within our own lives where we choose left or right. This limited view of vision is a blessing not a curse. This untroubled sense of being part of a larger body is vital to the things that are to come.

We will always feel some things deeply but this is curated by the fact that we will be indifferent to other things. The things outside the sphere of our concern may be as deeply in need of attention as the thing within it. This should humble us. Our myopic views of what matters are not truth. They are only as far as we can see.

There is the grating need for a lifelong purpose in all of us and when we find something to latch on to we hold on for dear life. We tie together our value, our ability to love, our bond with God and our light on this earth to this one idea of what matters and build a life around it. This is a mistake. Not that we should not focus but this sort of narrow vision focuses on doing not being and on the specific one-eyed appreciation of something that may need more than one line of vision. There are fires all around. There are issues with humanity that confound learning and wisdom. We should not step back from one way of seeing the world because it is hopeless. We should step back because we need to learn more.

So, what should we do? Remember the need for connection. We connect with God first then we connect with others. There is no one in place of the other. God is not an escape from the world. In fact, you become more alive in it if you let the light in.

We connect with others because this is the church; a group of enlightened despots and tricksters realizing the truth about all of existence and seeking to listen to, learn from and serve each other. Fight against the need to be a lone ranger. There are no enemies but the one. There is a deeper call always underneath the surface of things. It is not a call to do something to preserve the status quo of a world manifestly unjust and prone to decay. We are seeking a better world. A place where everything does matter. 

“When everything matters.”

H,

There is often this grain of thought in popular culture about the tiny nature of the human experience compared to the vastness of the universe. The tale is spun that we do not really matter, our efforts are all dust and we will simple be forgotten by time and space when we become extinct as a race. I admit I like this line. It suits my nihilistic ideas about the nature of being. It had a nice ring to it when I was much younger but I am not sure this was because of some scientific enthusiasm for the vastness of outer space.

My aims were still very close to earth and my particular patch of it. I felt if nothing mattered because our time on earth was a grain of sand on an endless beach then nothing I did truly mattered. I was trying to be free of guilt, of anger, of disappointment and of the fear of giving account for the stewardship of a life I barely understood. I was afraid of engaging life so the idea of being the third planet to the left in one solar system of many more unknown meant that it did not matter what I did. It was all an abyss, anyway.

Of course this is a silly way to look at life. It is almost as silly as saying everything I do is of such extreme importance that I will shake the fabric of time itself by picking the red pill over the blue pill. There is a place where everything matters but it is not in my head or in my inflated or deflated opinions about myself.

If we are eternal beings, if we live in the light of some cosmic wisdom from the steady hand of a creator and if we fall into line with the wide view of love then everything we do matters in a more introspective way than we imagine. There are more depths in the human soul fathomable than in the Universe unfathomable and, as yet, unreachable. We cannot avoid the imperative of being a full human being for the speculative fiction of the universe uncharted. I did this a lot as a child.

Growing up needs a deeper look at what it means to matter.

“True.”

H,

There is something simple about being in God. It is easy to be open with a being that knows all about your secret flaws. In theory, at least. We are wired to present the pictures that avoid disappointment. We are usually trying to pull some wool over the eyes of those we want to love us. We say they can’t handle it but the truth is we cannot handle them thinking less of us. We need them to love the bright spots and count it much more than the occasional slips.

The problem is that these things are not occasional slips. They are perpetual states. The Christian worldview says that we are not basically good with occasional lapses but basically sinful with occasional lapses into the light. All we are doing is avoiding being bad and doing enough good not to be ostracised by family, by lovers, by society and by God. We are keeping the horrible thoughts inside and the horrible acts within legal bounds. We are not being true to our real selves.

When you see this then you see everything. What God is proposing by grace is not how to make us better people but how to take us from being fatally flawed to being eternally redeemed. There is a difference. This is why being curt with God is such a bad idea. There is a mother within God that longs to nurture. There is a father in God that longs to embrace all our flaws and unspool them. There is a friend in God that longs to walk beside us. There is a lover in God that longs to be closer than close has ever been.

We have to let that He and Her and Us and Them all in. This is the only true way to change. 

“True.”

H,

The truth is never easy to say or live. There is something about trying to live an honest life in all respects that does not rhyme with the practical life on earth. Everything is dressed up, polished and presented to fit in with the zeitgeist of the moment. That Geist isn’t always the most sensible thing. Once it was slavery, the superiority of civilizations over one another and the idea of a woman being property and not person. We know now this is all wrong but in that age it was all life was to the vast majority of recorded human beings on the earth. It is story we are fed now.

Right or wrong is not relative in this larger sense. Freedom, choice, democracy, human rights, equality and mutual respect have been the highest echoes of the human ideal but it used to apply to specific races and groups within a particular race. The universal application of these ideals is a fairly recent concept. It is has always been right but it has not always been true to everyone. In a real sense, it is not always true now to every mind on earth. It is said in polite society but society is not ordered to give every person their due application of inherent value.

We are no saints ourselves. It is has often been easy to group people into them and us. We have always sought enemies instead of conflicting ideas or ideals. We have been told not to hate and we forget that we “wrestle not against flesh or blood”. We make enemies of the transient and forget the eternal story of love that wraps us all together.

What is true has to be true forever. The bible, perfect exemplar as it is, revises itself within its own script to become a more perfect reflection of the eternal life of Love in God. We move from a malevolent law giver to a compassionate graceful leader. We cannot take everything the saints said at face value. They are not Christ. We cannot ban women from leading worship, from speaking up in church or allow slaves to continue to be loyal to their masters. We must move into what is eternally true: we must learn slowly to love everybody because that is where God lives. 

“True.”

H,

It is true that as you grow older former times fold into romantic history or sullen tragedy. The history you connect with in joy becomes sweeter because it is gone. The darkness you cannot take becomes this haunting ghost that follows you around. We are not all the same and it shows in this; how we deal with the history and tragedy of our own lives. In dealing with these two strands that form our being we become more or less true or untrue.

If we are untrue then we construct a great dam against feeling the negative aspects of growing into ourselves. We let in all the good stuff. We reinvent the evil stuff. We make unicorns out of dragons and force back the dark into a single blot that we can wash away. We write fiction. We act like a character in the great play. We become heroes.

If we are true we carry this heavy weight of being. Living, working, trying to carve meaning out of daily life becomes the task of our age. We are upset and closed off when the tide of evil comes. We need the talking cure, the listening ear and perhaps, the light of God. There is no time for fiction. We are in the great play and it may go on forever.

I am not sure we are wholly true and untrue. We mix and match depending on memory or experience. There are times when you would tell me a story about our growing up together and it would seem so stale, so free of what I felt in that real moment and so much more like a fairy tale that I would call you a liar. My own version was no better. It was dark and nihilistic and there was no good in anything. Perhaps the truth was somewhere in the middle.

Perhaps in learning to listen to each other without judgement we may stumble upon what is true.

“The disciplines: prayer as connection.”

H,

The ideal place we want is to move from discipline to nature. It has to move from the conscious learning of how to connect to the unconscious reflex of making it part of our lifestyle. There is a good reason this is so alien to us. It has been shoved down our throats as duty since we were children. We have been told that it is what we owe God before He solves our problems. We have to do it. It is required. God sits lonely in heaven waiting for a call so He can dispatch goodness to the soiled earth. He cannot act unless we act. We give Him power. The world is upside down because we are not yet on our knees.

We might not be able to unbundle all the nonsense in those false claims in one conversation but I think it is good to note that things may get lost in metaphor or analogy from their original meaning or intent. It might well be that we are taking the rational path to an emotive conclusion. Let me put it this way: if we are looking up to God for answers would He be looking down to us for attention? Does that tell us of what love is or is that merely an exchange of goods and services? Is the business of heaven joy or just business? Something does not quite chime with this image of a tin-pot, petty god more akin to a vampire who needs the praise and worship blood of creation before he moves in our favour.

When I think of prayer I do believe He wants to live in that space in us. I think as a father, as a mother, as a sibling, as close friend and as lover, God longs to live in the town of our hearts. I think prayer as connection is the most valuable part of that we have before the crucial face to face to come. I believe that love is compelling, both ways.

You know what I am going to say next. Do not mock me. When I think of God and prayer I think of Peter Gabriel’s “come talk to me.” Where truth is absent or unknown, honesty will do. I first heard the depths of this vulnerable and heart breaking song when I was a kid and so maybe I have always identified as the child in the words. It is about a father who is so heartbroken by the absence of connection with his child that he pleads for a conversation. I never connected it with my earthly parents. What Nigerian child wants to talk to their parents that deeply? For some reason I always connected with the song as a call to the sublime and the divine nature of things:

the wretched desert takes its form, the jackal proud and tight
In search of you I feel my way through the slowest heaving night
Whatever fear invents, I swear it make no sense
I reach out through the border fence
Come down, come talk to me

In the swirling, curling storm of desire unuttered words hold fast
with reptile tongue, the lightning lashes towers built to last
Darkness creeps in like a thief and offers no relief
why are you shaking like a leaf
come on, come talk to me

Ah please talk to me
won’t you please talk to me
we can unlock this misery
Come on, come talk to me

I did not come to steal
this all is so unreal
Can't you show me how you feel now
Come on, come talk to me

I can imagine the moment
Breaking out through the silence
All the things that we both might say
And the heart it will not be denied
Till we're both on the same damn side
All the barriers blown away

I said please talk to me
if you'd just talk to me
Unblock this misery
if you'd only talk to me

And so I did. 

“The disciplines: prayer as connection.”

H,

It has always been hard to connect immediate problems of life on earth with the high idea of a present God. We might see the Godhead in overarching themes but not in the daily drudgery of making a living or framing a life. This also means that God becomes not just a distant being but also a useful one. A disposal presence for the little stuff and inconvenient spaces of our lives but a fine refuge and help when we get into the more absorbing troubles of purpose and being. This dichotomy creates the space between what we profess and how we live.

Now, we all do this. We all reduce God. At least I can speak for both of us. We have had many conversations either way. The first one would be about how we can tackle some real issue in front of us, something based in brown earth and in need of a practical response that trumpets, robes and winged creatures might find unappealing. We think through it and we say such nonsense as “well, God gave us a brain to solve problems. We can think our way out of this.” The second one is trickier problem, a little rugged path and a mountainous quest. The thinking has failed and we are out of our depth and suddenly it is time to get the old miracle worker in the room. Cue: song, dance, lights, camera, prophecy and action.

In both responses we have missed the point of the whole thing.

Prayer connects us to God in the most intimate way possible in our present state. It is intrusive because we are reminded of our helplessness. Our great fear is to be helpless, to appear weak, to not be a hero and to be only a small part of a much larger wheel. Our great fear it to realise who we truly are. We cannot have intimacy without revelation. We cannot come close to the light and not be aware of the many plot holes in our ongoing storylines. We cannot come to real prayer without the vulnerability that we so desperately avoid in real life for fear of being weak and the much greater fear of being used by others because of weakness.

We forget that we are not being weak to lovers, friends, landlords, rivals, parents or even ourselves. We are being ourselves in front of our Creator. That is always a good place to start. 

“The disciplines: prayer as connection.”

H,

It has been a while since we spoke. I do not want to dwell on the details. I would rather focus on the recovery: the idea that we can get back on track and restart the honest back and forth in our pursuit of what is true and if that holds true through all things and is in all things.

We have always had a growing distrust for formula and fixed views of God. This is not because of any inherent distrust of the well laid paths of old. I think it is because we have seen formula fail and stoic views come up against reality without any real movement of the latter. If what we believe has no real take on present reality, if it does not answer to the real state of things and if it does not bring light to the darkened rooms of everyday life then, as A. Paul once noted: “we are of all…most miserable.”  We know from experience that mere religion, the objects and tenets and practices of any one single expression of our faith, cannot speak to all shades of the human experience. We know that one word here can be used to enslave some and another to empower others. We know the high price that has been paid by countless individuals throughout history as mad men, despots and mistaken prophets try to summarize truth into the petty box of the human ideal. There has to be more than chapels to make Christ real.

And beyond the high sprung ideas above about the nature of being there is the very personal struggle of attempting a life of value. We know the pitfalls, setbacks, surprises and ultimate failure of our demi-god state. We are more like lustful Zeus than noble Elohim.

We cannot get away from the ordinary life that daily calls us to be better than we could ever possibly be by telling us to let go of fear, to connect the great prose of the spirit with the full passion of the human heart, not for balance, such a dirty word, but to be fully alive and awake. To be in life and in love.

This daily encasement of our frail state needs breaking through. This is the first of a few letters on how we break through the stifling nature of our present states and reach out to be the fully realized bastions of grace and love we were always meant to be. It starts and ends with the most basic, and so most important, discipline there is in the inward sense: prayer and this as connecting with God, every day.

“Joy.”

. H,

There is this tension between looking at the world as it is and the world as it will be in the fabled “fullness of time”. We are constantly shutting off from the great dark across the face of the earth to find small spots of light were things work a little better and there is a little less tragedy staring us in the face. In fact the great comfort of church and family is that we can create out of the chaos of the world around us an oasis of calm and a place where things make sense.

There is nothing wrong with this.

However, it is not the full story. Sometimes, love really is pain and facing the pain around us. It is not that love should be dark and morbid and give us that strange satisfaction from sad love songs of the corny persuasion. It is that love is the answer to all that muck (well, except corniness, there is no cure for that sand trap). We should be bolder in our expression of love as a light in the dark.

Now, we have these fears. Reasonable in present context. How much should we love? How much can we give? Will we not be used? How much will it hurt to truly love? Where should we spend our love for great returns? These are the questions of balance and serenity we seek before we love. We have been told there is a prim and proper way to love and live. There is not. We have been told we need to balance these things for safety and levity. There is no balance in God. It is an all or nothing thing. It is light or dark, hot or cold and in or out. We should not mistake the pilgrim’s progress we are in for the capitulation of careful love. There is no such thing. This will cost you everything. You will not be free of pain. You will learn to count it as joy.

As the great poet says:

So you hit the lights/ and I'll lock the doors
Let's say all of the things/ that we couldn't before
Won't walk away/won't roll my eyes
They say love is pain,/well darling, let's hurt tonight
If this love is pain/then honey let's love tonight

Or something to that effect. Love is messy, love is pain, and to care is to have

your heart broken over and over again. There is nothing wrong with the

 sensitive soul. There is no such thing as feeling too much. Broken hearts are

 the best hearts. There is a joy ahead in the fields of eternal healing and rest. 

There is always space for them in the great arms of God. 

“Joy.”

H,

There is a gnarly need to be someone different. It eats at the centre of who we are and what we believe. It tells us what our joy should be but not what it really is. It makes all the things we presently are never enough and it convinces us that we need this drive, this dissatisfaction to propel ourselves to the illusory “next level” of existence. It is the carrot that is perpetually out of reach. It is the northern star you may follow straight off the ends of the earth. The deception is that this state is reachable by mere grit. The deception is that this version of joy is reachable at all. What ever happened to simple joy?

Do you remember all our young tales of falling in love? We thought we had that sorted. Love needed pain needed anxiety needed touch needed fire. Love songs and epic poems and the constant fighting in the dark, the fabled knight in armour parody that reduced the objects, yes objects in every true sense, of our affections to something less than a human: a mountain to be overcome and not a person we could talk to calmly and discover the depths of being human.

Do you remember our dreams of conquering the world? Talent and hard work and down with our fathers. We had this enormous chip on corporate shoulder. We were the hitmen for the new age of how things ought to be. Nothing deeper but we thought we were. Nothing wider but we thought our gospel would spread like wildfire over oily seas. We did not say any of this, God forbid. We meant it though. It was the message deep in our hearts and in places we dare not look now. What ever happened to simple joy?

Now, weather beaten and coupled up, daughters in tow and old dreams + visions making more sense than ever before, we have to give in to joy again. This childlike state of wonder and love, our master tells us, is the only way to grow up in the ways that count. We have to believe after every setback, press on after every pushback, love after every betrayal and speak up when it is safer to simply shut up. The things we were always going to be we cannot force. The people we are now we must love. The transformative work of constant redemption we must accept as our joy. We count it all joy because we are in that tiny speck of the rest of our lives. The light is ahead of us. The light is rising inside of us. The dark can have what is past. We are living in joy.

“God of the broken.”

M,

I should say that this is not about doom or gloom. There is nothing dark about the state of bliss that is loving God. It may not seem this way. In fact, it rarely feels that way in the working out of your salvation. Yet, three score and ten or whatever time we have left is a tiny grain of sand on the beach multiplied by infinity in comparison to what we have forever. The glory is worth the temporary pain.

And it never feels like it. That is fine also. Feeling you will find is secondary to knowing. It will take time. We have all the time in the…

The most important thing to know is that you do not walk alone. Isolation makes everything worse. Feeling like the world and everything else is against you is always the recipe for decay. We have to break free of the idea that we are lone rangers, bastions of our own truth and the only good intentioned folk in a sea of snakes. We are not. There are people all around us as well meaning and as flawed as we are. They also suffer the slings and arrows of fate or fortune. On them we must practice how to love.

Above all that is the presence of God. There is nothing like this. You could never get away from it. He is present in everything. He can be present in everything you see. If you would only see. He is already there. If you would only wake up.