“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. 

“God of the broken.”

M,

There is never an easy fix to our broken state. The older I get the more I make peace with the idea that it will take a lifetime to fix what ails me. Perhaps, that is what this life is: a hospital to get well before we step into that eternal stream.

This is not an efficient way to look at it. At least from our vantage point. We look to God as more of a quick fix than a real fix. We follow Him more as a problem solver than a constant companion. It will be hard to imagine God as someone who sits and holds your hand while the disease of this mortal coil winds down and grants you a place in an unseen Valhalla. Death is a morbid topic. Life is the constant zing. We know which one we prefer.

Yet the Holy Writ offers us some real insight into the new view of death. “Oh death where is thy sting?” is our common refrain at funerals and as consolation. It is funny that we say that when the sting is clear at that point. The sting is to those left behind on earth struggling with our own mortality. The “casualties” are those who live with the memories of their dearly departed. The dead are already “well out of it”. 

We see only in part and the part of death we see is not pleasant.  The coil seems truly broken and all possible futures end. I should not be so morbid but I am trying to say that the timetable should be one of hope and expectation not of dread.

The final cure for all the things that are broken in us is to shed our mortality for immortality. Now before I sound like a cult leader advocating for mass suicide, let me clarify. Eternity starts in the heart. It is not to die or to even want to die. It is to see life from an everlasting perspective. It is to live with the idea that everything matters only in the light of values that never change and acts that have only that value to them. The healing to our brokenness is in this great idea. It is not bound by time. There is no hurry. We should be at rest. Let God complete His full work in all of us. No eye can see this work in all its glory. We will see flashes, evidence or stirrings. The trajectory of a human life on earth will not contain all the glory of God. It is just a start.

The final stage of the evolution of the human spirit may well be free of the human body.

So death, where is thy sting?

“God of the broken.”

M,

There is nothing to be ashamed of when we face the God of the broken. There is no sin to hide and no flaw to put under wraps. If we grant His omniscience then we know it is all known anyway. If we understand grace, then we know there is help given for even the direst expressions of our soullessness.

The problem we have is that we do not want to be broken. We have lived so much under the idea of covering up cracks and putting our best foot forward. We exist in the realm where it is weakness to admit weakness. It is folly to appear vulnerable. There is a good reason for this. Extreme honesty is often derided. You will often get advice from people if you even give a hint that you do not know what you are doing. Some of it is well meaning but done with an almost violent hatred of weakness that can seem personal and unpleasant. Some of it is callous. Both are just expressions of a deep fear we all have of being broken up by life. It might take us a lifetime of dramatic events to even let that thought sink in.

Here is the deal, though. We do not come to this hill so we can live out the normal script of the unfounded life. Any direction away from the lie we tell about ourselves is a step into the light. We know from constant hammering on that there are no passive believers and there is no indifferent road in God. The idea of confessing, of looking at our evil first before we take on the world and of putting ourselves in the context of a saviour are the building blocks of the new life we are being made into.

There is no true healing for the undeclared sick. This is not the self-help game. There is no map for those who choose to help heaven help them. This is the life of choice, though. We must admit it. We must say that there is something wrong with the world we live in. We must believe that the great correction of eternity to the nature of all reality must start in us. 

“God of the broken.”

M,

I feel I need to be clear about something off the bat. When I say He is for the broken it does not mean that He is in opposition to the unbroken. I am not saying that all the strong people of the world are excluded from the table of God. That would imply that God is petty and, despite what the scriptures might sometimes seem to suggest, He is not in the least a petty, tin pot god.

It is not that He is God of one side over the other. It is that all sides may not look alike even though they are the same. It is that everyone is broken, cut off from real purpose and set adrift from the eternity that beats in the heart of our fading human lives. When Cadmus called life absurd he was right. Life that ends is absurd. Cut off from the high calling of God to be like Him we are absurd. Everyone is broken. We have more psychology now to break it down into disorders and ailments but everyone has always been broken.

The difference is coming in from the cold and staying out in it. The difference is the solution you choose for your own personal battles with meaning.

He spoke to the poor, the oppressed, the losers, the widowed, the hurt and the criminal because they were broken in the most overt ways. They had little plaster over their festering wounds or none at all. The wheel at the centre of this fallen world had crushed their dreams so they were open to a new reality. This does not mean He picked people open to fantasy. No. He choose those open to the idea that this world was wrong and not enough.

A good analogy is the story of the addict. Imagine that we are all addicts. We are struggling with various fugue states and compulsive but destructive habits that have taken over our lives. We cannot function except to feed our addiction. We cannot see beyond that.

Now, in the brilliant programmes set up to battle addiction they tell you that at some point the addict themselves have to reach rock bottom. They have to see the end of the empty barrel they have been drinking from. Then they are open to all the other steps to freedom. Then they can start to get hold of life again. They will most likely relapse. They will fail and fall and make a thousand mistakes in-between. The vital thing is that they know now that they are broken. They know they cannot live any sort of full life with the addiction in the lead.

It does not come to us naturally to let God in. Even if we are born in a church pew we will experience that moment of crisis that will question all we believe and all we profess. Faith out of fear simply does not work. Covering the cracks simply will not last. We are all going through valleys and mountaintops, all rising and falling and making a mess while doing so.

And finally, It is not that He speaks only to the outwardly broken. He spoke to all men He encountered. He spoke to shady men and women but also pseudo Jewish kings and Roman leaders at the height of civilization of that day. The question is: who listened?

“God of the broken.”

M,

There are no strong tales about the real state of the human soul, are they? None that we will recognise anyway. It is now more fashionable to know what you are doing in work, play and life itself, to have all the answers and be on the progress road, to have suffering pay off in material terms and to not be a burden, a flake or anything that smells of the lower half of the totem pole we have put at the centre of modern life. We wish away the weak states of addiction, mental illness, anxiety, frailty and other ‘dregs’ of the human experience and since most of us only minutely deal with any of these things, we are grateful to an imaginary god that these things have passed over our private houses of self.

We are sadly mistaken. The god we think we pray to when we wish these things away does not really exist. The God that is comes down for broken people and stilled up hearts. He is here for the weak, the poor, the diseased, the fallen, the oppressed and never the oppressor.

We are sadly mistaken because deity looks not at what a man or woman appears to be but what they really are. He sets a high bar by just being and we all fall short. We will not all sell all we have and give to the poor. We will not all die for those we consider wicked. We live in cycles of sublime self-preservation and furious self-justification. We do what we can to look the part and sometimes tend to the garden within with brash strokes and ailing platitudes to cover up the things we cannot face. No one is perfect. Everyone is broken. There is not poetry to hide it. No roman a clef to obscure the truth in. We are all of course, fallen from original purpose and in need of some serious saving to make life mean anything at all other than attending to things that should be dismissed to begin with.

This is fine, though. There is no need for panic. He is the God for the broken.

“Of brutality and love: God”

The talking shadow had its day

It stretched, it lingered, and it failed

I had to sit inside that wake

Not quite believing, not quite at pace

I found the words but not the page

A living writer that ate the sage

I did not know it, did not feel it then

Talking to the gods, seemed out of place

And still this moral centre of things

This call to be straight rather than bent

While bending in order to reach

That slipping light, that rolling height

I did not see the symmetry of things

Never being good at math

It escaped me

Until I could see it as a story

Yet, this is not that tale

This is something else

Trapped in my heart since I was a child

Something beautiful, something constant, something holy and wild

The constant failing

The hidden despair

The trial and error of cosmic love

Does not move you, God

“Of brutality and love: Friends"

If I could paint the future

And not worry if it was blue or red

I would paint it in our colours, our marching band, our winning team, our trial before test before trial before test again

I would paint it in the blood red of friendship and the sharp grey of flaws

For we did not just fall down

We were wiped with the floors

If I had an image of things done and not done

I would make it straighter, less lame and with more bombs

These are the heroic quests from the soul

They do not tell us anything, not anything whole

Cliff notes, blurbs, dreadful summaries, one liners

The truth is far more circumspect

The angles bruised and worn out

There is no perfection, there are no heroes

No villains either

Just moments, good and bad

When you carried or you were the bag

If I had a recording

Of every single voice

Every football game, ever silly knavish trick

It would serve no use

Until honesty wins the day

So all I have in parting are the things we used to be

Painting, picture, recording

A manifesto never lived up to

Drawing down into the realm of grace

Faster only to discover

We need to move at the same pace

This is all about arriving at the same place

I had a dream once about lagging behind

I felt stronger alone

Like a fish on land about to die

Thinking, this is breathing

No, this is dying

I had a dream once

About wearing a crown

Now I see those crucial thorns

Put it on me now and still

I now can see the future

It is painted blue and red

Our colours, our marching band, our winning team, and our trial before test before trial before test again

              The blood red of friendship and the sharp grey of flaws

The fall down

Being wiped with the floors

The rise

Together.

“Of brutality and love: Family”

The buzz of the years

The hype of all our secret fears

This insistence on going old and cold

Fevers of the past and healing of the present

Would it be that family could always be there?

The constant experiment with links formed by blood

Born into the same disaster

So PTSD together

There is something unfound about all of this

Lookalikes in framed pictures

Habits, passions, failings

Generational wealth or poverty

Broken cycles of common songs

Reclaiming the ancient sign of the hurt

With mother in her lip turned fame

Saying, if one, if one, if one could name

And father with his upturned grace

Claiming

I was, I was, I was the s%&*!

And brother with the telepathic gaze

Sharing one mind and one experience for days

And sister with the virtues intake

Spinoza, Descartes, Plato, Parmenides

And sister again, and oh that human stain

Creeping out of self

Just to stand in forgiveness and the rain

And what is this ancient pain?

This longing, this fear of loss and rage

I need you but I need you not

Till finger bleeds

And they cover all.

“Of brutality and love: Daughter”

Fredo,

The open palm squeeze of the cheek

A smile for all ages from pristine lips

In the great hold of your littered laughter

Keith Moon,

Drumming on tables, on floorboards, on me

Trying to find the beat, one and a two and a three

Bump,

Scared of a song that does not apply

Looking for signs of tragedy

For comedy is never free

The girl,

Grandmother moniker and constant refrain

Pretty in pink but handsome in blue

Just a name but not a destination

Nins,

Nickname from the great woman I know

The heart always fire; the heart never snow

Virtue is honesty is passion is gold

Essie,

Nothing prepares for a daughter like you

One handed typing because you never let go

Constant harassment and wallet grabs

Rolling in sleep and walks through grass

Learning curve and open heart

I hope to one day

Be worthy

Of your

Hype.

“Of brutality and love: lover”

The first flake is always of ice

Then fire, then lithium, then water, then life

The submergence, the melting, the frostlike end

Then a face emerges from heartland’s doom

A spectre of something, a hint of everything

There is no other love than love itself

That is what you tell yourself

But you look for every shade and every rock draw

Under every pile of distant pain

And you are brutal with it

Aggressive, numbing your fists by pounding at hopeful castles

Till you arrive at the one that has side-fruit

And it is not enough

But the seconds are there

You swallow them up

Every one

Battered and bloody from internal injury

Smiling through heartache

The liar of the century

Sitting in pain

But dancing with Newfoundland energy

While the bergs merge

And inside, the longest winter

Until

Flashes of light across a common face

Reading yourself in her or him

(It is a common fate)

Finding you can be understood

And this does not stop the argument

But it makes it better

Sitting with you through rough trees and ascents

Falling behind over rent fees and attempts

Fighting and falling and still bloody fists

But four no longer two

A partner, a crime, an object, a crew

There are no sequels to a life of the heart

It is open or close

Come up or stay home

We are pilgrims in process

Sick beds and open heart transplants

Changing in the midst of the storm

Finding ourselves at the moment of our deaths

Joined to live and joined to die

In process

In process

In process

With an end

What we must never fear is the idea of regret

The things that have a taste of sting but not the sting itself

Loving you is my corporate stance

My billboard, my calling card, my purpose for today, my awkward dance

I like to think you are better than me

Then I am angry when you do not always bleed

But no one is better

No one is worse

We are just the same

After all these hard fought battles and schemes

A thousand more to go

It does not matter

Brutality is the language of earth

Love is the basis of heaven

We live in the in-between

We experience the leaning thing

I am always on a boat with you in my mind

Playing the music that is for you and is also mine

Not yesterday

Not still

Perhaps,

I love the rain

The most

When

It stops.

"Your fire is dim"

H,

                            

I remember all those years ago when it seemed the fire would burn bright forever. I did not see it as a phase. We had our great Pentecost moment and it seemed like we would spread out and change the world in utter restlessness and bravado. Of course that did not happen. Life happens to everyone. Life breaks us all, the great poet said. It is supposed to, the great wind whispers.

We are not here to build worlds and create legacies of despair under the creaking weight of self-fulfilment. The fallen kingdom of self is an act of grace and disappointment is often just an opportunity to make an adjustment in how we see things and how we live. That sounds like the discredited science of self-help gurus but sometimes the bitter medicine of nectar is true. Cliche sometimes hit the spot marked “x”.

The light going dim is nothing but a learning curve that points to our own humanity. When the Christ spoke of seed falling on different kinds of surfaces he was mapping the whole trajectory of our faith. Sometimes we need to hear something once to produce the fruit and other times we need to hear it over the course of our lives. The flame is fine as long as it stays on.

And, it never really goes out. It may seem so. We might give it all up and go follow our own nature to that logical conclusion but something will be wrong. Once you enter the circle there will always be the shadow of it in your mind. You will carry it with you wherever you go. You were re-made this way. You will have to hide it deep down and cover it with unhappy layer over unhappy layer to make it seemingly silent. This is an eternal flame, after all.

It will be easier to let it grow out again. Even in captivity, disgraced and blind and alone, Samson’s hair started growing again. The moment he chose to touch it again his life regained focus and purpose in those last violent seconds. Isn’t that a powerful parable for a fire coming back to life and catching on? The blundering, lustful, disobedient warrior finally seeing when he had no eyes? The Judge of Israel becoming his true name in the last moments of his life.

He sits now in the pantheon of heroes to the life of faith.

We all have our struggles, drawbacks, flaws, some of them serious, and delusions about who we truly are. Yet we have these stories, this book, this grace, this faith and these reminders that the love of God is the true fire in our hearts. We can fail to recognize it many times but it will never go out. It is better we look at it so we can live.

And that life, more abundantly.

Amen. 

"Your fire is dim"

H,

Prayer is our connection to everything else. There is nothing bigger than it in terms of connecting or re-connecting to God. It has taken this bad color in our recent religion; an outward flourish instead of any inner sense of being and living. It has become like any other chant to any unknown god.

Yet the abuse of something does not negate its ultimate truth.

Of course the last thing you want to do when your fire is dim is show it to God. We all have the fallen virus in our bones and blood. When He (the generic “he”, of course) comes calling, we run and we hide. On one level it is the dumbest thing to do. It is like having a fire about to go out in winter and running away when you see a flame coming toward you to replenish your smouldering wick. It is also the most sensible thing to do. A fire coming towards you is still a fire coming towards you. Fear and dread my still be the most logical response to the fiery presence of the living God.

Especially if He is unknown.

We are Christians because we believe that He can be known. We relate to the idea of God with us in every sense. We know the fire is one of heart. We know that when it consumes it revives, when it hurts it heals and when it kills, it resurrects. We bear the “slings and arrows of fate” because we believe that we are bearing witness to the greatest truth of all: eternity is what matters and time on earth only matters in relation to eternity.

Our fire is dim but our head is unbowed. We are of non-bowing ilk.

We do not bow to sin or wrongdoing, of others and from ourselves, not to transient power and lucid madmen on plastic thrones, not to failure or the failure that is seeming success at too high a price of self-worth and real self, not to trances, false visions, ideas, falsehoods, false gods and tin displays of worthless power.

We bow to only one being in the Universe. Not because He is spectral and we cannot reach Him. But because He is closer than close and He does not speak in words. He speaks in love. And we got His great letter. It was imprinted on a cross, it filled up an empty tomb and showed up as fire on the heads of our brothers and sisters from two thousand years ago.

Our fire may go dim but in Him, it cannot die. 

"Your fire is dim"

H,

That is enough talk about flames that flutter. How do we fan them back into a flame? How do we re-join the eternal circle and begin to fill alive again?

Now, we know that effort will not do here. We need effort for a good many things but not when we stand before God. In that presence is where we learn the hardest trick of all: standing still. We are to learn it till it is no longer a trick but now a habit and then no longer a habit and just how we live. We are to learn helplessness that leads to prayer, a true appreciation of our many flaws that leads to humility and a true appreciation of what divine love is that leads to transformation. These things are not the checklists of the soul. That is always a bad idea. A personal inventory without a guiding light or a low moment is an exercise in the ego as the driving force of all actions and words. Ego is not a bad word. It just cannot save us. It will lead to more bad decisions than good ones. We have been told of a better path.

I digress. How do we stand still? We start with prayer. There is nothing more helpless than telling your story to God. It is almost like you can hear him disagree and agree at the same time. You can hear yourself grow more selfish as you list your wants, less holy as you confess your desires and more wrong-footed as you pray with solutions already in mind. There is something deeply artificial about the start of prayer. It breaks down as the hours pass and the spirit moves and you feel connected to something above your years, your petty problem solving and your deep need to avoid or engender conflict at all cost.

Prayer is the key. It is the starting block of our great recovery.

We ought to try it. Even, today.

"Your fire is dim."

H,

There is certainly no denying that everyone’s fire will go dim at some point. The winds are up and there is constant threat of drowning in the black waters of normal life. The difference is if the fire will die out completely or if it will come alive again. That is the choice before us all. This is the much touted free will of the soul.

In one great sense once you give in to the utter reality we now call truth, there is no turning away from it. It will haunt you as ghost or embolden you as spirit for the rest of your life on earth. You can lapse but you cannot forget the first day the whole universe made sense in your head and, more crucially, in your heart. It will colour everything you do and you can no longer be indifferent about the great argument about being. You will pick a side and you will be passionate about it. It will make sense to you. There is an unbridgeable gap between the two viewpoints: one points to beauty and poetry and a creator’s heart while the other points to randomness and that dark abyss in pre-creation and takes the story on from there with a different cause if not a different outcome. You can see the viewpoint I believe in from my words. I know what you believe. We have gone past all that.

The question becomes about viability in the modern world. We are not prone to turning the other cheek or giving over all of us or visiting prisons. Yet, that is not the problem. There is work to be done to align us with the divine heart and we accept that. I think the problem becomes how much work is to be done. This is when dismay sets in. This is when serpentine logic taunts us with ideas of all things being equally the same and no idea over deity more superior to the other. In relativity we find the idea that our choices have no meaning and no bearing on real events. It becomes like everything else: we choose what is most convenient because it is all going the same way, after all.

This is where I think our particular flame is in trouble. It is all becoming the same to us. There is no difference between deep and shallow, right or wrong, before and after. We are in the same game with the same end result. We have forgotten the fundamental difference between trying to be someone and being who we are.

And do you know why I am not so worried?

To realize this great flaw, or any of the many still dormant or active in our volcanic hearts, is proof that the fire is still on.