About Amina....

She's an unwelcome shutter on the worst of her days

And despite the bad moods, she won't go away

She's as stubborn as winter and as kind as the sun

And she won't freeze or burn anyone

On most days she drives me home, out of her way

And when I say "drive safe" I mean it, today

Cause I'm a tough luck friend

I reckon she'll stay with me til the end

And it means more than I pretend

Her car's like a sauna made mostly of smoke

And it glides back to hers most late nights like a ghost

And nothing is said unless it needs to be

I'll watch a movie, she'll fall asleep

She's one of those who when you're talking, you'll see:

She's really listening to someone like me

Why would she listen to someone like me?


Cause I'm a tough shit friend

I reckon she'll stay with me 'til the end

And it means more than I pretend


And I know I'm awful, I can't even cry

It's about time I told her, and looked in her eyes:

"You're my best friend, I'll love you 'til one of us dies
You're my best friend, I'll love you 'til one of us dies
You're my best friend, I'll love you 'til one of us dies."

"We are all just learning to love without fear."

M,

In those incredibly dark moments of what could be called my 'romantic life', before you, of course, I had this nagging idea that I would be alone for the rest of my life. I thought this was the calling on me, and my failures at love seemed to suggest this, and that i would never be able to be open to anyone in any real way. There are traces of that in me, now, scars that are easily wounds again and a crippling fear that my true and honest self could not accepted by human arms. You see this is in me, sometimes; the holding back, the closing up, the mumbled energy and the uncertainty i can bring forth with my actions. It is not a lack of something in you but a lack of something in me. I am still learning to love without fear.

It is not that there is something dramatic in the past. I do not look back at any particular person or time with desire or hope. I am in the best spell of love that has ever existed for me. I am content, i am full and i am in joy. At least, in theory. At least, this is what my heart knows. There remains, still, this aching fear that a)i will mess up royally or b)this is all a cruel ruse and God will soon take it all from me and tell me: "this is love. Love is pain."

Bad Ja rule album aside, i cannot shake either fear and i live in this shadow of happiness punctuated by these ideas of falling. I am not worried, though. We are only in class. The exam is written and passed. We are learning but only to understand how the test was passed for us. We are becoming the person we already graduated life. I do not sit and wonder if I will get better. I know I will. It is written. It is sure.

Loving you will be one of the grandest lessons i will ever learn. And I like that class. I want to spend a lot time learning to do that properly and without fear.

"Grace finds beauty in everything"

M,

When we talk of characters in stories, it is always about the need to make them live in colour and not in black and white.  Life is more round than straight, more zig-zag than concentric and more random, it may seem, than logical. People are always more complex than what they appear.

No one needs to stray far to find this out. It is within our own souls. The chaos we are and can create moving from hour to hour and life to life, is a reminder of how though we can make things we can also break things. One is not the sum of our lives over the other. If we measure our bad acts against our good acts, we would fall into doubt and fear and self loathing. So we create a fiction about ourselves, a story so grand and encompassing it keeps us walking when we would be crawling at the truth of ourselves and the depths of our own depravity. Writers need more honesty than imagination. All of us suffer under the stain of imperfection. The complexity of the human soul is there, in all of us.

This is what makes Grace so important. It is that "wide road that keeps my legs from slipping". It is the beautiful idea that the condemnation of man or woman is irrelevant in view of the love of God. And beyond that, it is the assurance that we will get better in time and be full in eternity. It is not an excuse to keep on sinning but the idea that sin can end, if you so choose. It is not embracing that life and everything, and the human soul, can be ugly, but the comfort, the everlasting consolation, that grace finds beauty in everything, even in us.

Beyond Here.

H,

We were always made for things beyond here. The lie is that we can have an eternal effect on a temporal set of circumstances. No. Sparks of light are not the sun. A candle is not a raging fire. An idea of  heaven is not heaven at all. We were not made to be comfortable on earth. We are not to find our peace in this troubled times. There is something to be said for rage, for frustration and for the deep dissatisfaction of the soul.

We have spent too much time trying to fit in. It is okay to be as you are. If we accept this, take it for granted that we are both made for more and born this way, then we might put aside the endless drink and whoring and ambition and other consolations that cannot answer the question of being. Nothing purely of earth can speak to the eternity hidden in every human heart.

This is the thing we must give up; the idea that we can make this all matter somehow. That we can work hard enough and deep enough and steadily enough to make a dent in the whole fabric of time and space and meaning. That is never going to happen. This is not real life. When we break from the wool that has been put on our eyes, we may get at something truly vital: the art of giving up. We do not give up into despair or inertia. We give up the game, the pretense and that ego that tells us we are at the centre of all experience. We wake up to something more. Love unbound by time. God. What will we live for now? In Him. Move. Live. Have our full being.

This will not make us care less but more. It will not drop us to the floor but to our knees in prayer and on our feet in faith. There is no fear of falling or failing because these are temporal concepts. We live in and for eternal value now. Any "impact" we seek is beyond here.

Ordinary Heart.

H,

There is no denying the depth of human failure. We see it in the way the world really operates, not the plaster-thin tale of a prosperous earth, but in the poverty of most of the earth, in the fact that we are told that the richest of us can end poverty, and they never will. This does not make them evil. It makes them human. It is proof of our ordinary heart.

And, perhaps, we are looking to high into the thing. We can easily scan the path of everyday life and interactions. We may, not so easily, but more vitally, turn the spotlight on ourselves and begin to see who we are in light of the great aspirations of the spiritual life. There are no moral or physical miracles bursting out on our pilgrimage. We know we do not often measure up to the high value of that calling we received years ago. The word is choked by the world. We find "rhema" for our selfishness. We redefine the wheel. We make selfishness an art-form and selflessness unwise and unscripted. We suffer from that most human of maladies: an ordinary heart.

Brother in arms, this is not a rallying cry or prophetic shout(out) in the wilderness. It is a slow realization of the limits of our human state. We used to cry "I need you/lord i need you/every hour..."
It is much more serious than that. We cannot ascend unless He descends. I used to think there was some fixing to do. No. It is a brand new care needed. There has to be nothing else left of the ordinary heart for the eternal seed to truly flourish. Everything else we do is a negotiation.

These fragile vessels we live in hold no eternal worth. The heart is the thing we are told to guard. There lies the calling card and the only thing that will not die. Our pilgrimage is to experience the things that will not work so we can learn to hold to the thing that will. We are here to die, in all that absurdity, in order that we can have the real life of value. This is not some metaphor or irony or oxymoron for the pleasure of playing with words. It explains why we fall so much and much more in secret. It tells us why we run from our flaws and into our promise. It spells out for us why the ordinary heart is always telling us to put our first foot forward. We need a lie to keep on holding on to a sense of self against the tide of the world speaking against our worth.

The Gospels tell us not to be afraid. It tells us to let go. For in giving your life you will find. It tells us that Christ already conquered the world. How? By dying young, poor, betrayed and with His legacy unclear. In other words, by living aside from everything the world tells us is important. Wealth. Long life. Loyalty. Legacy. It is not a paradigm shift or new set of ideals. It is a totally new reality. A new kind of life. An extraordinary heart.

We will be growing into that for a while.

Daily

H,

There is something about the daily grind of living that keeps us from life. We are constantly in this battle for our own minds against the tide that would tell us how to live and what is important. The tide disguises itself as simplicity when what it really does is muddle things up. It robs us of focus, clarity and the peace of mind that comes in resting in God. It does not come with all the loud clanging of other temptations, it comes with its own sort of of silence; an axiomatic argument based on our own base desires for relevance, recognition and acceptance. There is nothing wrong with any of those things, base desires are not bad just basic, but to make them the focus of our coming and going takes us away from the story of grace and onto the well worn paths of running up that Sisyphean hill. This is an even more insidious mound of rock and sand than in the fable. This has marks of progress and sparks of artificial light. We quickly forget the higher things to which we are sworn. Endless advancement becomes the eternal goal and eternity becomes something you earn with earthy sand.

To clear, the tide is not part of the world but the world itself. It is easy to compartmentalize and say there is something in the world to extract and seek balance in. This would be a mistake. It is even easier to say that the world is full of evil people with evil intent and a wilderness is always required. This would be an even graver mistake. There is no "us" against "them". We are all facing this tide. We are all divine beings having a human experience. We are all trying to make sense of the universe.

Our challenge is to remember this shared camaraderie, this common destiny and this beautiful idea that we were created to think and feel and love and be honest until we know the truth, everyday. We are not at war with each other, not competing over dogmas and definitely should not care who will be right or wrong in the end. This division is only part of the tide. It takes us away from the simplicity of our faith. It stops us from demonstrating in character what our faith says in the holy book. It robs us of both our connection to the divine and our connection to each other. The former cannot exist without the latter.

We need to be rid of the tide. It is not easy and it will take a lifetime to this. It is not important to panic, fret or be in a hurry to free of these things that bind. It is enough that we know this today. It is enough that we remember this daily.

Ordinary Time

H,

There is a telling nature to the way time bends now. We are fast approaching those dreaded forties were foolishness and wisdom are supposedly set in stone. What did we do with our roaring twenties?

Being mostly Pentecostal by the time we hit the high notes of having our own agency, we were full of that fire of the moment. We were here to change the world into the image of the one who changes not. We had that hot aired arrogance, the privileged stance of being in step with eternal things and the stupid mask of vanity to crown all we did with a certain veneer of wholeness (or holiness). Of course we were wrong, but we were slowly learning. Perhaps, we are still learning now.

And, in the now we suffer the burden of knowing better. We also struggle with a loss of confidence. We second guess, proscribe our own thoughts, and live in this half-step or non-step of getting through the days without causing too much harm to ourselves and, maybe, others. This is far away from our old self. We are in that cold state. The crushed seed, the smoldering wick, the faltering heart and the hidden frame. God help us. We have turned foolishness into a sort of wisdom.

We have our excuses but none will do. Mine has always been fear. Not fear of anything in particular, but fear itself. When you are afraid of anything then you are afraid of everything. Fear robs us of both the bravery of our own agency and the peace of our own sleep. It is inactivity couched in waiting or cowardice disguised as calculation. It is one of those things, i guess, i have to die to daily. Not with bravado or the fake muscles of the soul, but with honesty and the great walk with God. The walk was were we started. The walk is where we are going back to.

We cannot calculate life in ordinary time. The walk with God will not make sense like that. In that great conversation, the journey from self to true being, there are many quiet spots and dry seasons. There is time for diversions, cock ups, frailty and getting lost in the fields. There is no hurry and there is no final lesson. We are into something eternal and the things that last forever can take all the ordinary time they need.

We are not quite into our forties. There is no need to hurry along like we are catching up. We live in the rest of God, the seventh day of His own glory. Let us remember that, now and always. Let us step our of ordinary time once more. Let's walk. 

“These new things that feel so old”

“These new things that feel so old”

H,

I have been thinking of how quickly we have grown out of our innocent ways. We used to really weigh things, back in the day. It is was not mere morality; there was something so darn precious about the way we approached life and living. Now, we are less able to see things without the grey. I do not think that older means wiser. More often, it means more careful, jaded or cynical about the real hope of all things. We are more calculating, I guess, is what I am trying to say.

It is like this: when we were young we were always trying to stop ourselves from being impulsive and now we struggle with letting ourselves be a little less predictable. There is a sense of wonder in God that you cannot afford to lose. The things set before us, before everyone really, are so magnificent and metaphysical that we cannot live in stoicism and still have a full life of faith. We cannot focus on these new things that feel so old; the new disappointments that hark back to old failures, the new fears that we match up with old anxieties and the terrible idea that we are making no progress.

The pilgrim’s process is different. There are no external markers that we celebrate in the world today. A billion-dollar ministry is more evidence to our windy eyes than love, gentleness, faith or humility. We want the accolades and not the humiliation. Our faith wants the humiliation that is redemptive. Our faith calls for the falling down that is really standing up. No human eyes can see it.

We are perpetually attracted to pretty things. We are fools to the attractive and the pristine. We do not want that awful mess that only the grace of God can cure. We do not want to admit that we are in that awful mess that only the grace of God can cure.  We want to be independent of everything, even God. The mantra of the moment is self-sufficiency, self-love and self-fulfillment. It is not that there is anything wrong with all that ruckus. It is only that they will not take us where we need to go. After all that has died down, the greatest question of all remains human mortality. The absurdity of the finite life calls us to look deeper than the decades we spend on a mock up earth. There is a calling to something more. There is a mystery that rolls all across the universe. It calls to us in our most silent moments. It tells us to turn and look into the light. When we are done with all the acting and posing and pretending the world has taught us, that light is still above us, edging us home. It does not dim with age. It grows brighter through space and time. It will grow brighter in us if we let it.

"To give of your life and to, finally, give your life”

H,

We had that old joke about forty years in the wilderness before the promised land. The funny thing is that it is not a joke at all. It is the heart of Christian pilgrimage. We are hyped on the idea, frequently, that the lesson from the story of the wilderness is; do not be stubborn, do not be sinful, do not doubt God and eat your manna with gratitude. Those old pilgrims of old did all that evil and look how they ended up. The truth is we are stubborn, we are sinful, we doubt frequently and we spit our manna out. We are not better because we cannot be better. We are not better pilgrims. We are just the present pilgrims.

The eons we have spent in fallen state is not so easily erased. It is the full work of the sacrifice of Christ. It is God’s blood on wood. The human problem has divine implications and, yes, a divine solution. We cannot speed up the process though. We hide in the make up of the faith when this is about nature not looks. It is about desperate honesty and not putting your best foot forward. It is about dancing with two sore feet.

There is a standard, a line, a heft of holiness and truth that is the rule across the universe. We fall way below that. We cannot attain it. It has to be given to us. It was given to us. It does not mean we have to change the way we speak, the way we move or the clothes we wear. It does not mean we represent anything central to the faith when we make it look fun or clean or whole. It is all those things but we are not. The faith is working in us, if we let it, and then working out of us. It is not our nature. This is why we are being reborn. It is not that the holy spirit transforms by rote. The work is much more serious than that. It will take a lifetime. It is complete upon death. And the in-between is more dying.

Death and dying, in this context, are synonyms to life and living. The resurrection speaks to this. We are dying to someone and living to someone else. We are giving up the feckless wonders of the world to believe in the ethereal benefits of the forever spirit. We are making choices up and down the narrow road. Yet all those choices are really just on choice: who will you serve?

Right before us, we have always known, is the direct choice between the light and the dark. If we dwell in the light as He is in the light, then we are transformed. The world may be on fire. We may feel that we are utter failures at living up to it. We may be more fallen than risen but we are in the light. And we are changing.

Amen.

“So, I said to her what is learning to drive like…”

Face your fears, she said

In a weak, feeble voice

The sunlight only now whispered through the curtains

I was at my writing desk

She was on my wailing bed

She said:

“you just enter the road and face your fears”

I shrugged it off

Still a thousand years from any real understanding

I went back to the white blank page

She continued to wither

In beauty, pain and grace.

“In Him or Her”

H,

We live in perilous times. There is a great deal of hopelessness in and around us. It is easy to go cold and close up to everything but your own ideas, your own well-being and your own interpretation of every event. It is always said that in times of great upheaval the group construct gives way to self-preservation. We simply stop looking out for each other. We think of self and then of the things and people that make up our concept of self: family, lovers, friends, tribe and so on. They say this is human. It is.

Yet, these times call for us to be more than human. We have never really bought the tale about the innate goodness of man with only his own heart as a reference point. We believe there is more to it than that, we believe in a God who stands at the center of the moral universe, urging us by mere presence to accept or reject the great premise of the light over dark. It is the feeling we cannot shake even in our agnosticism or atheism. The reference point is always to believe or not believe. Our moral outrage is in relation to this being that is either everything or nothing at all.

 We decided long ago that He or She (we have to go beyond gender to really get at this; there is no gender in God, like there is no race or tribe or anything that separates wholeness or being) is everything and there we lay our flopping tent and windy hopes. Our faith defines how we look at the world and how we access our own progress in it. We have felt like failures when we did not live up to it and like gods when we thought we did.

In this present climate, with the blood spilt across our nation on earth, it is easy to see why the heart falls flat. We do not have an answer. We do not understand. There is a terror that seems stronger than the false demi-god we have constructed called a government. Our idol is showing it cannot speak and will not address the darkest sides of all our natures.

It is easy to say: what good will prayer do? It is common to say: we have to put faith aside and forge a different path for our countrymen? And perhaps there is some real honesty there. Our ‘spiritual’ leaders are in their own corners waiting to answer the question of violence with the answer of more violence. They have lost the way and now talk to surrogate lives with passion but no wisdom and no real solution but anger and pride. Truth is now dramatic and the solution is now in division rather than the great bonds of brotherhood that should tie all of humanity together.

There is something in us that lets loose these dogs of war. Something human and frail and worthy to be put up on a cross to end and begin again. We are fractured, broken, prejudiced, angry and full of bloodlust. We might never get to spill any actually blood but the zero sum game we play in our daily living and dying shows how far we are from the real end of all darkness.

What is the solution? Where do we land when we are told not to pray but to act? We have spent our whole lives imagining a new way of seeing the world. We have spent our whole friendship sharing thoughts about being a force of good in our nation, on our own peculiar patch of earth, on our own streets, to our neighbor in front us and our neighbor across the seas and other false lines. Where did this come from? Him, of course.  Who taught us to hope above despair and to love in spite of rising water? Her, certainly.

In Her (or Him) we live and move and have our full being. We are the children of the light. We do not need less prayer but more. We do not need less love but more. Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks and the body makes war or peace or love. It always starts with our willingness to pray and listen and understand and then act. In Him.

F: father’s day

The day spun away from me

World cup flashes and baby runs

Holding to the last echo

Of your memory

The fading sense of loving you

So I hate it all now:

The pedestrian nature of father’s day

It took me all day to settle down

The anger, the fear, the ugly town

The endless tears, the loss of time

The call from the curve of the universe

The voice saying: “all is the abyss”

“There is no reason and no rhyme”

No more sense of you

I want no monikers

No memorials

No remembrances

I want only to forget

Repression is my art

A cold heart, my reprieve

A closed soul, my bed

No spirit, my resolution

Damn you, Mr. Cat Stevens

For this taste of ancient love

Before all, there was Father

Before bone of bone there was mother

Before romance, pure nature

And before me was ‘He’

He that is no more

He that has left the stage

He, I do not love

He, no love and so no sleep

Damn you, Mr. Stevens

For reminding me

Of David and Esther

And slain Samson

Of myself

I will go to bed now

I will not remember

I will not untangle the lie about love

For all is loss

And father is lost

I will go to the arms of my lover

And there, I will cry

Be a baby again

I will say: father…

“If I walk in into the darkness I’ll be lost/if I try to stay the light will show my false.”

H,

We seem to keep going back to the same place. I know this sounds like a lack of progress but I do not think it is. For one, all our ideas of progress are material. They do not add up in the light. They are hallmarks and milestones made out of the need to see movement rather than advancement. It is much easier to move around than to actually walk in a straight light.

 Two, there is nothing more useless than the human conscience when it comes to making real spiritual progress. God is larger than the conscience and the conscience is not larger than our small thoughts.

The cycle is sure: when we feel up then we listen to nothing from beneath and when we are under our flaws we shy away from everything from above. We are trying to be perfect creatures of grace instead of imperfect patients of Grace. As the poet says, we have to reconcile.

We have to give in to the idea that we are today the best version of ourselves and it is not up to scratch. That our shifts to the left or right and the up and down are as much a part of our spiritual path as breathing is to our physical life. Once we get out of the fragile fantasy we have of ourselves we can come alive to the reality of who we truly are: creatures made for light, used to the dark and running between them as we experience finite life. We need to reconcile.

We reconcile by accepting this imperfect picture of ourselves. Not that we give up. Not that we say it is all no good. That is just more weakness and death. We instead give in. We let the whole story of love and God in: if we walk into the darkness we’ll be lost and if we stay the light will show our false. Lord, please, show our false. 

“There is no place like the home to come.”

H,

There is no place like the home to come, I feel. We have been told this over and over again. We keep trying to make of this lost world a garden in the desert but all we can do is speak of that other place and how it means this place may sparkle with light but never truly fix its problem with darkness.

I hope that does not sound too morbid. I am not trying to be. I am not even saying that we fold our hands and let the tide take us anywhere because nothing matters. The brevity of present human life makes everything matter.

The thing to take from the great idea that this is not our home is to be fearless in our pursuit of those values that are not transient but permanent. We have a world of injustice and wrong in front of us. We are called to confront these things with the light we know and the light we are learning to bask in. We cannot be afraid of what will happen to us if we fall flat on our faces or lie still on our backs. The former means we will be wrong and ashamed but that is the cure for human hubris. The latter means we will be dead and buried but that is just our body giving out. It is just the start of a long train ride home.

There is no place like the home to come. So, we speak of that place in all we do. We speak for justice over exploitation, we speak of kindness over hate, we speak of love over indifference and we speak of unity over the differences that emphasise tribe over humanity. We speak where we should and we act where we can and we move forward toward the day where home is not a dream but a place where we all eat at the same table and with the same heart.