“Home coming”

H,

Our eyes are always searching for that hint of home in everything. We know we do not belong. We know we must slip out of this mortal coil to finally find this wholeness and that this does not reduce the volume of the darkness in our own ends. Perhaps, it makes it bearable.

I think of those serene moments that populate every single life. That sun rising or setting, that particular person, that place, that piece of music or moving picture, that sermon, that book, that idea, that face and all the billions of other ways life has seemed complete to us, even if only for seconds. The things we go back to again and again, trying to make a home in.

And these things are only a sense of things, not the thing itself. They are all hallmarks or harbingers and not absolute knowing or feeling. There is still a home coming ahead. There is still that light in which this will all make sense. There is still the much more becoming like ourselves ahead.

“This daily bread.”

H,

I take your earlier point. There is always this fear about what happens next. We have lived lives of such uncertainty that we are now a bit punch drunk from the “slings and arrows of fate”. And the material component of the machine, the nuts and bolts of making a life, add an extra dimension of paranoia and fear.

We can use these things as the great excuse for drowning in vice. Or.  We can remember the faith we profess and rest instead of worry. Rest does not mean inertia. Faith does not mean dreaming and sitting. Most of faith consist of walking or working toward an inexplicable conclusion. There is no charter or creed within following God that speaks for laziness or cowardice. It is usually the very opposite in play.

We are told to live in the day, for the day and on the daily bread provided. I cannot possibly speak for all the world, but you and I have found this to be enough. This is what we can testify to. This is how we must continue to live.

“Grace is the only context.”

H,

I keep thinking of all this guilt I carry around over past events and detours. Some of it is unreasonable but I am sure all of it is useless. Grace is the only context that resolves, and surely not guilt.

We have been sold this idea that guilt is the answer and the great harbinger of our conscience. Perhaps, at its best, it may start the process but once it has pulled as away from absolute levity, it becomes more of a wall than a gate.

We must always remember the truth: we are in the midst of our own darkness, the world outside is also full of the dark but within us, the light is growing steadily. Grace reminds us that we are being made whole. This is the way we must always see ourselves.

“The other side”

H,

There is always a need to separate things running through to the human experience. We are built to understand things in differences; one thing compared to another with the quality of their distinction. This can also make us victims of seeing other people as exactly only that. We do not equate their weakness to our own or their wrongdoing to our own or their sins to our own and so we cannot grant them the forgiveness we must grant ourselves to live a healthy life.

This obsession with having any sides at all, with framing all our arguments in truth to win and to getting that unique sense of pre-schadenfreude over the idea of these lost others going to hell is at the start of a dangerous road to the destruction of our humanity.

Empathy, understanding, kindness are all the traits of ordinary love we must have to truly be like the Christ we say we follow. There are no others in the kingdom. As the poets say, there is only us.

“The song that is always playing.”

H,

Listening to “Everyday Life” I am reminded of the great soundtracks of our lives. We have always moved and lived inside some musical scape and cannot deny this idea that it marks the epochs and valleys of our human experience. 

There has always been a song playing in every moment. In those days of black tea and brown nuts, a coke through in sometimes, “for variety” and not knowing if we would live or die past that moment, the reddish sand of high court one, sharing a robe or wig or just appearing “in chambers” and being told to sit up straight and look straight and be straight.

 We have never been straight though, and we probably never will be. Life is curved into this sense of seeking the truth of things and failing at everything else.

At least we have the songs to map that journey.

"To the prayers then."

H,

The morning blues is constant nowadays. It just occurred to me that this early morning awakenings are a good opportunity to pray. I forget, in my anti-everything, that this helps with the blues.

Hmmm.

Oh well, to the prayers then.

Amen.

"Strenght"

H,

On mondays we have to find strength from somewhere. The week looms heavy and all the inspirational quotes and messages we receive do not speak to the individual challenges and doubts we scrap with during the week. After all that mountain talk, there is still the flatland to work on and work out. There is never enough inspiration for the hours and the hours.

I am learning to look up more now. I should look up all the time but this is a lifelong habit and i am just forming it slowly over close to four decades of being. It is not an easy skill. This present iteration of life keeps demanding immediacy, keeps asking for all the answers today and keeps telling us we need to show our handiwork as quickly as we can. There is a constant push to be more current in our doing than in our being.

Yet, we are not here for our doing but for our being. God gives strength for us to be a certain sort of character and not just to do things we think are important.'Being' over 'doing' is not about inertia. In truth, we only get the strength to do the right thing from our position of grace in being the right person in God.

"The time is always now."

H,

We keep going back to the idea of waiting on God, on waiting for His ultimate will and way to be fulfilled and for the glory to somehow show we are not the crackpots that we appear to be. That validation may never come this side of eternity. We might be crackpots for life.

Yet, it was and never will be about that sort of validation. We are not here to be proved right. It is not about earthly elevation. No milestone here can cut to the heart of the very human struggle with meaning. Even if all we want and need to happen does happen, it will not resolve as much as we think it will.

There is no other feeling to get to, no other place to be and no greater self to reveal to a waiting public. There are no garlands for our dishonorable desires to get ahead of the pack and no provision that will ever make us think we are good enough.

The time to be full is always now. Our hearts are in the scope of heaven. We can access that peace, that inner reserve of joy and love and faith at anytime. The glory inside will never match the buildings outside. The ennui of daily living speaks to our hearts of a greater space for mind and spirit. The body is such a distant third. Now is the time for our salvation. Now, is always the time to be filled up in God.

"Back to the basic"

H,

In the recent upheavals that have taken place all around us, i am more at peace than i have ever been about the storms that may come. It is a note from experience, a true and tested response to the hills and valleys that characterize our pilgrimage up this holy mountain. We have never had a straightforward ascent. Let me put that in clearer terms: we cannot see all of the road so it seems winding to us.

It is probably the straightest line in the universe even though it does not feel that way. We rage against the things we do not anticipate but the truth is, these things are not in the way, they are part of the way. We are on a defined road to something grand. There is no doubt about this. We must always remember that our journey is curved by the divine hands and creator of everything we call life. We will not slip into the abyss. The glory road is tested and true.

And when we are faced with these powerful and honest waves of fear and doubt, we must not deny it or pretend there is nothing there. Pain is pain and fear is fear. We believe in things above the fear and doubt and present pain but we are in present disarray. Let us remember, now more than ever, the simple call, the most basic line of our faith and how to follow.

The lord is my shepherd...

“That the fear may be good, that it only means you care about the outcome”

H,

It is well storied, at least to me, this constant battle with anxiety and dread. Once, it was all in stutters and now it is spread evenly across all my engagements with life and living. It is not easy to speak, to ask, to talk on the phone or to be assertive in a room where I know I should speak up or make a contribution.

I used to resent this shadow. I used to hate how it felt; that knot in the stomach and that doubt in the mind. I used to hate myself for it and remonstrate with my inner state in the foulest language. It used to be the greatest effort to do anything and leave me completely drained of all my energy and all of myself.

I know a lot of people feel like this. The world is not set up to make you feel validated or powerful or significant or seen.

I know a lot of people feel like this. And that was the start of the breakthrough for me. The dark always seeks to isolate and define the problem in the most peculiar terms. It makes it seem like you are a sore thumb upon the tapestry of time and space. You may be unique, but you are not exceptional to the human experience. Neither are you inferior to it.

I do not know if it was the soft tones of Elyon directly, a lifetime of those, or some of his vessels, including my mother reading out one of the letters to Timothy “Spirit of courage and a sound mind”, but something finally broke through. It flattened the higher levels of self-hate and despair and it said to the individuals moments: “this fear you feel is good. It just means you care. Now, be calm and do the thing you care about.”

I cannot tell you the watershed this was. To understand your inner state, to know this is what that means and to do things in spite of the nagging and rising terror that only tells you how much you cannot do.

We do not live without the sound and fury of fear but in spite of it.

“Do not be afraid of the hard”

H,

There is no escaping the hard bits of life. Some might argue that all of it is hard. That we are fighting gravity and learned nature and all the present darkness of the world. We must not sell a fantasy of ease when it will take all our belief to live in the light. We must be honest. It is not for the fainthearted.

But, of course, it is for that fragile heart. In relation to the high hopes and deep dreams of living right, all of us and all our hearts will fail. We are talking of applying eternal principles to temporal life. It is telling the human soul and body, attuned to survival and selfishness, to forget dread and fear and self interest to focus on things like kindness, bravery and people less fortunate than you are. The focus on others is the hardest discipline of the human heart.

It is a hardship we must embrace. There is no other way to slip into the divine. There is no higher calling. And it is impossible to do. It is not something we work out ourselves. We are given the opportunity through grace, faith and love to commune with eternity and let these things become our character. It is the light within before the light comes out.

We are learning to bring light to this hard plane. We will learn this, inch by inch, throughout our whole lives.

Amen.

Mansions

H,

God of light, light me some passion

Green fields and lovely mansions

Let your mansions live inside me

Love me, light me, give me, guide me

Cross of skin and naked figure

Broken legs and crooked fingers

Help me live for good tomorrow

Today's too late and full of sorrow

This light is good and dark is evil

But I'm running around

Through the cross and through the steeples

Trying to make it to higher ground

Come on light, please live beside me

Love me, light me, give me, guide me

No pride and hate, they live inside me

I need your love enough to guide me

Help me walk across these borders

I'm a pilgrim in deep waters

Faithful God, like faithful sunrise

Help me break from all these old ties

Lead me all to that is holy

Break these chains, but break them slowly

God of light, light me some passion

Green fields and lovely mansions

Let your mansions live inside me

Love me, light me, give me, guide me

Let your mansions live beside me

Love me, light me, give me, guide me



Music & Lyric by Burlap to Cashmere

Melodies of You

H,

You're a painting with symbols deep, a symphony

Soft as it shifts from dark beneath

A poem that flows caressing my skin

In all of these things you reside and I

Want you flow from the pen, bow and brush

Then paper and string and canvas tight

With ink in the air, to dust your light?

From morning to the black of night

This is my call I belong to you

This is my call to sing the melodies of you

This is my call I can do nothing else

I can do nothing else

Music & Lyric by Sixpence None the Richer

“Sigh no More”

H,

Love, it will not betray you
Dismay or enslave you, it will set you free
Be more like the man you were made to be

There is a design, an alignment
A cry of my heart to see
The beauty of love as it was made to be

Music and lyric by Mumford & Sons

“But I still haven't found what I'm looking for”

H,

I believe in the kingdom come
Then all the colours will bleed into one
Bleed into one
Well yes I'm still running

You broke the bonds and you
Loosed the chains
Carried the cross
Of my shame
Of my shame
You know I believed it

But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for...

Music and lyrics by U2

“The Moment of surrender”

H,

I've been in every black hole
At the altar of the dark star
My body's now a begging bowl
That's begging to get back, begging to get back
To my heart
To the rhythm of my soul
To the rhythm of my unconsciousness
To the rhythm that yearns
To be released from control

I was punching in the numbers at the ATM machine
I could see in the reflection
A face staring back at me
At the moment of surrender
Of vision over visibility
I did not notice the passers-by
And they did not notice me

I was speeding on the subway
Through the stations of the cross
Every eye looking every other way
Counting down 'til the Pentecost

At the moment of surrender
Of vision of over visibility
I did not notice the passers-by
And they did not notice me

Music and lyric by U2

“Faith in living”

H,

I was thinking today of the incredible things we have in front of us. Now, you know I am always going on about how this is a small blue marble of a planet and a tiny part of a massive universe. This is true. The ‘glorious’ things we do may not echo in eternity in the way we think. They are vital only from our skewed and then limited vantage point. They are big only to our small eyes.

We do not have the material within or without to say how it all connects. We do our part only in faith. We do it knowing there is no logical reason that connects our now to the then we know is coming. We have seen in the past how glory has turned to dust and how dust has turned to glory. All we can do is live in the faith that it will all make sense.

Faith is that place where all things come together in the end. We do not see the parts that make the whole, but we know in faith that there is a story, a picture and a reality being forged from the human experience. To live with that awareness, that small acts can affect the destiny of the universe, is the whole discipline of living in faith.

“The cure for love”

H,

There are always these bad songs about love. Love hurts, love is pain, oh that I knew love was a winding minstrel. The very theme of each song is love as a winding road that leads nowhere or ends in utter frustration. They depict love as this burning thing we cannot escape or control and that will consume us. For romantics, like us, this was music to our young ears. We could not wait to wallow.

We needed a cure for love and all that angst. The cure for love, of course, was love. It was not the cold in the rain, overtly frustrated, looking for a savior with a beautiful face and body or wrestling with our insecurities in front of a rigged mirror sort of love. It was the love is divine and love is all there is, and love is in God and is God in reality. It was and is the kindness before big speeches and grand gestures, it is the forgiveness before rulemaking and fear and failure. It is the lifelong lesson over instant fire and all that jazz about burning up.

Love is all the things we do and say and are, wrapped in such a stringent selflessness that we will only ever get there in response to God. It is the golden rule because it is the only rule that truly matters. It is the light by which we must see all things and the cure for all things, even those things we formerly called love.

“An unwavering faith.”

H,

The way the world operates is set in stone. It will not be moved by our wailing at it. There is a way to be in it and a way to be taken seriously. There is a premium placed on output and this no matter that the input was before that. There is a story told over and over again, full of sound and fury, that means nothing and goes nowhere.

We cannot play those lines. We have tried and we are not that good at it. Well, perhaps, we could learn them better, but they are not for us. The real tragedy is that they are not for anyone but that is another story entirely. Anyway, the parts of it that we are good at we do not need to encourage. We have to step out of the rat race, the dark emblem of futility and the idea that we must prove ourselves worthy of a love we did not create and cannot control or return outside the light. There is nothing for us in this world and it takes an unwavering faith to know this and live accordingly.

Unwavering not in the sense of undoubting or unfailing but in the sense of persistence. And persistence not in the sense of our own strength but in allowing the grace already in us, carry us there. The energy we usually spend is in resisting the light. The act of faith we do most effectively is when we give in to the holy call to be our true selves.

“Winding down to God”

H,

Aren’t we always just winding down to God?

All our lives and effort and positions and possibilities are tied to this idea of divinity. We have tied it all up nicely to fit the form as best as we see it. And in this wider sense of love and longing, it matters not how much we get it right or understand or guess at the divine nature of things with accuracy. All that matters is that we are being led in the right direction.

I suspect that we have a problem with this because there is a massive hero complex drawn across the modern human soul. We all ‘know’ now that we are the protagonists of our own story and we are acting accordingly. We have set up rules and principles with a semblance of God so in our following them, we become worthy of our own story. We think grace has space for us and faith means we power through.

We are critically wrong on two fronts. First, there is no such thing as becoming worthy of God. You are already worth everything He put into you. He has paid the ultimate price for your salvation and eternal wellbeing. He did not ask us to contribute. He did not ask us to participate. He did not ‘co-create’ this new reality with us. We are merely recipients of His great love and grace.

The second, and perhaps the most pressing in our talk today, is how much the height and depth and breadth of our life is winding down into God. All of our self will be subsumed in that event of being torn from the brittle coil of human life into the divine experience. This is not a clarion call to not give a damn. It is in fact the very opposite. It is he or she who values the connection with God that worries and frets over losing it. It is to that troubled soul that the Godhead declares that it is impossible to be less worthy of the price already paid. The road is one way. It is the road of love that ends in love and love forevermore.

“The land beneath our feet”

H,

It is unthinkable that we have a cosmic sense of life and reduce it to a stoic nationalism that excludes more than it includes. The land beneath our feet shapes who we are and how we see things, but it must not and, most times, should not shape where we are going. There is no reason to choose a place over people or to take people who look, sound or talk like us as more valuable than others. There is no life of faith, call of faith or practice of faith that can justify this. The inherent value of human beings must always remind us that we are loved from the start and not because of who we are or what we do. The divine romance is predicated on being and not doing.

This distinction is vital because reasons to love or follow or believe in a thing, lessen our ability to look beyond that value and instead lead us to ascribe qualifiers on our love and decency. The root of all rabid nationalism or racism is the idea that some qualities, even facile ones like nationality and race, are more desirable than others.

We must always remember that countries are artificial constructs and the human race is divided more in tone and shape than in substance. We develop language and mores and habits from things around us, but we are joined inseparably and finally by the things within us.

Where we are born and where we live and the passports we carry show our present location and the places where we work to be a light in the chaos, but they have no bearing, in themselves, on the eternal nature of the universe and those virtues that we pursue.

“This is a kingdom without fear”

H,

We know from experience how crippling the fear of the unknown can be. Well, even the known has its scary bit. We can feel in the air around us and in the fire within us the high stakes of living in the light and how it all adds up to the glory that cannot be taken away and the eventual resolution of all things into God. Yet, the little steps do not feel that way. Every day we are confronted with the opposite opinion to our high ideals and perfect dreams.

And, before we sound all high and mighty, there is the low-end stuff. The jealousy and brooding, the wicked smile we give as we attack life and the imperfect way, we proceed out into this jungle we call earth. All of it rooted in fear of what living in love will look like. All of it mounted upon the toxicity on which we were raised and the closed doorway through which we view the world. There is no fear in the Kingdom, but we are still on our way there.

We are still focused on output. We are still invested in results. We have let the standard of the world set into the way we assess progress. The pilgrim’s progress is something different. This other way, the light, is not invested in physical signs. The “greater works” in Christ are really the things of the Kingdom; not water into wine but lives in sweetness, not bread and fish but the bread of life and not walking on water but being led by the spirit of God. In all these things, the outcome is already sure. We are afraid because we are still looking for our lord in the world. He left. He has gone to prepare a place for us. These things on earth are just sound bites for that other reality. There is nothing to fear. The kingdom is coming.

“Sigh no more.”

Serve God, love me and mend

This is not the end

Live unbruised, we are friends

And I'm sorry, I'm sorry

Sigh no more, no more

One foot in sea, one on shore

My heart was never pure

You know me, you know me

But man is a giddy thing

Oh, man is a giddy thing

Oh, man is a giddy thing

Oh, man is a giddy thing

Love, it will not betray you

Dismay or enslave you, it will set you free

Be more like the man you were made to be

There is a design, an alignment

A cry of my heart to see

The beauty of love as it was made to be

Love, it will not betray you

Dismay or enslave you, it will set you free

Be more like the man you were made to be

There is a design, an alignment

A cry of my heart to see

The beauty of love as it was made to be

Love, it will not betray you

Dismay or enslave you, it will set you free

Be more like the man you were made to be

There is a design, an alignment

A cry of my heart to see

The beauty of love as it was made to be

(music and lyric by Mumford and Sons)

“The nation, the earth and eternity”

H,

I know we are always going on about nation building but I hope it never descends into rabid nationalism. To be clear we believe in the inherent value of the human being and in the right to exist in the freedom we call democracy or human rights or citizenship. We are more for open borders than closed one, for peace in place of war and for cooperation instead of competition. These are idealistic tones and we are in that boat, proudly.

The other layer to this is also that we believe in the higher love. We are in the faith that speaks of a benevolent creator of all reality who is the framer of our earthly context for living and being. We do not think that nations are a mistake in the general sense but a flawed precept in the fallen sense. They hold no value but for the human lives within them and the great nature around them.

On days like these, national days, I am drawn to the idea of what it means to be a citizen and to act like one even in the face of alternative acts by people who should know better. Someone asked if it makes sense to follow the law when people with power do not. We do not follow the law because of the human call but because of the divine mandate to do so. All laws are meant to align with natural justice and good conscience, so an unjust law can be ignored with eternity in view. How do we know the difference? We have out hearts fixed on eternity, so we know by feel and touch and the spooky parts of the reformed soul.

  There is no hard and fast rule in God but the idea of loving your country must be subsumed in loving the people within it, caring for the things around and in front us and also living for eternal values and not trendy ones. Every value that is not eternal is trendy.

We are not here to dominate or push a Christian agenda. The light, even in candle form, has no agenda. It simply is.

“Today is the only day”

H,

In the pantheon of great examples of things that we have no control over, surely there is one that stands out from the beleaguering pack: tomorrow. We have only today.

This seems simple enough. It is axiomatic when we say, today is all you have time for. Yet, most of our concern is about things in the future and things we cannot yet see. Worry comes from the undefined and can live even higher in our hearts than present concerns.

The whole tension over Mondays is subsumed in the idea of the unexpected week to come. We always stand at the beginning of things worrying about the end.

That is not how living in the light works. We are engaged in great acts of faith every day. We look up to a benevolent creator, one who will fix the nature of the universe back to the original design, who sees and knows and is a lover of every soul. We believe that He is big enough to fill all of reality but intimate enough to listen to our lazy scribblings we call prayer. We can read the catalogue and say we believe all this but still doubt when that faith tells us, today is the only day?

All the grace, strength, joy and love given to us, is for today. Let us live in that and leave the rest for when we need it. Faith is for daily life and not epochs and milestones. It is for the ordinary as well as what we consider extra-ordinary. It is present and palpable and effective and living.

It exists in our moments and all our moments lead up into eternity.

“Let’s not forget the joy”

H,

There is mostly a somber tone to the things we profess. I suspect some of this is just our antidote to the dole-eyed faux optimism of our youth. We had a run where we performed the great role of sounding like we knew all the answers and making God a rewarder of them that seek Him with smile and song and dance. This laughable coaxing of God to be “who He is” fell flat as we pursued Him and the fragments that remain in our spiritual experience have been crushed by the other overreach, the stoic nature of false depth. No clapping or singing or ability to dance masquerading as the apologist stance; too high and intellectual for these low things.

We must not forget the joy, though. This is a story of the light and not the dark. We cannot go further the other way. There is joy in both approaches. Surely, there are many ways to approach the “multi-breasted” God. There is no superior one. They are all parts of the same experience accessed by our diverse hearts and souls and happenstances. There is joy in all of it.

We are discovering who we will forever be. We are learning to be honest about who we are now. We are thriving through sin and decay and taking on the cloak and moniker of eternal beings. There is nothing small occurring. The whole world is designed to make us forget this. It is made up of false symbols and false precepts of power. It tells us to chase the things that will protect us from feeling, from connecting with others, from feeling ‘ordinary’ and from really empathizing. It is arranged in rules to make it all black and white, to make some things unforgivable and others acceptable according to bent and ideology. It is not made for the fragile heart. It is not set up for feeling. We are only happy in relation to someone else. We are only advancing in competition, stated or not, with some ideal life. All of our identity is subsumed in the thing we produce. The idea of “purpose” in the Christian life has become a clarion call to justify living by what we produce and not who we are. It is a slight variation but a significant one. We are learning to pray to God as idol and then chase our dreams without the limit of a God on whom we hang our hopes and dreams and all our waiting.

Let’s not forget the joy. This is all a passing world. All our real “impact” is in the eternal kingdom to God. This present world does not hold a candle to that holy call. The joy is in that other place, where everything dark here will bow to the eternal light. We are seeing troubles now that are already conquered. That’s the joy of the thing. The light is coming. The lord is coming.

“Fear and all that”

H,

There is a living fear inside everything we do. I am not so sure we will ever be rid of it. Sometimes I actually think it does some good. It is a marker of how much we care about an event or person or outcome. Indifference has always been the much greater sin to me.

Yet, the fear itself can be crippling. It can rob us of connection. It can take our most fruitful ideas and intentions and render them inert. It can make us hate others and refuse to be loved. It takes so much and gives absolutely nothing.

Fear in itself will not do these things. Like I said before, it can simply show us how deeply we feel towards something. It is our reaction to fear that is always the kick in the teeth. It is a note and not a call to action. It tells us something about ourselves but that is all. It is not the inspiration to engage with life. Most of the time, it actually tells us to do the exact opposite.

We must learn that there is no way to live a full life in fear. It will take everything we have. It is an instrument for the dark. We are creatures of light. Just as the dark is only a contrast for the light, so fear is only a marker for courage. We must press on. We must not relent. The thing to fear the most, death and futility, has been taken away. There is no longer a hold or lien on the human soul. Freedom is sure. Living or dying are just the two sides of our human experience and the latter will only lead us home.

“Calm in the storm”

H,

There is only so much a poor heart can take in the midst of various storms. I suspect that because we do not live in a storm ravaged part of the world, we may dismiss the pure viciousness and violence of one ravaging through our homes and lives. We may not be able to appreciate the way it takes from you and the loss it gives in return. When we use the analogy of a storm, we may not be wired in to the devastating level of upheaval which this represents.

I always think of the disciples in that boat and how they must have felt. We always see it as a lack of faith, but it is a fairly normal reaction to be afraid of being swept away and drowned. It is how we would all feel. We were not built for anxiety or chaos or the fires that ravage most of human life. It is like that burst of fear that makes you believe you are coward even though it is just a feeling and cowardice is mostly how you act not how you feel. We are told to be scared at all shows a lack of faith. This is simply not true.

I do not even think that was Jesus’ point with his disciples. He was not telling them that they could have stopped it by faith. He was asking them why they did not have the calm of faith in the midst of the storm. He had been teaching them and showing them that there was no end to the glory of God. They had seen the miracles and heard the words and called Him “messiah”. He was asking of them to understand what Paul would later summarize as: “To live or die is Christ and gain”.

The storm does not matter because it cannot kill the eternal destiny we have in God. Whatever it brings.

“Always an opportunity to love”

H,

The years do add on this extra texture of hate and desperation. We are not wiser by trauma but more bitter, full of untouched rage and waiting for an opportunity to strike back while always thinking we are healing. This realization that we are going the wrong way is not in itself fatal to anything real, it is merely an opportunity to love.

We love first because we are loved. Simplistic but absolutely true. We do not have the tools to delve back into our own darkness and find the healing we need to live in the light. We have to experience something of that old weight of glory, the idea that we are more than flesh and bone and incidents that scar us. The very true revelation that we have inherent value, that we are creatures of purpose and that within every life is a fantastic story that will make full sense in the end.

It does not make sense now. We would be lying to ourselves if we said it did. All of present life is tainted with the dark. We see tragedies beyond description and live in situations that have no tinge of romance or levity and sometimes, seemingly, no trace of a benevolent creator. All sense of goodness we have is in the hope and faith right there in the love of God. There is no easy way to describe it: it is like the best story about us is suddenly and clearly true and we are living in it. This is what the love of God feels like.

And in that great repair, lies the great wave of being able to be honest, to be true, and to love others. But let us not hurry along to solutions we do not yet have. It is enough to learn this slowly. We are edging into eternity, becoming out real and final selves. We will have many opportunities to show love. Let us take the one we have right now to experience and grow and become that character that lights up the whole universe.

“Created, creator"

H,

I remember struggling, in my younger years, with the idea that art meant anything to God. It was my old Pentecostal soul, the one that always mistook serving the whims of the movement or person at the head of the movement with living in the high ideas of God. I thought every expression had to speak about Them in the most overt sense possible, even if it did not ring true. I still had the idea in my head that this was a praise hungry and insecure god who looked through all the pages of life to see how many mentions He got.

Of course, once I rid myself of these stolid ideas, I discovered that all my mind was in that question of deity. I could not write a paragraph without exploring what the idea of God meant. It was already in my mind as the path to meaning. It does and will come out clearly in all my art.

This should come as no surprise. All of truth is accessed in stories. They present to us as an eternal tale culminating in the merging of story and life in a forever blend. That He is creator and maker of all things should have alerted me to where the artistic impulse comes from. The questions we ask and the answers we find and the creativity we use to get from question to answer are all parts of our God-side. It is a creator creating creatives. It is God as creator and what is the most vivid image of where we will be when we see Them: right hand side, co-creating an eternity that is still being written.

So, now art for me is that reality. It is not propaganda. It is not an advertorial. God needs no public relations unit. We must tell stories that elevate truth and speak to the inherent value of every life. Do not waste a word. Do not make anything glib or light for folly sake or take away from the glory within or without. Let it always sing. Let it be honest. Let it say what you think and feel and know and want to think, feel and know. There are no barriers to the human mind. Let us create as we were once created.

“The light that repeats itself.”

H,

There is always a tale to tell about grace. We live under a light that repeats itself solely for our benefit. It is set up in such a way that it is available again and again, without fail. There is no gain for God in how we act or what we say. He is not larger or smaller because of what we do or don’t do. The only thing that living in the light changes in the whole of the universe is us.

And all this does not reduce the value of the human soul. The whole idea of inherent value comes from the creative love of God. They created beings capable of understanding the light. We are made to be friends with our creator. Not robots or toys or fodder but actual friends. There is nothing deeper than this idea. There is no precedent for what a human being is in this regard.

We cannot be friends and not know that it all means. We cannot be friends without understanding what He means and what that means for us. We are slowly learning, as in the dark and through failure and obedience, the height and depth of the love of God.

This is the reason the light repeats itself. We have no context for what that is. We are learning slowly. To run it all fast will only lead to error. To act like we know when we are still in process is the singular crime of our faith. When we invent doctrine, we invent error and chaos and ruin other lives and our own. For a time.

For the story is not yet ended. What we lose sight of here we will see fully over there. There is no human act that is fatal to the will of God. We must remember this. There is nothing They cannot do. The reformation of the human heart is always and only a choice away. And with that, the many choices after, always leading into the light.

“The high price of being human”

H,

We all have a tendency to shut off from the pain of the world and become immune to the suffering of others. I suppose they are good reasons for this. We all have a plate of suffering in front of us. There is enough sadness around but none to spare. It is far easier to focus on specific pain than general anguish. We cannot solve the problems of the world and so on and so on.

And some of that is absolutely valid; we cannot save the world or cure many of its ill by mere empathy. We cannot even save it by constructive and sustained action. It would require too much work, or a draconian state of things were all evil thoughts are banned and only the best intentions, generally agreed upon by a congress of the human whole, are allowed to flourish into action. It would be 1984, with a human heart.

The problem, of course, is that 1984 did start with a human heart. It began with the best of intentions. It was trying to solve famine, hunger, inequality, violence and the freedom to be bad.

I think, and this is from a dark glass viewpoint, that the grand design is the reformation of the human heart. Valhalla, heaven, utopia, or whatever guise we call the perfect state, is only possible within the human heart. We can either be heaven or hell to each other.

This is the state that we are being led to. This is the fulcrum of love and power and the light shining forever. We are either becoming more like the fire that lights up the universe or more like the darkness that will end before forever starts. There is no middle ground.

The high cost of being human is that we learn how little control we actually have over the vastness of time and space. The high cost of being human is also that we learn that the little we do control, love and light and being like Christ, is the spice of the Universe and will change the nature of everything else.

“Look how beautiful the thing we are wasting is”

H,

I had one of those scary conversations about violence yesterday. It was about our country and the tensions around identity, resources, history, tribe, power and everything else. It was not a hopeful look at possibilities. It was not based on the idea that challenges have solutions. It was simply this: blood is the problem and blood is the solution.

I could feel how inciting words said in a certain tone and with certain facts could be. I could see the easy solutions make a point to me and become powerful as an idea growing steadily to fulfilment. When we think violence, even state-controlled violence, is the answer to problems lodged in the human soul, then there will be no end to killing and no end to blood.

It is a path to take, this incisive surgery against the rakish kinds, but what a high price to pay. When we take lives, we are wasting all sorts of things, including the divine ability of people to change. It has become too easy to not believe in the light above the dark. The simple solution is always the immediate one but look how beautiful the thing we are wasting is. We are missing the opportunity to learn, love and be surprised. We are missing grace.

I don’t know. Maybe, one day, I will know the arduous decision-making turn it takes to make bold action louder than kind words. Everything eventually has to be weighed. God help us that we always weigh these things with a full heart.

Amen.