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.