“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.