“This insolvent soul.”

D,

I am not sure I should give you all the advice I want to. You deserve the value of your own mistakes. There is nothing to avoid escape except the dishonesty that may make our flaws palatable but has never cured them. A complete moral inventory is always the start of a journey away from this insolvent soul of ours.

I am talking to you like this and you have done nothing. This is intentionally, so. We are not in white shirts facing a dust bowl and hoping not to get stained. That is too much defending and not enough attacking of life and all its beautiful meaning. We are not here to not catch the disease of being human, we are here to access the cure.

So, I am not praying or hoping or pushing that you get all the easiest days on the calendar. Easy never built a whole soul. Choice is at the centre of the human experience. And life is much more beautiful lived from shadow and shade to sunlight and grace.

“Day in and day out.”

H,

In this period, we will feel the days more than usual. The world has come to a grinding halt, and we do not know when it will begin again. This is time for us to sit back and face the ugly and well as the beautiful parts of our soul. There is no hiding place from reflection, from looking again at the things we are afraid to and the day in/day out necessity of truly being ourselves.

Pretense was always too high a price to pay for being loved. The parts of us that cannot be true can never be truly loved. There is a big and beautiful way in which love must become everything we face and everything we want. And this sort of love, this kindness and patience and belief and endurance of each other, must start from the simple admission that we are not all that.

We might even be the problem. We might be the villain, not in the story we tell, but in the story we live. For people addicted to sin and selfishness, this is the time for that unique and effective full moral inventory of the way we have lived against the way we ought to live. And this will make us better, not at first and not at once, but finally.

“The end of things may not be nigh.”

H,

We live in perilous times. We have always lived in perilous times. These signs and portents we are referencing right now have been part of the cycle of death and fear and disease that have characterized the world for centuries. There is nothing new under the sun, that old fable tells us.

We are always quick to find reasons to declare that the Lord is coming. Yet, no one knows the time or the hour. The signs will come and pass before that event. And the signs are in cycles. And a lot of people read them and look for dates to link to this great happening that every Christian waits for. They are universally and utterly wrong. Much damage has been done, not all Christian, in trying to divine the exact day the world ends.

Yet, the emphasis was never on the accuracy of the day but the quality of the life. It was about how we live not how we end. That is always the point. We have eternity in our hearts already. Why do we obsess over the external that we have no choice or control over and neglect the internal, where choice is required and in which we dwell in every day? It is like shouting for the sun to come out when you could just put on a candle or flip a light switch.

We are not here the solve the mysteries of the ways of God. We cannot resolve those depths. We are here to live in the water and experience the sun of His eternal will. The war outside and the pestilence and plague may rage, but it does not change the real law of the light: our hearts to do the right thing and to love in fullness. It is always the time for that.

“Your gods are not God.”

H,

The rule over idolatry has always fascinated me. There seems or seemed such a desperate plea in: “Love no other God but me.” In the old senseless way, we were told to love God with our soul but not our spirit or our mind. We were told to obey and not understand, to not want to but to choose to and to not engage our whole personality in worship, but to obey like drones. This misguided view of things left us prisoners to the things we were supposed to avoid. As Paul said, “I did not know sin and did not sin until the law told me, this is sin.” I paraphrase but you get my meaning.

So, we are caught in this terrible paradox: told to be without heart or mind in worship but then told that our will, our soul, must avoid everything with heart and mind in it. We cannot be whole, and we cannot ask why we are not whole. We cannot feel things deeply except the scriptures spell it out and we cannot ask why we cannot feel things outside the ambit of those old words that are not yet life because we have no heart in them in the first place. We are trapped by the “depth” of small men behind big pulpits and eternal ideas they cannot yet grasp.

These tin gods are not God, thank God. They sometimes mean well but are desperately wrong. They sometimes mean ill but are helplessly trapped themselves in the games they perpetuate.

We are meant to come to God with soul, with all our heart and with our mind. We are meant to question, like the Psalmist, or feel overwhelmed, like the Christ. It is expected we will fall flat on our faces, forget to worship, leave the narrow path or find it after hitting our heads against walls we created ourselves.

Never let anyone tell you that they know, exclusively, the way to God. They are just pilgrims. We are all pilgrims.  At best, we share experiences with open hearts and open hands. These men and women are just human. They are not God.

“It’s the adoration that kills you.”

H,

We always speak of the pitfalls of humans worshipping other human beings. There is an inherent fall waiting for both sides of the equation. It’s the adoration that kills you. We are not made to take this sort of things with grace. We begin to speak back to that side of us that tells us we are worthless. We swing from the lie that we are at the bottom of the barrel to the other lie, that we are the top of the heap.

Fallibility is underrated. It can teach us to be free of ego enough to see the truth about ourselves and others. There is a way that a great humbling makes us more human and less false. People who live in the illusion of perfection, as a job title or general posture toward life, actually do the most horrible things. There is no anchor for that soul. There is no one to answer to, even within themselves. It is God without the character, and the Messiah without the love.

This is not to say that anyone is worthless or should feel that way, for so-called “balance”. Can we just agree on inherent value and beauty? Can we not put obstacles in the way of people being individuals and becoming who they ought to be without telling them they have to be this or nothing else? We do not need to worship each other. We should not. We do not have to denigrate each other. We should not. We should learn to love each other. This is the best face and heart of being human.

“Tell me where your heart is.”

E,

Things change at parenthood. It changed with you. I looked into those multiverses you call your eyes and all I could see was possibility. You looked puzzled, like something new had happened to you too and you were trying to understand what it meant. It is just another magic trick that all that wonder becomes human, walks on her own legs and now is a little terror with no respect for my writing hours or my other work.

I remember taking you to work one day and how you did not want to leave. You frowned at my like an angry lover when I put you in the car home. Your human side will always be beautiful to me. Your divine side belongs to the stars. Only God can crack that code. I am just here to hold it in my arms for a little while.

So, flawed father and human being that I am, I ask for only one thing: that we evolve from puzzlement to engagement, that we talk without judgement or agenda, that we become whatever we should be in the best possible ways and that you always, eventually, tell me where your heart is. For in the words of Uncle Ray: “my heart’s like paper, yours is like the flame.”

Daughter.

“Friends, Companions.”

H,

There is no greater longing in the human soul than to be understood. We arrange the complex web of our social relationships so we can spend more time where we are understood and accepted than anywhere else. There is nothing more painful and lonely than when we come to the realization that there is no place where this understanding is complete. People can bear almost anything, as long as they are not alone when they are going through it.

We have friends, companions because human suffering is real, it is physical, mental, spiritual, and relentless. We are tied to a plane that is almost absurd, almost obscured by the darkness and, without love and light, not worth the price of admission. I do not mean to be dark. This is just the way things are. People with material means feel it. People with no materials means feel it. It is the weight of the world. And we all need a friend.

We can find that in each other. It is great for brothers and sisters to spend time together in the unity of love. We all need that human connection and power. We will find it in the darkest hole and cling to it even when it is more dark than light.

Yet, there are places no other soul can go. There is a version of you beyond all human eyes and comprehension. There is the isolation that comes with being an individual. A part of the soul that cannot be cured in a group. This is where the companionship of God begins. This is talking, listening, following, being aware of and loving God. It is not, as has been advertised, this tit for tat, praise him for raises, you only get what you give nonsense. There is nothing you can give Him but yourself. There is nothing within worship than first letting God love you. The rest is a list of gimmicks made up to serve the formula of man’s attempt to reach God.

First, let us let Him be our friend. Let us talk, even in shadows, as if He is here with us, even before we believe this is true. Let us find in that love and grace, the full picture of who we are made to be. There is no time but now, right now, to remember again our first calling and instinct: to love and to be loved. Let it begin with love Himself.

“These imperfect mirrors.”

H,

It is not enough to know that we are imperfect. We must carry that bit of wisdom into everyday life. We must think on it as we assess our interactions with others. We must think of our own wrongdoing as a call to understanding the human condition and the frailty of the others we despise. Or want to.

It is easy to love those in the same boat as we are. If we all have flaws in common, we can form a band and talk through the issue. The real problem, at least overtly, is the flaws we cannot stand. That other kind of misbehavior that our petty morality rules as more egregious than the one from which we suffer. We are always looking at that other wrong and then that other. The command to forgiveness is a call to look at these imperfect mirrors by which we look at each other and declare a holy truce.

We have a history of that. We stand on unstable tables and make great claims about the way others act. The high point of God is when we let this burden of judgment go. When we accept what it is to be painfully human and understand that beyond that lies the eternal cure for all things.

It is not easy. People have forgiven such horrible things. People have failed to forgive even more horrible things. No one can put that burden on you but God. And you must believe Him to do it. He showed you by letting evil be done to him. He made it clear that nothing can and should be unforgivable.

“I was wrong”

H,

In the highs and lows of our common experience in God, in all our travels and travails, our living in the light or wailing in the dark, it has always been, to my mind, that right was that other country and wrong was the fading past. I was wrong.

It turns out that salvation, grace, redemption are not just the inception class but the thread and theme of this new life. We will be wrong much more than we will be right. We will fall into holes we thought we have buried in the sand. We will go back. We will suffer the ignominy of defeat, over and over again.

If we look at the disciples and their relationship with Jesus, we see one bumble after the other. He was always correcting, teaching, telling off, warning and instructing them to higher purposes. There is no magic potion for the human state. It must fail, finally, and be redeemed. In-between the final transfiguration, are a thousand falls. We will learn to fall perfectly well.

This is not a sad note. It is counter-programming. We are tricked into thinking that this foibles are gone. Some do. We lose the taste for some of our major flaws and that initial fresh air makes us believe we are on the road of glory. We are but glory is the revealing of the true nature of things. Our true nature will not look good for a while.

All of this is not to put the soul down. Let joy be the song we sing in these trying times of body, soul and spirit. We are being made into the being that does not end. We are going to be made of eternal stuff. A little walk to it is not such a heavy thing. This burden is light. This burden is power. This burden is love.

“A quiet heart for loud times.”

H,

We already know that panic helps no one. That is usually said by people who are not emotionally involved in the same crisis we face. In normal times, you are told to calm down when you scream or to tone down when you are angry. These same rules no longer apply. We are all in crisis. Anyone can get it. There is no objective safety. And panic, is still no help. We must have quiet hearts in truly loud times.

What does this mean though? It is not the absence of fear or anxiety or the premonition of incoming terrors. All of that will occur. It is par for the present course. It is what you believe and how you act that counts now. Fear can make us inert or irrational. Faith can make us bold and sacrificial. The second strain of things is what the world needs now. A calm heart is one that makes its home in the things that will always matter.

So, when we feel that urge to panic or we are angry or afraid, we must take a breath or two. This is a time for prayer. It is a time to look up. It is a time to remember we do not believe in the random but in the build up of history to a crucial point and then the wind down into love. We knew these things would come. We are not changed by them. We wake up daily to spread a little light and speak to the truth of all things. We need no signs or portents to put our heart in what we have always known: The Lord is coming.  

“Chaos, Crisis, Death and Remembrance.”

H,

The world has shifted. It happened in our time and we cannot deny it. There is something evil in the air and a hundred thousand people have died. It is projected we will lose millions. This is not the fulfilment of God’s will or not His perfect will, anyway. It is not a time for vengeance or anger or the opportunity to share the gospel like it is a warning against the disasters of the earth. I do not think it is time to proselytize at all. It is time to be helpful, to show empathy, to work in love and of love. It is a time to be who Christ is. A healer, a comforter, a leader, a lover and a friend. In chaos, crisis, death and remembrance, the truth of eternity stands as a light against fear, hate, panic and stupidity.

Something has shifted though. Behind all our carefully laid constructs, lies the fragility of the human body and the limits of the human experience. We are reminded that the mortal coil stands as a humbling exit against the desire we have to live at all costs. There is nothing wrong with a lust for life. That is the way we are built. We can deny it, but we all have within us,  to try to “suck the marrow out of life.” The thing we also have is an eternal sense of things. The latter will outlast the former by countless millennia.

So, in this time of strife and trouble, when there is a true fear of dying, we must live up to the creed that we profess. We must walk in the light unafraid. There is service here and there is love to give. Wherever we are and whatever we do, we are to be like the one we serve; wishing that no soul should perish, loving hard and loving consistently. For, this disease can only take our body, but it has nothing on the human heart in God.

“Howlers, at the moon.”

H,

There is a limit to what expression can do. This does not mean we should not value it. There is some value in being able to howl at the moon. Repression is never a good look. The beauty of all art, good art, is that you know the artist is saying something, anything at all, from the very tips of their soul. There is a loud cry from a hungry heart that can speak to all our collective and individual hungers. It is really a beautiful thing.

It is not an end in itself, though. Expression is the path and not the destination. “There are more things in heaven and heart…” It is not God. It cannot speak to everything. It is like medicine, but we forget that medicine is only for the moment of sickness and for no time after. There is more to it than being able to say what you like, no matter how beautiful. Music or a painting or a poem or a great book or film or sculpture or building or plan cannot save a single human soul. It can, at its best, make it less heavy or more heavy. The real thing, the eternal thing, is in our choices to love or to not love.

That said, there is nothing wrong with the beauty of telling a story. It has been my whole life. I have used it as medicine over and over again and will use it again, even today. It does not need applause or acceptance by majority. It is utility all by itself. It is like the gospel; one single soul is enough for heaven to rejoice.

I do enjoy being a howler at the moon.

“There are no real goodbyes.”

H,

You are absolutely right. There are those intense things we christened “love”, too quickly. I have come around on them, though. I am kinder to the memory of the flame. It was all learning and at best a stab at love. Attempts are fine. They are the basis of learning. Even in the kingdom.

The old taste of memory used to sting, now it is all welcome. I let in flood in. Why not? We live in too much fear over everything. It does not make us more loyal or more “good”. It does not make us more like God. Fear keeps us in the box and there, it provides the illusion of safety or, worse still, lulls us into a false sense of being right.

The repressed emotions of our youth are the sudden outbursts of our older years. There is no need to repress emotion. It is just the way you feel. It is not God. It is not real life. It is rarely even accurate. It is just the way you feel. We must admit that to ourselves. We must feel again and talk to that feeling with wisdom. Not with fear. Fear is the box. Wisdom is the wide path of the narrow way.

To hear this, you would think the shadows are past. No, sir. There are no real goodbyes. We are all on the learning curve. We are all becoming something beautiful, in the end. The shadows will come. Sometimes, they will overwhelm. Yet, we live in the light. The sun is above, and the moon is there in the night. It reminds us, by translucence, that the sun is coming around again. There are no real goodbyes.

“No Judgement”

H,

It is hard to keep hold of that great idea of God called “grace”. We have tried to water it down, to tie it to conditions and to make it answer to our flawed and fallen sense of justice. We want to earn the eternal life we know we cannot create. We want to be soldiers rather than children of the most high. We want judgment for others and reward for ourselves.

I think there is more hate behind the hesitation for ideas like “salvation for all” and “hell is not forever” than love. We are told that God “wants no one to perish” and we hate the idea that we would “deny ourselves of sin” and be on the same level with perpetual sinners. That we are all the latter is the argument for another day. The acts and not the heart is where our obsessions lie. We have earned this grace that everyone else denies. It is a zero-sum game. The others must earn their derision.

Yet, it is not a game. The hound of heaven is calling every heart. He will rejoice over every soul. He will keep the lights on till the end of all ages. He leaves the 99 for the 1. He is love and those who do not love, have no part in Him. They must learn. We must learn. There is no judgement above love. There is no plan above love. There is no idea beyond love. All things will bow to love in the end. The other son learnt that in the story of the prodigal son. He thought the lost one was the forgotten. He was wrong. God intends to shake the foundations of the earth so all can see the glory. Let us not be on the other side of the fence, cursing under our breath, while He lets everyone in.