“Silence & Prayer.”

Let silence start your day.

Whatever you choose to believe, express it in silence first.

Unburden your mind from the press of a loud Monday.

Breath in, wait, and then breath out.

Think of everyone you love

Think of everyone who loves you

Think of the pain in the world and all the troubles in the world

Think of your place in it

Make a commitment to be better than you have ever been

Whisper your promise to God

Breath in, Breath out

Creation

Amen.

“Of death and resurrection.”

H,

I do not contemplate death as much as I used to. I am more aware of mortal dangers, to be sure, and less reckless with the time and effort of living but I am less concerned with final chapters. I no longer believe there are final chapters.

I do not know when it shifted; this idea that life is temporal. I professed to Christian beliefs in my teenage years, but I did not take it all the way to an actual belief in resurrection. There was a vague sense of avoiding hell, but I had a stronger fear of nothingness, of the abyss and some theory I had about non-being. I figured this non-being was probably the real thing that was going to happen. The rest, the things I professed, were the drugs I used: the opium, the heroin, the painkiller, and the intoxicant. It was how I coped.

Not anymore. I have made this complete turn into believing that the absurdity of life is answered by the eternity offered in Christ. We have a conclusion to the story that is really a start. All the things I found fuzzy; I now see crystal clear. It has come slowly but it has come surely.

Death no longer has the former fear. Life has become the real priority. Eternity does not make what we do matter less. It makes it matter more. All things have weight. All things have resolution. Everything will make sense in the end. This is the gift of the eternal life; we will have the time to look through everything and explore the vastness of utter reality. It is not just the resurrection of the human being, but the coming to life of all being everywhere.

“This will not go the way you think.”

D,

There is nothing like growing up. It will not go the way you think it will. It never will. That’s the adventure we all need to embrace. We are on a path that is unpredictable. We must embrace it, or we will suffer through an adjustment process that is coming, regardless of how we feel about it. This is a constant adventure. Act accordingly.

There will be happiness and there will be sadness, but we live in neither. We are creatures of joy and love. These eternal stances will work when you are sad and when you are happy. They are your headlights for the many nights of driving through the things inside you that call you into dark spots and low dalliances. You cannot forget that it is all joy. You should never forget that it began in love and it will end in love.

And, do not let shame make a dent in your beautiful soul. You are far too wonderful for that claptrap. And, this is important, remember that so is everyone else. You are not an island of beauty but part of an eternal ocean of inherent grace and love and power. We are all destined for the light. At worst we deny our destiny of depth. At best we ride the wave into all the things that truly matter. I hope and pray you always choose the things that really matter.

“The Kind of Grace that breaks the human heart.”

H,

There is no place for goodness in the way that God saves us. Grace does not highlight that we are great or good but details that we are sinful and weak. It does not speak to ego but to the fallen soul. We are not allowed to glory in the recovery because that is always incomplete. We are always aware of our flaws and how quickly they can consume us. We are on a life-long trajectory to be cured. We are never quite there. This is how God saves; it is the kind of Grace that breaks the human heart.

One of my earlier breaks from purely religious ideas about God was when someone said that a little of your soul is not enough to give and the work of grace is not a repair but a demolition. We are not making little adjustments here and there; we are learning how to die. The whole person is seeped in the darkness that cannot save. The whole person must go into the water and the fire and the bread and the wine. The temple was going to all come down, Christ said.

I should note that this process is not the gloom and doom that many would like to think. It is absolute joy. God is absolute, furious, and everlasting joy. Many would like to focus on the thorns but those are just the symbols of atonement. Many would like to think of it as a difficult thing we share with God. There is only one in the Glory of it. We are often hapless instruments being made into children of God. Even the discipline, mostly in some things and never in everything, comes by the Grace of God. They, our holy trinity that saves, leave no allowance for false ideas that we are partners in progress. We are pilgrims in process. This is the grace that breaks the human heart: we are not the heroes of the story but the humans in peril. By the time we approach the heroic, as we see it, it will no longer matter.

“Waves.”

H,

We have never been able to conjure up the perfect feeling. We live in waves and setbacks, sights of lands and then falling down, almost drowning and then life again. I am not afraid that this means we never reach levity. Perhaps, levity is overrated and what we really need is friction, fractions of improvement and a long walk home from everything that holds us back. Perhaps, it is not about destinations but about journeys.

We live in the waves, the up and down of the human soul. There is nothing wrong with this. It is just how this present life presents. We are not a straight line. We are a circle within a circle across a square. We must stop trying to fit into these things or trying to make these things fit. This is all messy and fraught with failure. Yet, the wave goes toward land. The headwinds are not against us. We are sailing, stormy waters, to be near that which can save.

We live in waves, but these are beautiful constructs of water and grace. We will find out the rest. I say this a lot, but my idea of positive purgatory is drinking ale (I am cleaning this up) in a bar with God. He-She says: what’s your damage and we say: everything but we are on the wave; God smiles and says: that is the correct answer. Enjoy the journey, the destination is sure.

“Restart.”

H,

Every week we get to restart. We may get tired of the repetitive nature of worthy pursuits, of the crucible that is good work and of the loneliness rejection brings. This is normal. There is nothing wrong with going through a dark spot or having a bad feeling. We try to rush through this process too much. We have become less resilient because of this. We should let ourselves feel things, even unpleasant things.

There are two big mistakes we can make when our plans are scuttled: the first is to simply fold and move on to the next, easy thing. The second, and the more troubling, is to find some substitute for the feeling of success. We do this in many ways, but the main thread is avoidance of the weight of failure by the deceit of a sugar covered placebo. We do not try to restart, we replace. All the wonderful things we miss when we walk away too easily from the things that matter.

It is better to learn how to restart. To take falling down as part of the process and getting up as part of the same process. To learn that we will adapt, evolve, and adjust to the main purpose of our aims and not be so caught up in the minute details of getting what we want and when we want it. It is important to learn that every start will alter us and teach us and make us closer to our true selves. Every start will be have failure in it. Every start will be a success. Everything will add up in the end. Winning or losing are just all parts of being. Joy is to be found in both.

“66.”

H,

We carry our damage around with us.  It is right there in how we fight and how we love. The foundational years and the vital years come together to create a monster in us we must learn to resolve. People who love us will suffer from this monster the most, and we will suffer from theirs as well. We must come to an armistice, surrender these famed weapons of survival, and give in to the vulnerable and uncomfortable parts of love as much as we give in to the thrilling and powerful parts of love.

It is like that old epigram about parents etched in an Oscar Wilde play and all that sardonic underpinning. It goes something like: “Children start by loving their parents; after a while, they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.” What kind of parents are we now? And what is left to forgive from the parents we had? The answer to both may be “everything”.

In the first we carry the new-fangled ideas of being cool and not like the past, but we are prone to impatience, to shutting down loud voices and to applying discipline out of anger or fear or both rather than love. In the second, we can now admit, apart from actual abuse, and we did not have that, we have human parents and not Olympian gods. They were damaged and they passed that on too. Time to forgive.

And in all this, today is the Ancient’s 66^th. Well, it would have been. I have been having dreams about him. I have been trying to resolve my feelings of this great loss when I sleep and not when I am awake. I do not want hugs or tears or pictures about. I want to be in a room with him again. To not be annoyed by his small failings, and they are small in retrospect of death and eternity, and to hold in my mind all the stories and all the laughter and all that furious joy. Love is the resolution of all this damage and eternity is the place where all love is fulfilled.

“Almost there.”

Z,

It is amazing that we are almost there. There is only a few weeks before you wriggle your way into life and have that first taste of addictive oxygen. I have no clever story, no foreboding, and no old tales about who you will be. You are a genuine original, even in my mind. Your siblings, the earlier ones, always had a place in my mind. I have nothing on you. This is not a bad thing. It is a great thing, if you let it.

You are as foreign to me as the original Z must have been to Moses, but that did not hinder the love. It will mean nothing to this love. We will discover each other like pilgrims on new ground. You just came from heaven and I am trying to get back there. We will meet in the middle of our journeys to eternity.

I am excited by the idea. I am excited by the coming reality. I am pleased you are almost here. I cannot wait to meet you. There is this light in every single child I have seen. My job as one of your parents, will be to keep it on and pointed in the right direction: the world in need. Yet, before all that stuff, there is all this fun to be had. Let’s keep the peace and love each other with tenderness. I am already an old man. Take it easy on Pop.

“The Ancient.”

H,

When he was being wise, which was often, we called him ancient. These were strained times, and everyone was shouting without listening and being right without love. We had that odd texture of being in our early thirties and thinking we were knew all the pitfalls. We were as stupid as ever, just older.

It is scary to think how little we learn from actual experience. It is not a good teacher, just a good story. Or a bad one. Wisdom speaks through all the ages. It tells us the real source of things and the actual destination of everything. It is never about the speaker, except that one time in history, but about what is being said. Some of the folk who struggle and suffer the most give the best advice. Not all from experience. They just navigate from distance better.

And wasn’t this our ancient? He saw things from a distance much better than most people. When we listened, it worked. We had opinions of who we should be and how we should act, he had the reality of what we actually did. He saw us. We only saw our intentions.

I say none of this with useless regret. My point, and the thing I am always learning, is we cannot be the reference point for our actions. We can only speak for our intentions. The people affected by our actions can speak to the rest.

“Planets and galaxies.”

H,

We must never forget that there are other planets and other galaxies. This is not a push about extraterrestrial life or space travel. This is about the vast Universe we live in and how that should remind us that the thing in front of us is not the biggest thing there is. There is always more going on.

The things we are facing now may be difficult and they might take from us the beauty and power and depth of the whole story, but they are not the whole story. We are only a small part of an unfolding history. This does mean insignificant or inconsequential. People matter and always will. You matter and you always will.

The thing to remember, what this analogy is useful for, is the thing in front of you. There is a resolution coming. Pain and suffering will not last for all ages. It is a passing phase in the eternal nature of time. There is a story that ends with everything being alright. This is the story we believe. This is the tale we follow. This is the reality we live in.

“Growth and Gain.”

H,

There has always been this emphasis on growing and gaining in a material sense as a marker of a successful life. We need some physical sign of inner balance. We think this comes in money or recognition or something we can point to, even in this shifting sands we live in now. Many lives have gone to this false god; many hearts grown cold in pursuit of this mythical golden fleece.

People of faith really ought to know better. We have been battered by one extreme and have rolled softly into the other. Once, it was the church rat and now it is the church bat, vampiric and driven more by the survival of the fittest guidebooks than any holy writ. The ones who took poverty as a sword have now taken prosperity as a shield. Both stances do not answer the real question of existence and value, but in the fallen pages, every placebo is marketed as a cure. It is never a good idea to dismiss things with a wave, there is no shame in being poor and no inherent evil in being rich.

There is a need for social justice, for mobility, for food and shelter, educated and well-fed children and safety. Yet, none of these things are eternal. They are some of the ways we negotiate this plane, but they will come to a stop.

Growth and gain can only lie in the things that will always matter. We must always resolve things in this way. It must be the way we survive the bad and access the good. It must be the way we love, the way we give, the way we lead and the way we navigate all the spaces on current earth. It has nothing to do with money but has everything to do with value.

“Remember.”

H,

  

There is no end to the folly we got up to in younger years. It was not exactly wild, but it was certainly uncalled for. We forgot vital things about who we truly are at the altar of chasing down little cures for the doldrums. We should have just stayed bored.

I do not remember any of these shenanigans with regret. Regret is such a wasteful emotion. It does not help us get better. It is like the diagnosis without the medicine. We know we are sick, where is our healing?

And I do not know if we could have been ever better. We were who we were. The only thing that serves, is that we remember this is not all of us and this cannot be us through all time. We will change. We will dwell in more light. We will become more like ourselves as defined in God. That is the only real growth for us pilgrims, that we grow into our eternal sleeves.

So, let us remember we were once there, in that moment, and recall it without shame. Yet, we do not live in any moment. We live in all of them. We live beyond all of them. Our destiny is still eternity.

“Not always strong.”

E,

I cannot possibly give you all the advice you need. It could well be that you do not need any. There is this need to overpack all “wisdom” into soundbites and warnings. I am not going to live your life or face your struggles. I can only be honest about mine and hope that helps. You must remember that you will not always be strong. It is fine. You will get better at it.

The awareness of who you will grow. Time will tell you many things and if you listen, it will eventually tell you everything. The most important thing I have gleaned from my still ongoing journey is to learn not to make everything an emergency. Things may be urgent in the moment or require immediate attention, but they are not as life-altering as you may think. Part of this is faith; I believe life is eternal and our present reality is fleeting. The other part is just the normal ebb and tide of life, no matter what you believe.

It is important to remember, when you are not strong, that you will be strong again. Do not think one superior to the other, though the latter is more comfortable. Both are valid parts of your complete life. Find joy in both these moments. Do not rush to concluding one or the other. Your life is always valid, no matter how you feel. You are on a journey even if you feel you have arrived. En-joy what it all means. Be who you are: the not always strong, but always the light in the room.

“Waking up.”

H,

There is this constant thread in my head when I wake up. It is always: on to the next thing. I am afraid I will never enjoy moments without the weight behind them. I can never just wake up. It has to be for a reason and to serve a purpose. It is never light or comfortable. I see life as a series of tasks to get done as quickly as possible so I can have space and time to do other things.

This is not the usual idea that life is temporal and should be explored with that awareness. This is some other thing. A lack of joy in living. A failure to pause and truly take in the things that matter or to know that we breathe in holy air, so everything matters. There is all this tension and anxiety wrapped up in my bones. I forget to hear the music and then I forget to dance.

I am waking up to the fact that I am wound up. I know this is not something artificial I need to engage. It is not about a holiday or a new sport, I would just find things to be anxious about there to. It is about being present and grounded in this moment. Life is not something that will happen, it is already happening. Every day we wake up is an opportunity to wrestle with the eternal issues of all time.

 We might not be happy. It might be a sad day. We might not get what we want. The usual drugs and addictions that saturate our very existence may not work anymore. Yet, we are alive and there is this tingling sense that another reality is slowly but surely crashing into all of life. It is time to take more deep breaths, understand that joy is knowing that eternity has already begun and engage life with a full heart.

“Tales of Tycoon”

H,

I am trying to remember less and less but it keeps coming back to me. It is less than pain, now. I remember Tycoon in all his glory and what that meant to me. In this silent time, memory is so loud. The memory of our father is like a candle, a story still unfolding and certainly not something final; buried in the ground.

The biggest thing to remember is how little, at the end, it matters who was right and wrong. All academic arguments will one day cease. We are guessing at things we will one day see clearly, and we will no longer study, but become. There is some light, perhaps all of the light, in realizing that anger and lust and power and happiness in this sense, are all transient beings. There is no future in them. We will soon cease to forget why we were angry or wanted her so badly or longed for power to alter fates or found happiness in crevices and lakes.

When I sat next to his dying bed, I was not angry, and I felt no need to overpower him. He was a fact of my life, the second fact, and I wanted to love him and listen to whatever he tried to whisper into my eyes. I could not hear him. The words never came. Yet, it does not matter. I knew what it meant. It was not the Tycoon there, but the ancient who was in charge and he was going to say only one thing to me. It would be something like this: it is not going to be alright, it is already alright.

“Take a deep breath.”

H,

It does not come easy to us, this slowing down and taking a breather. We will say that we have nothing to rest about and the economic reality is that we need action and not silence. This is understandable. There is a loud call to action and a scramble for opportunities in this abnormal place the world is in.

Still, take a deep breath.

In fact, take several during the day. Our work life is not separate from our real life. Our life is hidden in God. We do not separate lives anymore. We live one whole life of meaning and purpose and depth and joy. So, we take time to explore the inner life, too. We pause and pray and meditate on the things that matter.

Today will come at us with all this sound and fury. We already have the answers. In the storm, Christ was asleep. When they came for him, he was praying. He went up to mountains to pray in the middle of changing the course of history. There is nothing wrong with taking these deep breaths. Life will tell you not to. Life is limited.

Take a deep breath, right now.

“Do not let it isolate you.”

H,

There is always this thing, a mindset, or an act, trying to isolate you from God. Do not let it. I do not mean to make it sound like this thing is some outside force. It is often something within your choice. It is often you. We have been told all the things that God does not like. We have been sold an impersonal God, who does not care for anything other than the preservation of holiness across the universe. This is simply not true.

There is nothing impersonal about God. He does not have a list of things that make Him happy and that we must do, or He gets emotional. Every law is made for us. Every rule is designed for our own good. And there is the great summary of what it all means: love. If we love as we should, we fulfil the law. It is about how we act and why we act that way, but the benefits are not in favour of the divine, but for the benefit of the human.

God has and can live without us. We cannot live without God. There is no life outside the source of life. The things we are called to do are not rules to make God smile but a map to navigate enemy territory with. We live in a fallen world. Nothing will work as it really should in this present stage of existence, even us. We are here to learn that and to understand the light that is ahead of us and now, within us. Do not carry the weight of all your sins. It will break you. Let grace bear your burden. Do not let the dark make you feel alone. You are never truly alone. God is at the door or in your heart. He is never as far away as you think.

“Unconditional love.”

E,

There is little more scary than the idea of unconditional love. The very idea that love is tied to neither conduct nor outcome, stands against all the safety and dogma we feed into what love should be, to us. It is not that we want a standard conduct on which love is based. We have that already. It is not that we want it to be balanced. We say we do but we really do not. What scares us the most is the high gate we too must face if love must be who we are. We are afraid that we will get unconditional love and then, we will have to give it too.

That is the other part of understanding God’s whole point about love. We are not just receivers of this great concepts of love and grace and hope and faith. We are being made into givers of that same light.

And there is the divine puzzle: this will not happen overnight. You will not be cured of your self at once but over a lifetime. Love starts in realizing that you are loved without condition. It tells you that this is your inherent value. You are worthy of love. It teaches you that your sentient life has value and you do not have to believe the worse versions of yourself as destiny. There is much more to come. Then it tells you, mistake after mistake, that you will be fine. That you can stand up. You will not be cured in moments but over your whole life. Then it whispers to you, as you rather like this lifelong trajectory of a love you cannot break, to apply this same idea to everyone else you meet. That too, will take a lifetime. But, dear daughter, you can start today.

“God is loud in the silence.”

H,

We have always had these strong messages from above. There is something strong and beautiful in the holy word, in dreams, in prophecy and in that inner sense of peace that comes when we are looking for left or right answers. It has been the map of our lives.

Still, silence happens to us all.  There are things we cannot help. We all feel disconnected and isolated from the things we believe. We believe in a divine being that rules over the whole universe. This being connects us to what is real and true and eternal about this life weighed down by pain and suffering. How could we bear the starving child or the injured woman or the broken man if we did not believe that pain is transient?

Yet, in transience, there is silence. There is a time, that second day of days, when we are cut off from the divine and nothing seems to be happening. It is when we feel most let down, most neglected, most confused, and most alone. It is not a pretty sight.

I wish it was easy to break through this and make our way back to peace. I wish there was a magic word or moment that could break the silence. The only thing we know is that it is just that; silence and not inactivity. God is working through the dark you do not know and cannot comprehend. When it is darkest, He is at the loudest volume. He is not speaking because He is working. And there, where we trust in the love and live on the hope, we must also embrace the faith that says all things are aligning, not just for our good, but for the good of all things through all of time.

"Death and Fear."

H,

When we were younger, I think we lived in fear of everything and then of death. Perhaps not in the physical decay that ends in death. We were far too young to be that precious about such things. Our fear was in the more urgent things. It was about not making a mark or having impact or dying in a hole somewhere, very old, without a single sign that we had been here. We worried that we were wrong and all our adventures where flights of fancy and not a holy pilgrim to eternal stars.

Still, there was beauty in those old days that death and fear could not take. There was the old black tea and groundnuts and coca cola. There was football. There were sterling nights and brighter mornings and a feeling that incubation could be beautiful, because the future release was good and sure to come. There was music and the eternity in that swoon. There was the writing and the reading and the atmosphere and the kneeling down in search of the sun.

Yet, all of that still in the shadow of our fears. We think of these things in memory, so they feel sweeter and more together than they actually were. Today is where we live. Today is what really matters. How we act today, the love we give, the kindness we share and the way we open the doors to growth are the real signals of our better selves. We are still on that march to the stars. Up there, fear and death are obsolete.

“These things that do not change.”

H,

As we take our seats within this new reality, there is a tendency to hyperbole, understandably so, and to write out the impact these trying times will have on us in definite terms. There are things that will not change and cannot change. We are not less responsible to the things that we truly believe in, but more. We believe in the rising sun of eternity, in love as the cure and in the face of God and the hand of God and the heart of God beating throughout time. These things do not change.

Even worse, we have been told these things will occur. I do not mean this in this pseudo-prophetic bend towards the book of revelations and what signs lead up to what death. I mean that the holy script has written: “in this life, you shall see many troubles.”  That sort of stuff. It is not for an age or a time frame or a generation. It refers to all of us and works through all of time. In 1918 they thought it was the end of the world too.

In determining what we should do and how we should help, we must remember who we are and what that means. We must help who we can and how we can. We must err on the side of love and show the character of love even more than the emotion of love. We must remember that the church is not a building, but a person and that person is anyone who believes. The temple is the spirit of God and if you said “yes” to that summons, you have that spirit thriving in you, even if you do not speak in other tongues.

There is no getting out of this quickly. It is a hard wall we have all hit. We have been altered by events beyond our collective and individual control. Yet, we are being made in the image of eternal things. There is nothing to fear. The sting is gone. If we are in this, it is gain and if we are hurt by this, it is Christ. Let us remember we were made for times like this. We are being made into beings that can thrive for all of time.

“Speaking to the dark.”

H,

In this moment when the world is still, there is all this darkness in our minds. When we wake and before we sleep, we are buffeted with all this fear, all this uncertainty, all these things that attack our place in the world and the dignity we need to be our best selves. These things are always there but now they are amplified because the things we usually use to drown out these feelings are all shut down. We have to look at the dark as it presents itself to us.

And there are many reasons why we must begin to speak back to the darkness. We cannot let it overwhelm us.

And “speak”, does not mean talking to walls in some pseudo-spiritual attempt, to “claim wellness by (vocal) faith”, though this might be your process, but the larger stance of not believing the things said by the dark. To remember that thing you always tell others: you are worthy, you are a creature of inestimable value and God loves you.