“Power.”

B.

All this power has to be subject to higher principles. What good does it do anyone if we can do only what we want? What good does it do our own souls if we are left to only our own ideas and devices? We are not at all ready for all that. We can barely wield it responsibly over ourselves.

 

We are in the right school for it though. We can see the lines around the galaxies. We know there is something behind every veil and a person behind every curtain. There is much to consider about the state of the world but much more to consider about the state of every human soul. All the hard power exercised in the world today, moved by sprites and demons or not, is wrought through human hands. The human experience shows us what power without light does. The divine experience calls us to remember to put power in its place: the opportunity to live in the light and not to dwell in the dark of our own solitary desires.

 

“Winning.”

 

F,

And so, what if we win? The other side of the coin is just the other side of the coin. All battles give temporary reprieve. We win by keeping the faith till the end and not by beating the problems in only the present. There is a large swath of forever to come. This is all training for that.

We win by being unchanged by the cries of victory, by being unmoved by the prizes this portends. It is like with anything else, the win is an opportunity to do something. It is not the end of the matter. In many ways, it is only the beginning of things. And this is a good thing. We cannot react to temporary things with permanent smiles or frowns. In winning or losing, we are walking into the things to come. We face both with the same heart. None of it works until all of it works. No one has become whole until all of us are free.

 

“Losing.”

I,

It was an honour to lose with you. I know the noise and the rabble after every contest is always the same. Winning is everything and losing is full of insight and reflection. This is not all true. How and what you win matters. And how you lose matters even more.

 

We did not fall down a flight of stars. We stood on something and for something. In the end, it was not the path everyone took but beyond that, it is not a temporary or permanent state. We are not here for a few battles but for the mighty war of values. We believe in the order and beauty of a seemingly random universe. We believe in the creator and the moment that births and holds everything together. Losing is forgetting that. Losing is when we fail to remember that, as the very wise man said, “…the victory of darkness over light can only be temporary.” 

“Weight.”

  

N,

We argue all the time about the true weight of sin. I know it has no eternal value. You think the sting remains. We both agree there is a sting to it. In the growing up of grace we hurt other people. In living in the darkness of our own pull of gravity, we harm ourselves. It is not a weight we should carry. We ought to put down these foolish and unguarded expectations of our own ability to be good.

Yet, the weight is just a weight. It is something to put down, finally at the feet of the cross. I cannot say how much the light chooses us or how much we choose the light. It must call to everyone one in some way. It must say in clear terms: this weight on your back is not meant for you.

 

“Freedom”

H,

The lights always come on in the end. This is our freedom. Grace means we are not a straight line. We zig zag through life at speed. We are not able to be credible at our own goodness. We are both victim and perpetrator in the crime of being human.

Yet, the light still comes up over our own heads. We can see it calling. We know there is more to the present things we do. We know our fatal flaws will all be replaced. We do not live in fear. We live in the light. We live in freedom.

 

“Final Days.”

  M.

I have no fear of my final days. I know I will spend them thinking of you. I do not think of what is on the other side too much. The human mind is too small to comprehend it. The heart only knows it in rumour. The body cannot enter it. The only real pointer I have for the universe is the heart we share and the life we are building. It is the great shadow that is full of its own points of light.

The final days are not the end. It is just the end of time. We will break free from all of that. We will be as boundless as the universe is. We will not be alone but we will be ourselves, not needing but wanting, not in shadows but full of that real light and no longer merely in love but as love itself.

 

“The Things Unsaid.”

M,

I was always in a hurry to speak my mind. I had to say everything. It had to be clear where I stood on everything. And it was all around me and my words and my heart and my need for sacrifice and some sort of satiation of the strangled soul. Now, I live more for the things unsaid.

There is a peace and joy in knowing you are loved. This is clear when we first encounter God. The thing people outside do not get is the wave of relief at the idea that there is purpose to the madness in general and form in and love for the specific madness that is you. Love is nothing if it is not specific and individual. The thing, mostly unsaid, is that love only works in every single soul. There is no group love. There is only love. 

“That love might stay.”

 

M,

The absolute terror, in my early love of you, of the possibility that it would not stay, that something would taint it, that my flaws would kill it and my hubris would lie alongside my wounded sense of self when the truth comes knocking: the final nail that declares love unworthy or, worse still, me unworthy of love.

None of that came to pass, though. It all went deep into the ground and not out into the atmosphere, useless. It became the thing we are building our life and three other lives around. It did not fail. It has not failed. It has brough back the thirst for honesty, for truth, for the whole self in everything and no part of it left out. Now, it is clear that love will stay. And I intend to stay in it. 

“Love is the ultimate resolution.”

 

M,

It is perhaps too easy to say love resolves all things. There is work to do. Yet, that work is also the work of love. Beyond or beside the greet feeling lies the great forgiveness, the great mercy, the great healing, and the great resolution of all our dark spots. We might summarize what love is but it is the main portion of that eternal book of life.

There is no weakness in love. It is the strongest thing there is. Everything else is a reaction or some distortion of fear and terror. Love stands by itself. It is action, it is words, it is the ideal and the body of the ideal. Nothing will be resolved except love. Nothing will remain apart from love. Our little stabs at it, our little plays based on it, cannot possibly decipher the whole theatre in which it is supreme. It is that singular thing between you and I that will remain enflamed forever, no matter what. 

“Starting Over.”

M,

I have always found it hard to look behind me. The past is not something I wrestle with too much. I am, in a sense, always starting over. This has its good sides, but I also fear I have spots in my memory because I zip pass the crucial replays. I am always trying to be light on my feet. Sometimes, it is better to let the heaviness in.

There is always the weight of history. And these things are to be resolved, not avoided. There is no beginning free of everything that came before. We do not put down an empty load to be relieved of an empty burden. The burden is real. We must resolve it. 

“Life goes easy.”

 

M,

Still, we learn to go easy on each other. It is just life, and we are sharing it. This need to be right ends in the same silly statement from which it began. There are no prizes for being the right one. There are no separate prizes at all. We are learning not to be lonely. We are learning not to be singular, and we are learning to not to lose our minds by ourselves. Even insanity is better shared.

 

The ease that comes is not giving up. It is hanging up those boots we used to call pleasure, but we now know is only escape. It is learning to be quiet because we do not need to fill every moment with noise. It is being at ease with one home, a nation united under the joy of its own weight, not scrambling, or suffering but at peace. It is knowing this house is all we need. And that love stretches, all by itself, into eternal form.

 

 

“Honest Assessments.”

M,

It is no wonder that love is portrayed in such terrible ways. We have not cracked it at all. There are so many rooms in that house. Who can climb all those walls? Who would want to? In the mystery lies the appeal but no mystery can go on forever. After a while, we want an honest assessment of what it all means and where it is all going.

 

In truth, when people say it is easy or it is very hard, I can see both sides. There is an ease to being with your partner that makes constant explanations and justifications obsolete. There is also a hard track of it that is two distinct people forging a life out of thing air. This seeming contradiction is not as strange as it appears at first look. The best partnerships will hit the rocks at many moments in a single day. The changes that happen will be between us and through us to each other. It is death to self but life to everything else. We are made whole by breaking up into parts together. The mystery is solved in this breakdown. There is glory and the light and the pain and the guile and the lesson in love. There is the start of the end of life as a lonely planet. 

“Be Vulnerable.”

 

D,

The older you get, the more your instinct is more the shield than the sword. The sword here is the true state of things, the actual and real word of God, the way you really are in the light. Something happens to tell us we should be weary of true feeling, and our many weakened states or admitting how much we do not know. We become stuck in that place. We become scared of our own shadow and the real image it predicts.

 

You must learn to be vulnerable. You must put that guard down. You must learn to cry without shame, to be nonplussed and not hate yourself, to fall and crack but let the light in and to not listen to that other voice that speaks against your inherent value and divine dignity in the face of present reality. You were always made for more. These lessons will not take you. They are made for you. Be open to them. It doesn’t matter if the world will see all that mess. The most important things are way beyond this present world and all of us presently laboring under its one measly sun. Your true self will overcome the sneer. Let that true self show all the way through.

 

“These planets collide.”

 

Z,

We will run into people all the time. It is important to note that no human is truly harmful or helpful by themselves. They are a complex web of experiences, expectations, disappointments, and the desperation we all share. We have our own webs too. When these planets collide, there is no telling what will emerge from the rubble. You have to learn to look at yourself in that light. We can be damaged, and we can also be the damage.

 

There is nothing to fear in temporary things. All damage is temporary. The human body is no match for the human soul. Jesus said: do not fear the person who can only harm your body. There is something eternal about the human experience. These present stakes are not as high as long and loud sermons tell us. In an eternal sense, they are much higher than all that. From the cheap seats of our present life, the stakes are that we learn from every rumble and the rubble that ensues. We do not learn avoidance but release. We do not learn how to avoid other planets. We learn how to put it all in context. The thing will look better in the full light of day. That day has not yet come. We learn we are on a collision course with something grander. Perhaps, our own true state. 

“The Lonely Planet.”

  

E,

It is important to understand and accept that the lonely planet is you. There is no space for another human being inside your own soul. We are disappointed in people, mostly, for not filling holes in spaces inside us they were not designed to feel. They have their own stuff going on. We can share a journey but not one single, we can share moments but not every bit of time and space, and we can be close but never, ever, the same single being.

 

These spaces are as infinite as the God who intends to fill them. We are all single stars in the firmament of heaven. This hunger we feel from that dark nothing and light everything we come from is insatiable and very real. We must learn to lean into it. It is not to be avoided or pushed away or glossed over or denied. We will learn, through much trouble and debauchery, that it still comes back to that same single place: your own heart, your own soul, your own silence, and your own reach for the divine. Thankfully, the divine has always and already been reaching for you.

 

“In the end.”

 

H,

Who will we be in the end? I do not know. I know the signposts. I have a feel for the ultimate story. I do not know any of the details. What will it be like to forever be? Is the universe inside as vast as the universe around us? What will we do when this other self emerges and we are made of eternal stuff, in reality and not in theory or by choice?

 

I find it endlessly exciting to think of. We are on the surface of a planet, held down by gravity but looking up at the universe every single day of our lives. We are already in the wonder. We just do not understand the infinite yet. In the end, we will.

 

 

“It Pales in Comparison.”

 

H,

We cannot sugar coat it. Life on earth is dreadful for many people. It is more of a terror than a blessing to most people on earth, no matter what the postcards tell us. The material improvements, which are not universal or as widespread as the cliff notes on prosperity and capitalism will have us believe, do not speak to the dearth of the soul and the meaning and purpose we must all find at the other end.

 

We know the human heart is hungry like a hunter. We know that even when that physical hunger is satiated, other and more complex hungers take its place. The greedy human belly pales in comparison to the greedy human heart. The idea that both poor and rich can suffer the same maladies, encounter the same crisis of the soul and end up, even with very diverse problems in colour, at the same ledge, is seen in everyday life. We believe light is the solution. We are asked to feed the hungry, to look for justice in the world, to fight inequality and decay and to not buy the approach that it all means nothing in the end. The darkness now also pales in comparison to the light and joy to come.

 

 

 

 

 

“Strength for Today.”

H,

It is a lifelong pilgrimage to be our true selves, but we only ever need strength for today. We cannot decipher everything we will face and the many places we will fall. It is not within our present stabs at prescience. We are going to have to go in the mud and then go to the living water. We must remove this dictator called consistency. That is for eternal beings. We are not yet that.

 

We cannot stand on the old monikers of decisiveness. We do not know enough. We will not always be right. We will mostly be wrong. We have been wrong a lot. We will be wrong again. This is not the thing we need to fixate on. The only thing we know and can encounter today is linear time. We only know of existence in time. We measure time in seconds, minutes, hours, days. All we need to look at and embrace, in the context of our souls heading into the light, is the magnificent present. All we have is today. We pray for strength for today.

 

 

“The road is dusty and so are we.”

 

H,

We know how deep it gets in the dark and full soul. We have lived on that edge our whole lives.  It is not the easiest path, to find wholeness and holiness in being who you are at any given time. The road is dusty with pitfalls and sand traps, and so are we. There is always that quiet moment in ourselves where we look for a thrill, any thrill at all, that quiets the loud questions within our own souls. We cannot be alone with ourselves for long without folly.

 

I am not sure that feeling will go away any time soon. We will either learn to live with that inner chaos or we will always yield to it and become poorer from it. We know that the things we believe in speak to the healing of our whole lives. We know that these “rules” around the path home are for our benefit and not a counterpoint to our fun. There is a great redefinition going on. The change is what is painful, not the destination.