A Broken Hope- A Weak People (Interlude)

“Will you now restore the Kingdom to Israel?” Is today the day you’re going to fix everything, cut the powers that be down to size and show them that Love and Mercy are the true powers and that Love itself is You?

I think not…and for that very reason I am angry with you. I don’t understand your choices, I don’t understand how you claim to Love so powerfully yet allow us to continue in our foolishness and idolatry day after day. Sure you’re self-emptying and all-loving, but this makes no sense. If you loved us, wouldn’t you rather set all things right as soon as possible?

What reason for the delay? Is it some divinely ordained plan to just wait until we’re so exhausted that we can no longer continue? What majesty is there in silence, in weakness, and in being trampled upon? What power can there be in allowing the world to fall ever increasingly into chaos? What justice is there in a world where money rules and corporations decide the events of our lives?

What justice can there be in a world where those who bear your name don’t bear your likeness? What justice can there be in a world where we are persecuted, abandoned and destitute? We are forgotten, just like you.

Men sing your praises with their lips and women clap their hands in exultation, people rejoice at your magnificence, but there are starving people down the street, abandoned buildings in our midst, and suffering children’s cries in our ears.

And yet, you sit in perfect passivity. You contemplate your own glory, and your perfection is unceasing. Maybe we should praise you for being the most contented narcissistic being ever. Mayhap we should be content that everything that happens is in your divine will, and that you’re just a beneficial dictator. Maybe you’re the all-loving Hitler in the sky, at least that’s the way that they paint you. They show you to us as a cloud of glory, an all powerful yet wholly apathetic and unsentimental being, so unmoved that we might burst for the compassion you’ve given us that you seem to lack, because everything is in your plan.

Your words do not rage in the hearts of the prophets, instead, they are drowned out by hushings and sighings. Your cries for justice on the lips of the autistic child are silenced or put out, your cries of love reach deaf ears when they come from the hungry and the poor. The woman in that pew is not sure how she will feed her children tonight, and the couple next to her is sated beyond their ability to spend, what manner of family is this? What honor can be had among a people mighty and sated with their own power?

Your “prophets”, your “apostles”, they ask us to believe that we too should be empowered, powerful, mighty, successful, monetarily wealthy. They tell us to seek these things, and as an afterthought mention that we might want to seek the kingdom first, because these things are irrelevant in so many ways. Your prophets maintain the status quo, they hold fast the barriers, and they’ve made a mockery of you. They’ve cast lots for your garments, but only to exchange them with an american flag. They no longer clothe you in purple, they clothe you in the seamless garment of patriotism. They crown you with lady liberty, and place the declaration of independence as a sign above you. They give you the sword, and nail it to your beaten hands, they take your beaten teeth out of your mouth and replace them with bullets, they take your wounds and fill them with the ichor of bitterness and pride. They give you to drink hypocrisy and mix it with the blood of their enemies. They lay you in the tombs of their great heroes, they inscribe your name on their war memorials and fail to see that you undo their idols. You yourself are the weakened voice that in its very weakness and suffering destroys all idols.

You do not raise your voice, you do not defend yourself against these abusers, these pilates, these caesars.

NOTHING makes me angrier than the words “It must be the will of God”. As if you haven’t clearly shown us that which you desire. I am angered, furious at your lack of standing up for yourself at times. You just sit there on your beaten tree, breathing, gasping, blood in your eyes, and you ask for our forgiveness. Let me join you, in praying for this broken world, for I cannot bear to stand outside it another moment, and at least in joining you, i may find life and hope. If all I see is darkness, at least I know you gave your life that they might have life, and that your will is life, over against the chaos of death that has usurped your good creation.

Teach me to forget my anger and forgive, that we might have heaven on earth.

Let us bear this together, for your body is life, let me be found in your wounds, and let your wounds be found in my body. Teach us to rightly stand with you, not in power, but in weakness. Teach us to surrender our power, frustrate all our plans, show us we’re all pretentious, that we might experience the joy of being dependent children, utterly lost without you.

Interactions

I breathe you in, your fingertips scratch across my lips like hands lifted high in prayer, I see you there, waiting.

Please don’t hold this against me, I feel something changing. Silence is waning, and we are waiting. I feel, your hand in mine again and it all depends, on breathing.

I can’t flourish in this half breath, with this canopy of fading embers being all that remains.

What remains is just a construct, a shadow, forgotten holidays and high holy days.

Break it all down into simplest terms, don’t forsake me now.

Let’s make a few of you and me, but where do we begin?

Don’t deserve me now, let’s get out somewhere different than where we were before.

Don’t tell me you never knew, it’s rising like prayers in our midst, as your hand collides with mine and your love meets my eyes.

Reflecting the endless interlude between presence and absence, i feel the tension of our union

Blessed Mecca, return to me my innocence, my wanderings in your presence, as I cross these streams in the desert, the sands shift underneath my feet, I am searching.

I am drunk with this wine and searching for a mirror, my life is in my eyes and the light behind them streams out like fresh water, whispering across the face of these arid dunes.

Prayers rise up like the ashes of a funeral pyre, calling out, my heart longs for return, my feet take me further, I feel closer, you are closer.

My daggers cross themselves before me like stars in my hands, let these lights in my hands rend the heavens, and tear down the veils.

The coldest night brings the warmest hearts, join together when the coldest man grabs his altar, and spills himself upon it.

Remember my words and echo yourself in their reflection, repetition makes for meditation.

Meet my gaze and drift away if you wish, but don’t say i never tried, don’t deserve me now, don’t desert me now.

It all depends on breathing, and i feel your fingertips scratching prayers once again, into these praying lips.

Alive

To feel great suffering is to be alive in today’s world. For with every great deep and chaotic valley, we know we are truly alive among the sedated masses that stumble in and out of bed obedient to every passing whim of authority, be it the job they serve, the advertisements they attend to, or simply the silent desperation of anesthetics for the soul, to feel pain is to be alive.

In past ages we’ve had pain to deal with, agonies of the soul, quiet meditations to life’s big questions. Today, we sit in an emulsion of sound and lights and flashy colors and distractions, so that when we do contemplate ourselves, we despair. We ache and hurt because we are not at rest, we live like the kings of ages past, and yet have not found happiness, and as Nietzsche pointed out, we are the last man, we are the final ones, who will claim with our sleepy eyes, “We have invented happiness.”

So, know then that when you suffer, and ache, and have riddles to ponder, great questions to overthrow and overcome, when you are tortured, you are alive. You are not sedated. You are empassioned, you are not anesthetized against yourself, you embrace your weary bleeding heart, and carry your heavy cross across the landscape of humanity, calling forth with clarion call, ‘this is the way!’

Have we become so blind? So as not to feel our souls retreating as our distractions flood us with less energy, less life. To contemplate is to be alive, to be conscious of oneself is to be a self, without this, we are shells.

Such heavy passions such as burden the hearts of the weary, these are the things which make us alive. We either live in great tragedy and ask why, or have no tragedy at all and are resigned to sedation which is the worst of all evils that can happen to the human soul.

To suffer is to be aware.

Though this by no means resolves suffering, know that you are alive when you feel, your passions are still beating in your weary heart, better than nihilism of the soul, better than sedation, better than a lack of identity, you are still alive.

And in that life we find our passions steady beating, that solemn agony.

It still echoes across our hearts and minds, in the visions of our memories, in the hearts of all children, the knowledge that suffering is within us all.

We are alive in this, and as we near that great consuming fire, we find that we are all alone, outside the walls of normality, outside the jurisdiction of sedation, outside the facets and boundaries of acceptable. We are not acceptable, we are prophets. We are not the joyous announcers of salvation, but the harbingers of awareness, bringing suffering to the forefront of our minds, in order to answer the question which has never been answered successfully. From Buddha to Jesus, to the New Age and beyond, no one can answer.

The Outside is Within.

The True Sufi

THE TRUE SUFI

What makes the Sufi? Purity of heart;
Not the patched mantle and the lust perverse
Of those vile earth-bound men who steal his name.
He in all dregs discerns the essence pure:
In hardship ease, in tribulation joy.
The phantom sentries, who with batons drawn
Guard Beauty’s place-gate and curtained bower,
Give way before him, unafraid he passes,
And showing the King’s arrow, enters in.

R. A. Nicholson

‘Persian Poems‘, an Anthology of verse translations
edited by A.J.Arberry, Everyman’s Library, 1972

Think about it.

Thanks for Tuning In

Close Your Eyes with Holy Dread

Close your eyes with holy dread…

Prayer, prayer for me is a moment of holy dread. Not always, sometimes I forget to be afraid of God, other times I am welcomed before Him.

This is what it is to have religion, to come into an encounter with God, holy dread. I remember the first time i ever had a vision of God, I was filled with overwhelming fear at first, there was an objective otherness that enshrouded my mind and captivated all my senses, it was like the skin cells in my pores were flooded with something just outside them that demanded they stand at attention.

Without waiting, i am caught in an endless interlude of presence and absence. To know God is to divest in yourself that means outside yourself by which you come before God for worship. Life is not about fitting God into my schedule, into my story, it’s about worshiping objectively the ONE who deserves to be worshiped simply for the fact that He is. There is a dread weight that draws tight the strings upon my heart in the face of overwhelmingly objective holiness.

God is the true objective, and I with all my subjectivity can but wish myself to survive such an encounter. To be stricken with the weight of holiness, and fall before that Holiest of holies, this is my desire. To be filled with Holy Dread, not for lack of love, not for the sake of distance and removing the personal, but because I desire the power of his holiness to enshroud me about with the awareness of an objective God that lies at the center of my heart, as the fuel of my life.

I dunno, i guess i don’t really have a point in writing tonight. I just am thinking about this holy dread, it’s something i feel i used to know at sometime, some days I feel fallen, divided in myself. I apologize first to myself for failing to unite into a whole the various persons that make up my being. I am not an academic, I am a Christian. I am not just a brain, I am a person. I do not seek to choke out my spiritual life with academics, but to be a Christian amid and between academics, always in the power and presence of the Spirit.

I have no real point tonight, only to say this much:

Father, forgive me my sins, hold me where I am weak
Lord, give me strength to awaken my heart in the midst of my trials
Jesus, I am weak and have failed, I have forgotten to take the straight and narrow path
I have sinned, and cast stones, stolen and forgotten the widows
I have taken bread from the orphans and forsaken your name
I have looked in the mirror, and forgotten what I look like
You are gracious and compassionate
You are the Holy One,
The Great Redeemer is in the midst of his people rejoicing over them with singing
I am not subject to myself, but entrust myself to you
Father, heal this broken weary heart, whose words you can commit to memory,
whose longings you alone can truly know
Help me, fill me with that Holy Dread
Fill me with abounding love,
You have done a great and mighty thing in my life
Let me not forget you in my busy ways
May my heart be near you always
even closer than my very breath
For in you alone do I find my completion
You alone deserve my being,
For you have called me to yourself,
The Spirit says “Come”
The Bride says “Come”
Maranatha,
I await the parousia in my own life,
I eagerly await your kingdom
let it come on earth as in heaven and redeem all things
give us bread that we may share with others,
water so that they never thirst again
give us hope Lord, in One Faith, One Hope, One Lord,
One Body, One Baptism, One God
You alone are truth,
Your word is truth
Be unto me that inseparable vine
so that I may be the branches
You alone are Father,
My heart is overjoyed at your beauty,
Thank you for your reconciliation
I dedicate myself to you again,
Be my healer, as I seek to be your son