The inner life of the trinity as love can be recognized by us as love only through our participation in that life as it already is and draws us into it. To know the inner life of the Trinity requires that we participate already in the kenotic and self disclosing Other seeking love of the Trinity. There is no epistemology apart from participation. To believe otherwise is blasphemy. Only love understands itself, and only love can disclose itself, and it shall only disclose itself to love when speaking in the epistemological framework. Love is the truest reality that has been revealed to humanity, and it is inescapable. To be a Christian one must believe in and be shaped by their understanding of Absolute Love. In concrete reality love will overpower even non-love, but it will only do so by conforming non love into love through a Taboric experience, through a transfiguration that in the self disclosure draws non love into encounter and thus opens its eyes. Love is always the apriori, and it will always necessarily apprehend and invite the situation before releasing itself and its disclosure into the encounter with the Other. -Eli
Sunrise Girl
February 27, 2009
Sunrise girl, passing from one morning to another, a morning caught in his arms, only to leave the impression of beauty before fading into another memory in another recollection, preempting the emptiness to be left behind. The void though is a fond one, an emptiness that is a transfigurative one, leaving a light behind it, even if only for a moment. It is a light that leaves longing on the lips. Sunrise girl you enlighten the world, but leave it in shadow when you leave, the day you leave behind is the longing of twilight.
You bring the morning sun, you lay out the clouds and scatter them to the four winds that they might carry them in the shapes of dreams and revelations, and they carry your impression, approved by your charming whisper, carried into the early twilight before the breaking of dawn
You bring the day, but you bring it at the expense of twilight, of lasting ignorance, and in shedding light on something less than alive, you yourself have brought its own death before it. Your light is a terror to those who are asleep, those who would have remained if not for your touch
With every sunrise that you bring, you bring your own death keeper of dreams. You disseminate them among the weary, and in instilling hope into the weakened, betray your own hopelessness as you bring dreams out of shadow. With the evanescing shade comes reality like a putrid corpse in the form of sunrise before the perceptions of an unwitting night.
Haunted by the memory of sleepless nights, by broken hearts left in the recollection of your tears, the guilt you run from sunrise after sunrise, enlightening and illumination after illumination makes your countenance darker and darker. Feeling the pain just as equally as they do, knowing the subtle sense of loss that comes as the day brings commonality back into perception. As your dawn casts them into even deeper shadows.
Mortality blurs in your memory and you become cold, as the mirror shows you less and less of yourself, and more and more of a citadel, a fortress to protect a bleeding heart enshrined on a throne of tears, the weakness of which causes such great strength, inverted, perverted, true. The cold icy sting of your eyes, protects your weakened gasps, as you stand tall you rasp for rattling breaths in your dissatisfied and weary lungs, a mighty fortress with weakened and empty halls, derelict and void. A silent citadel seemingly forsaken, yet blooming with life.
Sunrise girl looks into herself and sees death, yet her touch blooms with life. She looks at the effects of her own impartations of light and wonders whether she has scorched the earth beneath her, but she cannot judge for in seeing her path she is blinded to what it truly looks like, mindless of what truly exists beyond her perceptions.
Sunrise girl, bathed in light, touched in darkness, look into this mirror, meeting my eyes we assume it’s just another sunrise, another fleeting escape another sense of loss, another moment in another set of arms. It’s not. The eternal sunrise begins tonight, it ends now. We’re the same, the coin’s sides are the illusion, it’s just like us to make our own luck. It’s just like us to make our own way, but we know that already.
You call me out into the light, you dance your dance in another direction, but as children of the mind, we can bear to do no other. Two sides of the same thing, one perceives light, the other darkness and both are right, it’s twilight after all.
Your eyes meet mine, and I see a mirror, you see a mirror, we look into this moment and perceive an event that makes us tremble. We’re not like this, not anymore. Sunsets and shades of dusk are not our beginnings, not anymore. Cloudfall and storms, we welcome them, but they welcome us no more.
This event, it shakes and shapes us. You’re afraid, sunrise girl, afraid that sunrise might go on into everlasting day, into everlasting light, into an Eden you can’t anticipate.
Go into that Eden, and don’t knock at the edges of the River Styx anymore.
What Does the Resurrection of the Son of God Mean Today?
September 2, 2008
I was thinking about my Christian experience today, and as I was considering the implications of a certain emotional state, I got to thinking about the Victory of God in Jesus, and the idea that despite all things God has won a victory in this world and that ultimately, I am participating in that victory.
Sure, today I am not in the best state, but I have hope. Hope reaches into me, to lead me towards the victory of God. I am the essence of all consciousness, being constantly resurrected from a fallen state. I am baptized into the body of the Risen Lord, and united with him by one Spirit, made one flesh with him by that same Spirit. I am not forsaken, but am embraced by this beloved who ushers me into his presence with glee, as I approach with trembling reverence.
My tears are merely prayers in a different language. In them is the hope of glory, as true suffering somehow brigs true redemption. Our ideals are not God’s ideals. The Risen Lord shows us that in suffering is the cosmos replaced where the chaos once was. Idealism is ultimately backwards, and in those ideals I am further from the Resurrection of the Son of God than closer.
So it occurred to me that in order to truly experience the meaning of this great and glorious resurrection, it means that I must not shed the ideas that I have thought were ideal, I must also embrace those which are seemingly backwards to me.
Suffering is not the emptiness of dejection, though that is experienced, it shall prove to be more integral to the resurrection of my person than should I never have suffered. The world, I can’t speak for, but for me, for Eli, this suffering is my invitation into God’s plan of redemption.
So, as I enter into the lower depths, I know that my war with the forces of evil is not in vain, as I leave behind those things which would lead me from the narrow path, I find pleasure in the backwards ideals of God. Sipping a Lady Grey tea blend and wondering about all this gives me pleasure, and as I pursue my future, I realize that in time I will get there, regardless. Today is a day, tomorrow shall be another, and ultimately, it is completed in such a way that my purpose will be accomplished, I have faith and hope that the path set before me is not in vain and that which I feel called to complete will be completed because I have dedicated myself to it and to enjoying today.
I am enjoying beauty, the joys of mentoring, and being mentored, the beauty of togetherness, the bliss of separation, the ebb and flow of presence and absence.
Beautiful.
As you read this, I don’t think you’ll understand half of what was said here this day, and for that I am sorry.
I don’t blame anyone or anything for these things which we pass. We are all journeying towards something, and I am whole in the redemption of my body. I am whole in my expectation that this is going to be well.
So, brothers and sisters, my little children, remember that suffering causes the redemption of things outside ourselves, and in the end, it is not about how God is going to save me. It’s about how God is going to save the universe through me.
Love one another, as I remember to do the same. Hold fast. Stand strong.
The Resurrection shall live through me today, and in this we are well pleased.
Resurrection and Beauty
May 11, 2008
Do you ever just stop and wonder at the beauty of the world? Catching if even for a moment a glimpse of something truly beautiful? Do you ever just get the feeling that somehow things are going to work out alright? This is not to paint a wondrously idealist picture of reality, but sometimes, standing in the light of the sunset, I can look over my shoulder, and feel a sense of comfort, like everything that was created will be put in place. I can hold my girlfriend’s hand and appreciate the heavens, knowing that something beyond her, or me is coming. Standing there in the sunset, I can catch a glimpse of the eschaton, enveloping my heart.
That feeling, that endless comfort tinged with longing, I would argue, is the resurrection. Today, I sit at rest, and know that the world is being set to rights and I am an irreducible part of the reconciliation of all things, because God made it that way. That sense of beauty, of wonder, I feel to be the knowledge within me about the coming goal of the universe. Just like if you’ve lived in the south, or anywhere where it rains a lot, you can feel a shift coming. I think that beauty does the same thing. We can feel the grace of God in His creation, and can feel a need to develop the beauty that we have a sense of.
God created us and began the work of creation in us, and will carry on our createdness, until its completion. There are brief moments, when we stop and pause and think “I think the universe is good.” Or “Is everything really ok underneath it all?” Resurrection says that these glimpses of the beauty and rightness of things is what we’re really really waiting for.
Resurrection is the belief that while we are wanderers in the current age, traveling across endless landscapes of deserts. We are faced with things that are sometimes dark, leaving us weary and hopeless we take step after step in seemingly aimless direction at times. Resurrection answers that wandering with the belief that we are steadily approaching something new on the horizon, a new city, a new mode of bodily existence ,a new beauty which awaits us as we travel. Resurrection answers the desperation of our hope with a solemn assurance about our longing, no we are not yet perfect, no the world is not yet perfect, but it shall be. The God Man sit bodily upon the throne of grace, steering the world from the hearts of his saints, claiming from within creation a place for himself that will spread into all things.
This is the resurrection of our God, this world is loved and has been rescued, and will not be abandoned. I see something so beautiful that I want to approach it steadily. No matter how long the night gets, even if at the end of the journey my faith is fragile and weak, in the light of the resurrection I can find strength, by looking to it, i have hope.
The “progress” I’m talking about is personal, not political. It will not be found in the deification of leaders, or have an answer in politics. It is when the I and thou relationship between human and God adopts a face, the thou becomes the “You” becomes the “Jesus” as a person and not an idea. The approach is not just to declare the Lordship of God, nor merely his love. But when we look to that Great Savior, we see resurrection, beauty, life, and from those flourish all other things, that is when we have a taste of home upon our lips, and a prayer in our hearts.
“Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will be Done, On Earth as it is in Heaven” is the cry of this beating heart, and as I pause today to think, I remember the way in which that kingdom first reached me. In the arms of my mother, tenderly holding me and overflowing with divine love, she embraced me, and in those arms was a sacrament, a symbol of the love of God, conveying grace to the little child, who would grow up and turn away, only to be forgiven time and again. Parenting is a sacrament. As I close this thought, I would like to reiterate that God loves this world, and refuses to leave it, as we can see in the love we share, in the people we love, in the less fortunate we care for.
Resurrection, is about surprises, and I know that what awaits at the end of those glimpses is more surprising, more shocking and more beautiful than even I can imagine.
Thanks for Tuning in,
