De Profundis

The darkness feels stifling, consuming the light of my eyes
Choking the frail hope i retain that you will be my deliverance
I am in the midst of great darkness, and no lights present themselves to guide me
I am lost beneath a great cloud of fog, and my direction is uncertain

They said you would be my light,
They said that if I had enough faith you would always make everything work
They said i could trust in you to make me normal.
They spoke of your great glory, but it was only to serve the ends they thought appropriate
They told me not to be sad, to overcome by pretending to be happy
They told me to tell others I was blessed and not cursed
above only
and not beneath
More than a conqueror. They told me to conquer and make violence against the devil and his forces, they told me to be a one man army, to have the faith of a prophet.

I was led into the place where my hands were stained with blood, I tried to fix myself
I was led to the place where malice was my accomplice and a altar was placed before me
I was led upon the dais to behold the altar, and I burned incense to myself.
I was led to the place where my discomfort was my enemy, and i had to atone for myself.
I was led into darkness.

I was told that what matters is me, that who I am, and MY story are way God is going to use me. And now I am in deep darkness.
I was told to seek after the things of the world, just to do it in a way that appeased the mandates of cultural humility.

The darkness swallows everything. There is not one thing that escapes decay, not one thing that escapes corruption, and we are all fallen.

I am in darkness, and I am unhappy. I am in pain, and I am discontent.
I sometimes wish I was not acquainted with You, and Your gospel.
I sometimes wish I was different, another.
I sometimes desire to be forsaken.

But you will not leave me. You have called me to the cross, and it pains me,
you have called me to death and it is not easy.
You have called me to a holy dread, and it will not give me the desires of my wicked heart.
You have spoken to me by speaking to the world, and we tremble at the sign
The cross is our mt. zion, and we have all seen the glory of the lord and been called to respond

You have started a world in which there is no more pain, and that world is already-not yet
where there is joy, you are there
where there is suffering, you are there
where your church suffers, you suffer with us
where your church is crucified, you are too
where your people are beaten and scourged, this is already our glory
where your people are weeping and famished, you are starving among the weakest

You are the human, you are the objective humanity,
you are the one who knows what it means to live before the Father as a man
teach me my beloved and cross shattered Lord, what it means to suffer unto the shedding of blood
and reassure me that these sufferings are well to experience
The suffering of the world is not foreign to you, you are the suffering one
you are the ever suffering one,
we remember the testament of your great sorrow, and we enjoin our suffering to yours
you are dead, but not atheistically, we do not proclaim your death because you have ceased to be
but we proclaim your death, because we know that without it, there could be no life
we proclaim your death because we know we have been found wanting,
we proclaim your death because it shows us we are accepted
we are loveless sinners, beloved children

death is our enemy, and we reject her power, we reject her sting,
yet the suffering is our life, and our sweet promise, the darkness we pass through is for the sake of light
the darkness we endure is exhaustible, and we bear the fury of the world with courage,
not because we are inexhaustible, but because you are, and as we bear the suffering of the whole world enjoined in you, we shall find that your inexhaustible love is what guides us through the night
and gives us assurance in the midst of despair

it is not that we are happy, but that we have courage to endure our fears
it is not that we have power, but that you make possible a community which does not need it
it is not that we have blessings according to the world, but that we have one bread, and one cup which is the sweetest blessing of all
it is not that we are the most miraculous, but that you yourself have given us the greatest miracle of all
It is not that we have the greater works which we we seek, there is truly no greater love, no greater act than to suffer and lay down one’s life
Teach me to suffer by the way of your son, that my life brings to you principalities and powers subjected and laid at your feet Holy King of Israel

From the depths we cry to you oh Lord, your unhappy, and suffering children
From the depths we cry to You, your beloved children

Spirit be my guide in darkness, that where I am in the midst of sheol you are there
Spirit be my purger, and let my purgatory be in this life
Jesus be my teacher, that i may follow even unto death
Father, be that which you are, self-emptying love
Bring that vengeance which we seek, peace that destroys the powers of war
bring the vengeance which makes peace out of chaos, which brings order out of nothing
bring the vengeance and the wrath which dissolves alienation and marginalization
bring the justice which overcomes corruption, and the various injustices of the world
bring about that which you promised, the reconciliation of all things
and most of all, give us the patience to wait, with love and trust that you will not fail us.

Sunrise Girl

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.

This Broken Child

I just feel so torn. caught between two things, wondering, waiting, feeling exhausted as i sit here another night, contemplating my life, thinking of what could have been. I was ready to embrace what should have been, but in the end nothing is really as it seems, and so i’m on my way with empty dreams.

I thought it would get better over time, and came to find myself in line for just another lame excuse, now i feel i wear a noose, and tonight i am broken. Tonight, you win. I don’t know if that’s your aim or not but you have reached it.

Screw bad poetry, you fuck with me. End of story.

I’m just tired, and I don’t know what the hell you want from me.

Is it faith? Is it piety? Is it love thy neighbor?

Whatever. I’m done. Holy blessed Trinity, forgive me my arrogance and malice, bless this tender child who beats his fist against his chest and cries “Injustice!”

Forgive the scandal I make, for I know that you alone embrace this broken child.

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 mystery of grace

I just feel so afraid, today I’m so alone. And no, this is not a poem, this is my life. Hopeful and ever looking forward, i still find myself pausing, regretting, wasting away in the torture of my own possibilities, things that make me happy torture me with their enjoyability, and i seem to only find rest in misery.

 

I hate myself today. I want to strangle myself today, for how vain i feel. like a fucking insolent prick bastard, conceited and self indulgent, working my way into everything  only to spoil it by touching it. I feel like those thigns which i would gladly preach against, hate, vanity, greed, lust, envy.

 

I feel unkind, unlovely and dirty. I have crossed boundaries, been unfaithful to God and myself, and forsaken the person i thought i was. I have lived life to the fullest, emptied my heart on street corners and sold my body for love. Nothing ever changes. New humanity…where the hell do we get these things?

 

forgive my bitter pessimism, if it disturbs you, well, i’m just tired, i can’t seem to catch a breath and I fear that animal which seems to have become me. even as i approach that person i want to be, find happiness, fulfillment, inner peace, these things drive me to insanity. I can’t just allow myself to catch a moment of peace and absorb the meaning of life set before me, no….i have to complicate thigns, make them painful, difficult and selfish, i have to make them real, because any shred of frivolous pleasure would be too much for a holier than thou good lutheran like me. fuck it all.

 

fuck

 

it

 

all.

 

to hell with charades and bitter tears. to hell with these feelings, this guilt. this elephant in the room, this dying agony that tears at me everytime i have a minute to think.

 

I am a person, and i am hurting. i am a person, and for the first time in my life, i am treated as such, unconditionally, without regret, without remorse, without second guessing.

 

fuck you.

 

today, i am treated like a someone, beautiful, accepted, discipled, welcomed, lovely, today i am transformed rather than beat down, and in that acceptance i find my biggest threat. The thing i have always longed for, that unconditional love we’re all chasing after, it’s at my doorstep, it’s knocking, it’s here it’s upon me tearing at my chains, loving me without regrets, and today i shut my bible. Today i feel like God spoke to me, and it hurt worse than having a broom broken over my flesh, it hurt worse than the betrayal of infidelity, it jurt worse than the separation of death, and it welcomed me into a holy foresight, a peace that lies beyond the fringes of the mind, that comes to dwell in the center.

 

can you understand that?

 

I can’t comprehend this thing….this unconditional love thing. we all say we believe it, but go out and slap someone in the face, see if they love you then. go out and steal someone’s car and bank account numbers, see if they wake up to go find you and embrace you. go out and show someone your flaws, and see if they can accept you, tell someone you’re in love with them and that the world beats at a more painful pace when they’re not around, see if they feel the same.

 

they don’t.

 

not usually.

 

can you believe it? I can’t. I’m beyond words for this thing, this love that just accepts and never condemns, that’s fucking sacred. beyond words, spaces, times, this is the ineffable made into experience. God truly encounters humanity in time, because moments are sacred, spaces are transitory. moments are forever.

 

and as I go on exploring this journey that leads me down twists and turns tugging between holiness and absolute fear, loathing and loving, I feel angered, loved to anger by too beneficial a love, too forgiving a grace, too compassionate a mercy. I feel too accepted by something i could never accept back the way it deserves.

 

that’s frustrating as shit. how the heck are you supposed to deal with a realization like that and be sane?

 

I can never love and accept the love that God has given. it’s too overwhelming, too sacred, too present a reality, far more substantial and real than I can be.

 

I feel like a ghost next to it, hollow, and in pain due to the reality around, and looking at the beauty everywhere, I feel naked, cheated, bare, exposed, torn to bits and hatred spews out of me like an ocean, pouring out onto sacred ground, frothing at the mouth i’m trying to taint it, make it more bearable, make it more mundane, and it just refuses to change.

 

It’s still sacred, it just absorbs all my evil, it just cleanses all my dirt. it just transforms all my guilt and makes me scream on the inside because I can’t be anything base near it. It ust changes my filth, transforms my anger, redeems my sludge.

 

I hate it. oh….i have really come to hate that love of God which I also praise so highly. it’s too accepting, it’s shockingly overpowering, even when i wish to do evil and taint myself, i can’t. inescapable.

 

inescapable.

 

tragically holy. the grace of God is tragically holy, so sacred that facing it draws tears of blood from the beholder. It wasn’t God’s decision that Jesus faced in the garden, it was the power of his own forgiveness. The power of a grace so otherworldly it hurts to look at.

 

It’s made me cry today, made me angry, happy, frustrated, solemn, bitter and accepted.

 

How do you face a love so solid it makes you feel ashamed?

 

How can you reject a love so powerful it hurts when it acts as a mirror showing you how insubstantial your heart really is?

 

It hurts to behold, oh it hurts worse than any physical pain I’ve ever experienced, and yet it’s necessary, and in staring directly into it, i feel like my flesh could melt off my bones, and I feel like every cell on my body is bursting with new life.

 

this is just so incomprehensible to me.

 

fuck…

 

it’s a mystery.

Untitled II

Do you believe me? I asked one night, as we drifted through the night air, heavy laden with the tears of our saints. It took a moment to register that feeling, a soft twitch, a quirk in your smile. Weary and tired we approached the old theatre, tried and beaten down by the vagaries of reality. But within, within was really where the treasure was.

You’ve always known how to look within.

So, we descended the steps, hearing our echoes carry across the proscenium, listening to the whispers around us. Covered in rain, I lit up a cigarette and sat beneath the heavy curtains, drawing lines across your skin in whispers of broken revelry. You never join me here anymore.

Your lipstick carried the chorus of a thousand souls that night, breathing out the softest hues of murder and lullabies. Stroking your rain laden hair with my cold fingers, I felt you near me, felt you shiver inside your skin. You looked at me, caught in those eyes I emptied myself to the stars, and told you your dreams.

You told me I was your everything, now just a reflection. That night under the blood red curtains, I sang you a song from another world, that old song, from another life, when we were both cats. In that moment your eyes lit up and looked beyond our theatre, fell into revelry, and absorbed the ecstasy of our commingled voices as you joined me in our endless requiem.

Covered with each other upon the faded stage, upon that scratched wood, worn with love and age and ending memories we found each other, we found a song. I always knew you would find yourself. I was a saint. I was yours that night, and I asked if you believed me. You fell into that endless gaze and rose from my lap to dance before the eagerly awaiting audience of chairs and moths in the flames. You twirled about like that little girl, smiling out in open fields.

You told me to believe in you. You told me that everything was in its place. You asked me to love you like an endless dream, to enter you, an inseparable reflection. You were my voice, and I was your eyes. Justice, used to pass between us like ceaselessly flowing water, freely given. We used to watch the day go by from the roof, waiting for our chance to join the sun in her home under the earth. The moon we knew was our guardian, and the twilight, our sweet abode.

Weary and tired, you fell to your knees and cried out, a panic swept over your face, undying torture, a shriek of terror locked on your face. Suddenly, you no longer cared for beauty. Your knees locked in that bitter position of weeping agony, feeling the breaking of a thousand hearts, hearing the cries of a dying child, you were endlessly above me. I fell to my knees, welcoming the terror, feeling that horror that is our existence I joined you. Weeping hearts and breaking bridges, burning lives all around, and nothing for solace save the sound of our own tears.

You asked me to believe. I stopped hearing the sound of running water.

Sex Changes and The Light of Humanity

Quirky title. thought so. But anyways, don’t let it throw you.

What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
- John 1

In Him was life…and that life was the light of humanity, that light shines on….

I’m not going to go into a super deep reflection or anything, I just, i think that as I go through my day, I’m trying to remind myself of the significance of all of this, and what God means for reality as a unified whole.

In Christ is life, that life is our light, I can’t give a commentary that decrypts the message, other than, He has brought life into being. My own life, redeemed, as I’ve been talking to my friends from years ago this week, I realize that in Him I have found life. That life has brought me out of suffering in the past, has brought me suffering in the present, has changed me, has given me light.

There is darkness. . .screw the darkness. The light for humanity that is found in the life manifested in Christ shines on. There is no reason to allow depression to choke out hope, no reason to let doubt steal my sanity, to let fear steal my humanity.

I’m thinking that while it’s easy to doubt, it’s not mine. It doesn’t belong to me.

It leaves you feeling pretty hollow
It might be nice to look at
Don’t forget you’re stuck with it tomorrow

- Dresden Dolls “Sex Changes”

It’s ok to struggle, St. Peter says that we all shall, and we do. Life is composed of interludes of suffering and rest. But to give up, as they say it leaves you feeling pretty hollow. And there’s everything that comes with that tomorrow.

There is love in this beating heart, there is hope in these tired hands, and they are weary, but determined, to look to Christ for strength.

Thanks For Tuning In,

Thanks to:

- The Dresden Dolls