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.

By The Window

Words float on like photographs
that tremble in the pouring rain,
Echoing my heavy thoughts,
That drift like solemn memories
Endlessly refracting lights, drifting on my tired skin
It echoes like an empty song
That once lit up my face again
Candlelight is my parade,
it drifts through me like falling rain
Across the endless skies

Paint the sky with diamonds
You’re just another chemical in my catalytic converter
I am lost out here, painted on like masquerades
Waiting for the last return
I feel it echo in my universe
Resident entrapment,
And I’m the echoed memory, making stills
In the shadows of the darkroom
Chemicals and fading lights, they capture my breathless soliloquy
As I paint the universe with photographs
I’m not the devil anymore,
I’m not the devil anymore

Any second thoughts?
Of course I love you,
I’m breaking in my drifting pace
Nothing ever develops fast enough
It’s only what’s inside that matters, right?
Hey There,
Turn out the lights, meet me in the darkroom,
Blow out the red lanterns, follow my directions
I see these coordinates laid out, written into my skin,
Engraved into my alibi, like burning commandments
And the autumn leaves turn like pools of blood in twilight on the outside
Forget the bitter winds, and meet me on the darkroom floor

How deep do you really believe?
Does it turn like tidewater?
Breathe in the musty earth around you…
Shake off the dust that’s gathered on your Sunday dress,
take a photograph
Leave the stains on the floor behind
Let words float on,
It’s just dodged the development of something beautiful
Catch my drift,
Hold my hand, and breathe in the endless memories
If you follow the wind,
wait for it to turn up, through kisses shared in the dark,
see it happen like before
set it up, follow my lead love,
follow the wind, forget the cold, give me your hand
I feel the bitter wind again, as words float on like memories

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

Resurrection and Beauty

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,

Untitled

I thought that you knew

I figured it was easy, I guess i was wrong

I told you a tale about two mirrors, and the endless reflections therein

She waits for love to pass like light through a window pane

She waits for consciousness to flood, a river of thought stemming from the endless,

flowing off into deferred memory

I am an endless hall of broken mirrors, i am awake to the possibilities of the one

my path is truncated in photographs scattered across the deserted buildings of my tattered mind

i am empty and darkened, black ink pours from my lips, into my weary hands
I am a beam of light, passing through two mirrors

I told you a tale of two mirrors, of duality and blame,

This is not the end, merely another beginning,

She waits for love to pass, I suppose she waits for me

This poem has nothing to do with my own mood or personal goings on, i just felt like writing. It is a bit moody, but i actually feel pretty good. Thanks.

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