I Am Who Everyone Else Is Not

Praying with Clocks

2011-09-20T10:06:00.000-07:00

This piece was published at Eunoia Review on May 22, 2011.

Praying with Clocks

The gauze, constricting, shrouds his hands. He would that they would meet, moving beyond the lifeless clasp which whitens the knuckles. No amount of false tears can melt his yearnings to his words, which fall in a litany of useless entreaties. He repeats phrases, runs down lists, enumerates names to eat time away, but the clock ticks baroquely on the inert invocations, as his eyebrow twitches to its every movement. Time progresses, with God but slowly. He sweats with anxiety and steels himself for death whilst his life is robbed. His precious moments simper on, but he is girt only for abasement.

Every day he comes calling. Ask and it shall be given to you, seek and you will find. But nothing poured its deluge and smothered the coals of his expectation. Hear my cry, he would call. Are you there? he would ask. He looked on silence as the face of things, and his brow was not crowned with humility and patience. Once he would lose himself in supplication, but now his staticity made devotions of the clock’s ticking. Because he could not move his heart beyond the seemly, its exertions became fixations. His prayers became fuel to enervate the minutes and hours, his anticipation and his hope, wrapped up in numerical values, ceased to function on the human. He was paralytic in his computing, subdividing chunks of time to make faster its passage; varying his perception of the movement and interpretation of segments to augment the impotence of the already unengaging hours.

Something changes, though; the second hand clicks and vibrates as it tries to move forward. He watches as it ticks off second by second without progression. He frowns at the dirty trick but cannot leave; his hour is not at end. With the counting frustrated, he scrabbles for words and praise to lay out in offering. With every hollow crust of a word, the clock fails to record a second. With every extra moment, his indifference turns to ire. The more he babbles in his mind, the faster time does not pass. He contemplates abandoning the whole failed myth of it all, but he knows if he does that now, he will not be able to go back on it later. What can he do? There is no negotiating with a malignant deity demanding devotion.

It is apparent, he reflects, that only an imposition on his will could bind him in such a way. The convergence of events, the intersection of moods and precedents, these show the artfulness that goes beyond natural life. There is an intervention at work on him. He can but tremble, for he knows not the why or the wherefore. Cut off from man, cut out from time, cut away from the world, he imagines this isolated eternity imposed on every second that he has ever lived. Every humiliation, every shameful act, every guilty moment, every wasted evening, every barren, sorrowful ounce of pain he has inflicted or suffered, each one stretching out, echoing through the canyons of reality, unchanging, deepening the scars in his trapped soul, and he, unable to escape, let go or be free, is shaded with regret, becoming its doppelganger and kin. He begs freedom from recurrence.

Earnestly, he cries. Don’t let my days blow through open windows, he says. Don’t let my crooked ways haunt me. Don’t let my unfruitful hours prey at my mind. Don’t let my goodness be squandered and stifled by evil. Don’t let me be a limb lopped off. Don’t burn my fat and consume me for glory. But above all, don’t let my slow heart impede you. I desire mercy, not sacrifice. Forgive me. Forgive me.

The second hand ticks once more and moves forward.

Road Kill

2011-08-07T10:09:00.000-07:00

This story was published at Pagan Friends on April 30th, 2011.

Road Kill

The lights were crashing by with incredible noise, breaking the water in sheets that spread out like wings. Humphrey emerged from the bushes timidly. He blinked slowly, but did not look both ways. A vicious urge drove him forward. He had to move. East, over the plain, there was somewhere he needed to be. Directed by his instincts, his individuality was obscured. He was now primal matter, invested as a force, soulless and driven.

The deadline drew near, for his destination was time as well as place. He had to go forward despite the danger from the roaring lights. He placed his foot on the unyielding surface. His knees buckled as the ground refused to give way beneath him. Each step felt as if he was kicking up rocks.

A set of lights roared up and over him. The massive bulk behind the glowing eyes became visible like a can rising to the surface of a pool. He tried to pull his head in to protect himself, but he was struck anyway. Violently he was smacked around and thrown aside. His blood oozed everywhere, his limbs splayed and broken. Agony electrified his frame, pulsing in convulsions.

Car after car drove by his shattered body. The lost life at the side of the road meant nothing to any of them, but it meant a great deal to him. As his vitality waned, so did the need that had screamed through his flesh. He was restored to himself; the heavy hand of his ancestry left him to face his death alone.

A Mouse's House and I Hate Italy

2011-08-07T07:56:00.000-07:00

These two pieces were published at Danse Macabre du Jour on April 19, 2011.

A Mouse's House

Outside, the rollicking pale waste,
Shadings of black and white clouds,
Softly waves over the sky.

The balloon floats, waiting for its fall.
Chiaroscuro textures form gently
Across the smooth curve.

A couch lies, lost, sitting, waiting.
It’s left for taking at no cost,
Perched over the curb until…

Leaping, the cat moves slowly,
As if suspended in time,
Through the vacant glass.

A drip, dripping,
Echoes through the house
Clearly, with resonance.

A breathless impression of sound
Comes heaped in a jacket pile
With stillness from the ears poking out.

That gentle sobbing sigh,
Nearly lost in ambient noise,
Hides, one with rooms and buoys.

All is betrayed from order:
Over, under, wrinkled, torn,
Scattered, barely worn.

Fool! Brushed the drooping curl,
Peaceful in parallel slits,
Now, rhythmic venting winds.

I Hate Italy

I hate Italy; Italy hates me. It’s as if I’m a returning Etruscan King; the land itself rises against me. Heat and humidity are sent to dull my wits as I come to Milan. In Venice, whilst I plot its demise, the ancient winding roads conspire to confound and irritate my companions and I. We are but three wise men following a star to our destination; why are we dealt with so harshly? Is this not the home of the faith? Is every new pilgrimage such a threat? I feel fortunate that I did not leave without some spoil, or else all would be in vain. I gladly walk from this place in my new boots of Spanish (an aesthetic adjustment to the truth, they’re actually Italian) leather.

The Long Hard Road to Sainthood

2011-07-08T21:55:00.000-07:00

I really want to be a saint. Not the biblical version where all believers are saints, but the Francis of Assisi version, the Paul version, the Ignatius version. I could list name after name of visionaries with faith like fire who I want to emulate, but the problem is I don't want to do it for God's glory. I yearn for it on my own account. I want to serve the Lord so that I might be recognized for great faith, so that I may be regarded as a great servant, so that I may be esteemed highly of men, not of God. I am a selfish wretch. Lord help me.

I often fear that everything I believe may be untrue. Strangely enough, I believe this to be my first step towards sainthood, because this fear does not stem from my own desire to be right, or from the fact that I can't live without my crutch, it does not even have a self-pitying aspect, or a I don't want to be obliterated aspect. This fear is rooted in my love of God. It is a fear that if my beliefs are wrong then something great and good is missing from the Universe, in fact that all that is great and good is missing, all greatness and goodness is gone. I hate the thought of a world without God because he is great and good. It is messed up the way I end up expressing my admiration for His greatness and goodness.

This is a good evidence for God: it is said sometimes that religion, and especially Christianity, is a comfort we give ourselves because we don't wish to face the real world. I say that is foolish; anyone who knows a hardcore Christian ought to know that our religion is not comfortable. Honestly, life would be easier without the God factor, we'd be free to do and think as we please without all the guilt and conviction and confessions and morality, etc. If God was simply a way of comforting myself, why would I deny Him so readily and so often? If I was looking for comfort, why would I choose a way of life that constantly makes me seem foolish and hypocritical? Why would I pick a way of life that brings light to my flaws?

I was talking about sin the other day at work, trying to explain why I do not enjoy glorifying it, even humorously or ironically. I have to take sin seriously, I do not think that this is a deficiency or a weakness however. To be able to laugh about sin is not a wonderful and enjoyable freedom. I would much rather be free from sin and laughing in its face. Why can I not take sin lightly though? I have sinned, I continue to sin. That should be reason enough, it is to close to home. But what of sins that I have not seen or felt? What about a joke about dying African children? Why can't that be funny? I think that there is a crass attitude necessary to make light of such a situation. I may not take that attitude and the joke might be funny in and of itself, but the fact that that joke is being told by those God has placed around me shows I have much yet to do in their lives. I am responsible, in a sense, for their sin. They do not know the difference between right and wrong, but I do. It is my task to inspire good in them. My failure is my sin. I know it is God ultimately who inspires their hearts, yet I must work to make the truth known. I am positive that I do not do as much as I could.

Short: I need to die to myself that I might, through Love, strengthen my certainty of God's truth and become an example that will enable others to become aware of their sin and of the Lord's goodness and glory in cleansing them of it.

The Questions of Faith

2011-05-03T23:31:00.000-07:00

I'm just going to drive straight to the point here, I don't have all night and I have thought about this too much already. This new Rob Bell book is only a big deal because we as the church have not created a healthy environment for people to wrestle with the difficult questions that confront our faith. If people had been talking this out for years, this book would be old hat. Instead we suppress and censor people. Someone becomes a Christian and right away we get them all jumpy about being careful of this guy and that book and this doctrine. Now, nobody wants to look into things because we have put fear in them. Someone asks a question, we shut them down. We give them "The Answer" and usher them along. That in and of itself is censorship.

The truth is that when a question is asked such as, "Is there really a hell?" Nobody earnestly asking it is really seeking a yes or no answer. They are looking for God, they want to know who he is. We need to bring them into a discussion rather than force feeding them an answer. One needs to be able to undergo the mental and emotional process of coming to grips with the question that plagues them. They need to open it up and let God in. That takes time. An answer we take or leave, it's harder to walk a way from a conversation. I would that we could abandon answers and talk of the questions of our faith.

I'll leave you to think on this: is faith real if untested, how can we know we believe if we don't struggle and overcome doubt?

The Worst Thing Ever

2011-05-02T21:54:00.000-07:00

Here's a little thought. Christianity is not the best thing ever. I know that this might seem blasphemous, but it's true. Sometimes in our arrogance we feel that we have something that nobody else does, just because we know Christ. For clarification, Christians don't have anything up on anybody else, only Jesus does. So, I'll rephrase, Christianity is not the best thing ever for you. Or me or anybody else for that matter. Christianity is and ought to be the worst thing to happen to you. Because through the work of Christ you are forced to acknowledge that you are a disgusting, despicable, hateful, rebellious sinner. You are a murderer and adulterer, a slave to sin. Anybody who thinks that that is good news is nuts. Fortunately, the story doesn't end there. This is when Christianity becomes the best worst thing to ever happen to you. Jesus died for you, because you are a despicable, hateful, rebellious, murderer, adulterer, and slave to sin. Now we come to something else. Christianity is not the best thing ever from God's side. The Son of God being nailed up to a cross is not exactly something to rejoice over, what it caused is great, but the event itself was horrible. We're talking gallons of blood and sweat, our saviour crying in pain horrible. If there had been another way, I don't think God would have chosen this one. Christianity is not the best way, but here we come to the crux, it is the only way. Remember that.

Who Are the Majority of Scientists?

2011-05-01T10:51:00.000-07:00

This piece was originally published at 52/250 on March 14.

Who Are the Majority of Scientists?

The majority of scientists convened a convention to converse. The majority of the majority of scientists attended. The issue discussed was the nature of the authority of the majority of scientists. It seemed imperative to address the increasing number of appeals made in their name.

The room fell silent, as the head scientist emerged in his ceremonial vestments. The spotlight reflected off his starch white lab coat, creating a retinal after-image. He laid out Galileo’s telescope and Marie Curie’s bunsen burner on the podium before him. The room stood in awe and reverence of the Concrete Realities. Then the oath was recited, each member recommitting themselves to seek to discover all that is knowable, to rely only on empirical truth, and to disavow all mystical representations. “There is the fact. On the fact we rely,” they chanted.

The HS spoke over the noise. He introduced the evening’s issue and the prominent related questions: On what level can an appeal to the majority of scientists be considered an evidence of veracity? When should the majority of scientists honour such appeals? How can the majority of scientists reach a consensus on what the majority of scientists believe?

Each question was wrangled back and forth. Learned debate went on for hours, with evidence, charts, diagrams, equations and photographs. After all sides made their case, their was a vote. The majority won.

The outcomes of the convention were published in newspapers worldwide. The average reader asked himself , “Who are the majority of scientists?”

Losing

2011-04-21T21:56:00.000-07:00

I hate Losing. It makes me want to scream and shout. It makes me want to swear(Out loud even.) I'll be confessional, too, and admit that sometimes, losing makes me want to curse my wonderful, glorious, and, thankfully, forgiving God.

Everybody knows losing sucks. Losing is like scraping your eyeballs out of your head because you were trying to turn them in such a way that you could have a good look at them. It makes one feel helpless, and it hurts so bad. It sucks that we glory in doling it out to others.

But it's one of the most important things we need to learn to deal with in life. It's important in sports, it's important in writing, and it is even, and most especially, important in our walk with Jesus. How we are when we're beaten, when we're down and out is very telling about the state of our faith. Fortunately, it is also a great way to grow in faith, to cultivate it, and to build it up. In difficulty we see just how beautiful the saving grace of God is.

So, my hockey team has just come off the best season they have had in their entire history. They enter the playoffs against the team that has knocked them out of the playoffs in the last two seasons and when the first three games of the playoff series. Only needing to win one more to lock it all up and send their rivals home, they give away two games. 7-2 and 5-0. It's horrific, it's gory, it's disgusting. It should be illegal.

Now I am not fool enough or superstitious enough to think that anything I do will have a cosmic effect on the performance of my hockey team. But, the one thing that I do know, is that if I'm not giving my best, then why should they? So, for sports fans, I just suggest that when your team sucks, do the best you can at whatever you're doing and maybe they'll follow your example someday. It's a small consolation, but the only one I have for myself today.

The Man Without a Muse

2011-04-18T22:54:00.000-07:00

This piece was originally published at 52/250 on February 21, my daughter's birthday.

The Man Without a Muse

Exiled in Paris, Meriwether Gorse, a romantic vagabond, whose self-importance grossly outweighed his accomplishment, began the theoretical obliteration of the muses. He intended to demonstrate that the forms of creation that they embodied were illusory. There was no Calliope from whose breast he could suckle inspiration; the mysteries hidden in literature and between a woman’s legs did not coincide. The essential difference of function between Meriwether’s movements of creation and that which he rebuked was a question of intaking versus outpouring; that which was freely given over against that which was coaxed out.

As he wrote, the nine grew anxious. They could not afford Meriwether’s attack on the slender threads of devotion they yet had. In a brief, but heated, conclave it was determined that Erato would be sent to distract this man from his work.

When she appeared to him in all her glory, he addressed her with contempt. “I thought one of you might try to interfere.”

“Meriwether Gorse do not speak to me so disdainfully. I am not a mortal to be disregarded, not when I bring pleasures you cannot imagine.”

“Don’t speak to me of your pleasures. I cannot take them; I have found the higher. With one four letter word I can destroy you. The similarity it has to what you offer is merely coincidence. There never have been muses.”

Erato left defeated. Melpomene thought to do better, but it was too late. A thought was born, the knife on which inspirations balance.

The Prophet

2011-04-18T22:49:00.000-07:00

This piece was published at Joyful! on February 22nd.

The Prophet

He was known only as the prophet from the moment he entered our land until he left it. He arrived wearing long, filthy rags, barefoot, and holding a wooden staff. The dust from countless miles caked his garb, and his legs were black with dirt. His skin was as brown as a nut shell, his dark hair fell down his back in a tangled mess. He had the eye of wisdom and the aura of the divine. It is not known who first called him the prophet, but the title became him. Yet, he spoke not of things that are to come or of things hidden, but he only claimed that that which is not is. His claims were backed with power.

The day he first arrived word came to us in the heart of the village that a man had been seen just over the ridge heading this way. His description aroused our superstitions, our fears, and our excitement. The morning meal had just finished and the whole village was full of hustle and bustle as people prepared to go out to the fields. It seemed at first as if the news barely made a ripple, but the village did not empty out as usual. Everyone was taking longer than needed on the most mundane tasks, and no matter the task, a moment or two was found every few seconds to look out towards the ridge. As time passed, the pretense of work disappeared, all the menial chores were finished, and the men and women openly waited, looking out towards the ridge. We stood there in the arid air of late summer, the harsh glances of sun-beaten brows guardedly anticipating the advent of this strange wayfarer. The dust on the ridge whipped up in the wind, and the blue sky stood empty behind it.

After some moments a shift was sensed through the crowd; the dust settled on the ridge top, and a black shape started to define itself against the blue sky. The whole village began to seep forward to meet the newcomer, but as the gap closed between us, we saw that this man was not robed in the strange garments of an itinerant mystic but in the woven shawl of our own people. We recognized the stride of the miller‘s son, Keren, a sober youth. Once nearer, he called out to us, “The stranger met up with the shepherds, they’ve taken him to Abiezer’s hut.” This caused a fuss . The village stirred up into a commotion, questions and exclamations being pronounced left and right. Finally, one of the elders, Shem Tov, stepped forward. Raising his arms in a dignified manner, he shouted over the crowd, “Be silent!”

He turned to Keren, “Did you see the man?”

“Not close-up,” answered Keren.

“What did he want?” someone shouted.

“Why has he gone to the home that fool? He’ll find only that hell has sent its servants here, too,” someone else put in.

“Please, please,” Shem Tov called out, “if Keren did not have a chance to see the man close up, he surely would not have been able to speak with him. Now, there is much work to be done today. We have wasted enough time on this matter already. We will surely see this man in our village come nightfall.”

With that statement we returned to our respective tasks, yet the day did not pass into night without incident, as Shem Tov thought. A couple hours into our work, a rumour came to our ears that something miraculous had happened at Abiezer’s hut. The madman, they said, who spoke only nonsense and spat on holy truth was healed. He acted now as any man of subdued and sensible spirit. Moreover, he was going to the temple to make veneration for this gracious healing. Immediately all work stopped. No man or woman was able to resist the calling that beckoned them to witness these unforeseeable happenings.

We came back to the village and saw Abiezer walking down from the ridge, some shepherds in his wake. He walked with the confidence and assurance. To his right stalked the unreadable migrant. His face was set like stone, and his eyes glinted with detachment and disinterest. It was impossible to say who filled us with more awe, Abiezer, whose eyes glinted with a light of humane intelligence never before seen, or the prophet, whose very demeanour was rank with otherworldliness. As Abiezer came forward into the village the way before him was made clear; the villagers gave him, and that prophet, a wide berth. Abiezer arrived in front of the temple and halted. The elders were assembled before him.

“I present myself now,” he began, “as the custom demands, to show that I have become clean. I humbly ask, therefore, that my name be reentered into the temple register.”

Shem Tov stepped forward as speaker for the elders. “There will be some questions as to the nature of your miraculous healing before we can grant your request. Would the man who caused this healing come before me?”

The prophet came and stood right in front of Shem Tov, towering over him. He held out his staff at arms length and rested it in the dirt, saying, “I am he.”

“Very well,” Shem Tov peered suspiciously into the prophet’s eyes, “By what magic have you done this? On what authority do you pervert and subvert the laws of nature?”

“My power is grounded in and comes from the authority of God. By His faith was this man healed, and by His grace I was chosen, though unworthy, to be the vehicle for this declaration of His glory. God has done this among you, and you must ask yourselves why? Know that the Kingdom of God is near. Let each look into his own heart and see if he has cause to tremble. Only your sins will keep you from the holy presence.”

The crowd began to shuffle and shift with discomfort, but Shem Tov was unabashed. “What sins do you mean?” There was overt hostility in his voice. “We are a faithful, law-abiding community, not some brood of vipers that you may spit at with venomous speeches.”

Abiezer looked at Shem Tov pleadingly. “Please, Shem Tov, do not speak in such a manner. This man is my benefactor. He deserves honour.”

Shem Tov looked with disgust at Abiezer. “My honour is reserved for the lord of Heaven. Here, we follow the word of God, not that of filthy pilgrims.”

“You may follow the word,” the prophet shook his head, “but you know nothing of it’s spirit.” The crowd exploded with mixtures of shock and outrage, and Shem Tov looked around in horror. “How dare you? I see now, you are a sorcerer, a worker of evil magicks. Be gone both of you.”

“But my petition?” cried Abiezer.

“You have no petition. We want nothing to do with you;” Shem Tov waved them away rudely, “you are both malefactors.”

“Be wary, man,” said the prophet, “God does not look kindly on those who lead his children astray.”

“This is not God for whom you speak; it is an agent of chaos. You twist truth to your own ends.”

“It is God for whom I speak!” the prophet screamed.

“Then show us,” Ravit, a farmer’s wife, yelled from the crowd, “my daughter is ill, cure her, prophet. Show us that God has anointed you.” We began to shout our assent for her proposal.

“You fools,” the prophet cast down his head, “God does not work at your whims, but for your needs.”

Shem Tov began to chuckle. “You have been trapped by this simple woman’s question. Why would God not want to heal her daughter? Why him,” he gestured toward Abiezer, “and not her? This is not justice, it is not love, and it is not fair. Now we see that you truly are from the devil himself. You have come to divide us and to spread doubt with your sorcery.”

The prophet looked around at all of us. There was a sadness in his eye, a resignation. “I see that this gift is wasted on you. You see power and think only of what you have to gain, not of what you have to learn. You see God and think not of how you can serve, but of how He can. Yes, this is a wicked and sinful generation.” He walked to the edge of the crowd, shook the dust off his feet, and said, “I leave you now. May God have mercy on your souls.”

Abiezer ran to the edge of the crowd, then he turned around. He looked at all of us hesitantly, “I was born here. My fathers have lived here for thirteen generations. I was your brother. And now you send me away because I have been blessed. You ridicule me that my life has improved. I pity you. I have found a higher calling, but where does that leave you? Farewell.” With that Abiezer ran up the ridge after the prophet. They were never seen or heard from again.

Many said that we were well to be rid of them, that they had done nothing but disrupt the peace and harmony of our lives. Indeed, all are thankful publicly for the failure of the prophet’s attempts to tip our lives into an abyss of hysteria where God was unfair, unreliable, and unjust; and where His power was thrown about like some indiscriminate force of nature. “God has his realm and we have ours, let’s keep the two separate.” the argument goes, “What good is a God who does not follow the laws he laid down.” Some of us, however, are in doubt. When we do have misgivings, we look out to the ridge, with the sun hanging over it, and we wonder. In the back of our minds we worry that God really did come knocking and that we refused him.

The Message Falls Flat

2011-04-18T22:47:00.001-07:00

This piece was published at 52/250 on February 15.

The Message Falls Flat

“It was an amusing sign, but what did he want?” Gerald asked. Everard looked back at the man clothed in dirt with distaste. The grime-arousing man began to chortle, his teeth waggling like alabaster seen through a river’s flow of urine. “They don’t know what he wants. Har-ha-hech!” He waddled up to Everard and Gerald as they turned to face him. Everard’s eyes, uncertain, flitted towards Gerald whose face was like a dark continent unwilling to yield its secrets. The man of sallow cheeks, screaming as if his fingernails were being removed whole, flung slather, “I want a God to redeem me, huh?” Gerald’s face began to emerge like the Sun from behind a cloud, “Then you would hear of our Lord Jesus.” Now, the man squealed, “Shut up!” Timid Everard backed a step away, too scared to run or to stay. “I don’t want to hear of that pissant. Just give me something to lave my aching, give me something to soothe my parched throat. Don’t pinch your pennies too tightly. I’m a beggar, but I’m a man, too. Allow me the decency to escape, even temporarily, from all this.” He waved a dismissive hand, speaking with an addict’s blunt honesty. Everard spoke up hastily, “We can’t help you with that, sir. Gerald, let’s go.” He grabbed Gerald, pulling him away. Gerald’s face collapsed inward like the rippling of a pool in reverse and he murmured to himself as they left, “I’m a beggar, but I’m a man, too.”

Too Tired to Live, Too Hard to be Dead and Lone Dog

2011-03-18T00:12:00.000-07:00

These poems were published in the February 2011 issue of Yes, Poetry.

Too Tired to Live, Too Hard to be Dead

I have seen the men in their big stone buildings, black suits, and ties
The creases in my pants mark me stuck in line
Now I’m smoking a pack a day and thinking about running away
Don’t want to think about hair so long, beard well trimmed, or my body thinned
I haven’t eaten a proper meal to feed the meat beneath my skin

Firemen are autocrats too paranoid of their concubine
I hold so much fire it’s time I started spewing smoke,
Maybe next I’ll be snorting coke
I’m just a pidgeon pecking the ground grabbing anything that can be found
I want to hear a warmer sound

It was a plaid shirt and a paisley tie that made me feel alright that time

My mind is taken up with dollar signs and cents and dimes,
Perhaps I’m too in touch with the times
I have to last three months, three years, but I can’t bear the fare
When I spend a year of time waiting just to die
My little sister will come and see me completely unrecognised

Everything is gnarly here: the trees, the benches, and the beer
We’re all just paying out of habit,
And exhorting for a change
It all seems the same,
Same, same, same old thing
All these thoughts already thought, time to blow them away;
In the end I’m only left with the words that I can say

Our loves always end up breaking down between the light and lines of our palms
It’s so fucking cool to be two:
You’re compact and have nothing to do,
Everyone’s looking out for you,
You bounce more than run, it’s sweet
I’m sweating with all of this envy

Don’t want to be a king or priest?
You better lose your strut
But I need a sword and hat because Versailles is where it’s at
All roads lead to Rome, but it’s fearsome and hostile;
It ain’t home
I wish I had been turned away, then it wouldn’t be because of my say
I don’t care enough to share, don’t care enough to horde
Would I be as lost were I a lord?

I tried to take it all at once and was humbled when I met a dunce
I had this goal in my mind, but by the time I was ready to go
I didn’t need it anymore
They never tell the doubt and thought of the intermediary from this to that
I miss having ideas and being able to sit at any time and bring them to fruition

How could anyone say, “What I’m doing is too important for you.”
The leaves on the ground are orange and on the trees they’re green
It’s all in the air I breathe, the water I drink, and the food I eat
I just can’t find a comfortable seat
I don’t want to be an artist because there’s no such thing,
Just makers and providers of aesthetic tinkerings

There’s my freedom flying away with the strength I cannot find
I’m just trying to write down the pessimism in my head
Too tired to live, too hard to be dead

Lone Dog

In silent streets the lone dog prowls, runaway from the hand that feeds; is he thinking now he’s free? Hat and shoes and coat in brown, the trials of life crease the leather and his frown. His walking long will bring the dawn, but, light and dark, he’s like the shark that’s found no scent to push him on. Wandering, steel-stoned, unified by meat and bone but conflict replete within the soul, he wants to be a wolf so bad: purpose, prey, and pack to have; but he’s just a dog.

In spring he sings of hope, in autumn a mournful tune. Could he love a woman as much as John loved June? His heart bursts for doubling, but everyone says that it’s too soon; he should sow seeds first, beneath the moon. That long, lonesome howl is all the crop he’s got. Does anyone ever listen when the full sky is twisting? He’ll probably be here till the mourning for the day he dies. Only then will his howl be praised, as it’s eulogised.

Choices

2011-03-17T23:46:00.000-07:00

Choices was published at Vox Poetica on January 24, 2011.

Choices

Should I begin with recrimination or justification?
It was grandiose,
all that we did.
Remarkable marks we made,
and now, in confessional,
I cannot choose which foot to place forward.
Do I wish all following to come after my right or my left?
Yet, is not every delay just building a future following indecision?
Is that the future I want, built on my own timidity?
It's unbearable that there is
this great blank unknown of things to come
that is shaped in ways we know not
by every choice minute or great.
It is the greater choices that are easier,
for their impact is more predictable,
though less profound.

Haikus I and IV

2011-02-06T23:08:00.000-08:00

So, I just discovered that a magazine that I never heard back from had decided to publish two poems of mine. The Magazine is World Haiku Review and I was published there in August of 2009.

I

The cat moves slowly
Suspended in time leaping
Through the vacant glass

IV

Single tree freezing
Shorter than friend now lamppost
Comfortless lighting

Pastoring the Muddled-Up

2011-01-06T11:56:00.000-08:00

I have been in a tricky place recently. I feel trapped. I look at my life and compare to what God has promised us in the Bible, and I am appalled by the paltriness of my conviction and the expression I give to God. I know that I cannot gain what I desire on my own, I am too weak, but I don't understand why God hasn't given it to me. I must assume that I have done something wrong-- God does not break His promises-- and I come full circle. I feel as though I have all the answers already; I'm just not really sure what the question is that I'm asking.

I went to seek help on this at one time because I felt the Lord prompting me. I felt it a futile effort, because I knew that nobody other than God could really give me answers or solve my problem. I think, in retrospect, that God was trying to teach me about my foolishness and the foolishness of all of us. I shouldn't have been looking for answers, just as the man I turned to shouldn't have been trying to give me answers. What I needed, what so many of us need so often and cannot find, is friendship. I need someone to come alongside me and tell me that they can identify with me, that they understand. All I really need is support. We are so often caught in the trap of trying to exhort, teach or correct, we forget that sometimes we just need to be supportive. Just as the Bible isn't just a book of answers, sometimes our problems don't come from a lack of answers. We have more than enough of those.

I have more pastors around me than I can shake a stick at; but where are those who would be my friends first? I have become more and more convinced that our idea of the role of pastor is not as it should be. You can't just go to school learn to teach, preach, rebuke, interpret, etc. and then walk out one day a pastor. Answer me this: is a shepherd a shepherd if he has no flock? Can somebody swoop in and say, "Now I'm your father." and have that be the end of it? Being a pastor to someone is a relationship one grows into. It isn't like congress-- you're a regular citizen one day and then an elected official the next.

What does a pastor need to have to be a pastor? Well, the respect, trust, support, and love of his congregation. When you have those you are a pastor. We preempt everything by calling ourselves pastors and then trying to fill the role. It should be the reverse; the title pastor should serve only to name an already existing relation. How many times have pastors hurt people by trying to pastor them without getting to know them or like them? We cop out by thinking that the role of pastor is all about giving answers to questions. If that is the role of a pastor then things can go on the way they have been. I think, however, that to be a pastor that truly serves the Lord we need to get down into the nitty gritty with the people God cherishes and support them in the tough times when no answers suffice. A pastor needs to be the most steadfast friend of the individuals within his congregation. It is more challenging, and it might mean that one can only pastor a few people at a time, but that is how it works to be a guide. We must not only point the way but take them along the path.

The Blood

2010-12-28T14:31:00.001-08:00

Recently, in a discussion with a non-Christian, I had the crusades thrown in my face. He could have been a lot meaner about it, too, but the only comment was, "Christianity's a bloody thing." My smart-aleck response was, "Yes it is; it was founded on the blood of one man." I suppose that's true and all, but I got to thinking about this whole blood thing. Blood is a pretty important thing to humanity. Our life is in our blood. Blood is thicker than water. Yet, we have become a little more divorced from the realities of blood in these comfortable days. Not so in the rest of the world. I have often wondered why ancient man felt compelled to make sacrifices of blood. Blood was used as a source of appeasement and atonement, for Jew and Gentile alike.

Imagine the power sacrifice held in those dark days. As we led the snorting beast up to the altar, quaking for fear of the divine presence, the pungent smells of incense and burning flesh overwhelming our senses accustomed to the drab stink of our filthy living, draped in fear, terror, death, surrounded by a world we could hardly fathom or control, at the mercy of weather, diseases, harvests, wild beasts, and most of all the strength of men, our hopes were placed in the release of power. The powerful heart of the ox or goat pumped its life out forcefully, washing the unhewn stones before us. This blood binds us and the deity it speaks of the reality of mystery. Something unseen was here in this beast, and now it is not. All the visible parts are accounted for, but what has gone that took the life with it?

Even now in these days all things come at the cost of blood. Our nice clothes made in China are earned in blood. The fuel for our vehicles comes at what cost? Our food is soaked in the stuff. Something must die for something else to live. We extract what we need from the blood of the other. It is not only Christianity that is a bloody thing, but all of human life. Nothing has been earned, built, formed by human hands and minds without the shedding of blood, with out the sacrifice of something else. It is an inescapable fact of life. Even the way we are given to experience time; one moment dies and gives way to the next. Jesus', our God's, answer to this cycle of blood and death is unique int he history of humanity.

He saw something that needed to be done. To do it he did not take the blood of those unwilling, building yet another scaffolding of death. Instead, he erected the cross of life. When the world cried out for blood, Jesus did not take it, He offered it. Can we fathom the truth in the statement that His ways are not our ways? How much has this been proven? In everything He did, one can see an answer to our dysfunction, a completely different way of going about things. When we come to Him our hands dyed in crimson, every ounce of our flesh crying bloody murder at the crimes of which we are guilty, He takes all of us, deserving of death, Him the only one who is not, and He dies for us. I once read a note someone had jotted on a scrap of paper that said, "Grace is not fair." How beautifully true. It is unfair that we be forgiven, but we are. Thank God with all thankfulness.

The Crucifixion

2010-11-18T10:09:00.000-08:00

A Painting I made after seeing The Passion of The Christ

The Overflowing Cup

2010-11-08T08:30:00.001-08:00

Britta and I have been thinking recently about how to love fully and properly without artifice. I think that this is something that we Christians have a difficult time over. Often we try to act loving because we feel that we must, but is their love really in there. When love becomes a duty is it still love, does it not become mixed with condescension? Are we loving people because we want to have them saved, or do we want them to be saved because we love them? Britta used the term "loving just because of God." You might think that sounds positive, but to her it was negative. There is loving because of God, and Loving because of God. Do we love someone for who they really are? I have heard it said that you don't have to like someone to love them. With family I think that might work, you're stuck with each other no matter what, but with other people I'm not so sure. I wouldn't, and haven't, felt very welcome at churches where people say they love me, but look down there noses at me as if I have problems that need to be corrected. We are often so guilty of spiritual pride and a smug sense of sanctity. Where is our humility?

With the approaching season I think that it is a ripe time to speak of what I believe to be truly at the heart of this. It is a problem of thankfulness. We are not thankful to God. We have failed to be thankful for our salvation, because we do not offer it as a gift. We treat it as if it's an exclusive club; as opposed to the feast Jesus described, we treat it as an insiders only deal. We have failed to be thankful for what He has saved us from, because we treat others as if we have something they don't. We recognise our own spiritual strengths and do not acknowledge our weaknesses with fear and trembling. So often we acknowledge our weaknesses in such a way that only further serves our pride. We take one step forward and two steps back. We have failed to be thankful for our differences, for adversity and suffering and difficulty. We live behind walls where we try to tame those we bring in. We do not allow the raw glory of the creation to shine directly through. I hope we can all see what I'm driving at; I believe every Christian can examine themselves and see that they are guilty of one, if not all, of these things.

Is love a responsibility? Yes. Is it a duty? Yes. We should not, however, acknowledge or even be aware of this. We should be filled with rapture and thankfulness for all that God has done and given. We must forget what we can do and what we can give. When we remember the cross of Christ, or contemplate the beauty of His creation are not our souls lifted up? Don't we feel fuller when we actually call in the presence of His glory? The commandment Jesus said was the first was to Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, mind, soul, body, whatever I don't remember exactly. He then said that almost as important was to Love your neighbour as your self. Which do we put first? I think we all know. We spend so much time trying to be loving to others we do not remember to love our God. When we fill our hearts with the love of God, when we love Him and remember Him, our hearts will become as an overflowing cup. The love will pour out of us. We will not have to try to love others, or worry about whether we are being loving. God will love through us. That is the magnificence of our Lord and our Church. We are his body. In a body the limbs do not act of their own accord. The church is divided because the very feet meant to support it wish to be the head, and the hands wish to do the work of the heart. We must die to ourselves.

I urge everyone who reads this to do one thing: find one thing about someone or something that annoys you, or that you don't like, and thank God for it. Every time you catch yourself frustrated about a tool that doesn't do what you want it to, or a person who talks too much or too loud, or smells bad, or if the traffic isn't going fast enough, thank God that the tool serves you as best it can, and that the person who talks too loud has such enthusiasm, and that God created man to release odours. Remember God when the traffic is slow and thank Him that He has given you the extra time to contemplate the glories of His creation. And when you feel judged or inadequate in any way thank Him with all your heart, for you are just as He created you to be. He created the world and saw that it was good. Remember that, for He loves you which means that I can love you.

Kings

2010-11-08T08:23:00.000-08:00

This was published at the 6S social network on August 12, 2010.

Kings

Kings will bear statues to biggen their britches, but their ancestors
were faceless and came from the mud too. Every self-made man is a petty
impostor, and those who deride him, his pompified progeny. It’s just a
husk they try to impress as historical synergy, devoid of meaning,
truth, and impact. How can a response to one time’s conditions be
induced through all others and expected to fit so naturally despite its
shape and ours? Freedom from the past, which clutches like swamp water,
is impossible to be completely accrued; some things need sharing, else
you never get to bargain, and in a mouldy, wet cave you’ll live out your
days. It always seems necessary to take some responsibility.

VIII and The Little Butterfly

2010-11-08T08:15:00.000-08:00

These pieces were published at unFold from the week of August 2nd.

VIII

One mug left
Cupboard stands bereft
Lacking doors

The Little Butterfly

I.
Hitting wind with wings, at times
brings out hope in all of those
who live with the ground close

II.
Among sparsely growing grass
lawns of car parts, toys, and trash
split by scorched earth track

Condemned

2010-11-08T08:07:00.000-08:00

This story was originally published at A Flame in the Dark on July 12, 2010.

Condemned

The sun beat down on the meadow in waves of bristling heat. Thermometers were shattering as the mercury poured out their tops. The buildings in the distance were distorted by the swaying of the air. Between the rows of tombstones and concrete covered graves, the grass grew incredibly green for the heat. Three graves sat open and welcoming, the cool dirt arranged in neat piles next to them. They seemed to be inviting guests with the temptation of a brief respite from the weather. Not that it was much cooler where they led to. Next to one of the graves was a simple oak casket. The static buzz of mingled conversation wafted unintelligibly from the small crowd around the little grave. People were shifting uncomfortably in their black clothes. One man kept adjusting his tie, another fiddled with his cuffs, yet another toyed with her hat. Ripples of resentment ran through the small company. The inconvenience of having a funeral on the hottest day of the year engendered ill-will and spite. Faust sensed the self-righteous feelings of ire that surged around him. He wished that those who came out of a sense of obligation had stayed home. After all it was his brother, and if they cared more for their own comfort than for the fact that Erkenwald was gone, what business did they have attending his funeral.

Faust was standing at the head of his brother’s grave preparing to deliver the eulogy. Behind him his mother sobbed, but he didn’t have the strength to look at her or give her comfort. He found himself staring at the ground as he imagined the things he should say to his mother but knew he wouldn’t; uncle Polonius will be there, he thought. He looked over the crowd to shake out the thoughts of guilt and saw nothing but fawning sycophants. Most of them had come for the simple reason that one could not in good taste avoid a funeral; their only purpose was to avoid insult. They would deliver their platitudes and insincere condolences with dismayed expressions, their limpid eyebrows raised, foreheads creased, lips puckered in a spurious imitation of sorrow. And after all their fraudulent empathies, they would return home relieved to have “gotten it over with.” Faust ran over what he planned to say, and as he did, all the memories he had dredged up for this occasion came back to him. In his rage, tears nearly came to his eyes. He raised his hand to cover his face, composed himself, then looked over those gathered together once more. After clearing his

“My brother, Erkenwald, was only twenty-one. That’s twenty-one years we spent together, far too short a time to spend with such a wonderful boy, no,” he paused, “man. We should all remember him as a man. In years he may have barely been out of boyhood, but how like a man in his compassion, how like a man in his loyalty, and how like a man in his love. Erkenwald’s courage always astounded me. He was never afraid to express affection to anybody. He was never ashamed to say when he loved or when he cared. He could say the most disarming, honest things to anybody. Once,” Faust chuckled, “at a bus stop, Erkenwald met a stranger and his girlfriend. The guy was dressed up as Superman. So, Erkenwald told them that he had a super power, too. The girl asked what it was, and Erkenwald responded that he had the power to withstand any awkward situation. The superman and his girlfriend were silent as Erkenwald smiled at them ingenuously. They stared and he stared back. Then the superman sighed, saying that he wished he had that.” Faust grinned, “This was so true for Erkenwald; he was always unabashedly bold.

"Erkenwald had been having some trouble in his late teens;” Faust’s demeanor became grim as he said this, “he had no direction in his life. I will not speak of those days, their proper place is in the past. His life should be judged on how he lived after that time. My mother and I were a little confused when he began calling himself a Christian, but the change wrought in him filled us with joy. He finally appeared to be pulling his life together, getting his diploma, going to school, and finding a job.” His eyes began to sparkle, “He became so devoted in his affections and his honesty. He quit drinking and smoking. He began hiking, and grew healthier and healthier. This was not to last, however; the world was too cruel for his fragile optimism. Erkenwald had a run of bad luck, and he proved unequal to the task of bringing his dreams to fruition. We can only presume,” his voice cracked, “that it was these sorrows that brought back his malaise and led to his suicide.”

Faust stopped to take a breath. His look became darker as he went on, “Erkenwald’s depression is something that we are often likely to blame ourselves for,” there was an almost sarcastic tone in his voice, “thinking that we could have prevented all this by being kinder or more considerate. What if more of us had told him how much we loved him?” his voice was almost outright hostile now, “Or what if we had been there? Could we have helped him?” The angry edge left him and he looked defeated, “These are questions I have had to put out of my mind many times since Friday. Erkenwald was my brother, I loved him.” A few tears appeared, streaking down his cheeks, “I would have done anything to help him. I can’t now. I can only hope that my brother will be happier wherever he ends up. And, I can say these few words, keeping him forever in my heart. This is our last goodbye for dear Erkenwald. May he rest in peace.” Faust stepped down from before the assembly and took his seat for the remainder of the service. His face was blank and haggard.

Following the Eulogy, Faust retreated into himself. On into the reception at the funeral home, he acted petulant and apathetic. He couldn’t stand to think. All his heart and soul went into his speech, and he was left with scanty resources to face the remainder of the day. He wanted nothing to do with anybody, but he sat patiently through all the forced greetings and false commiseration. It meant nothing to him when someone would tell him, “We’re so sorry for your loss.” He would stare at them, no emotion registering, and mutter, “Thank you.” He didn’t mean it; they didn’t mean it. Nobody owed anybody anything, and they all left without having sacrificed the convenience of their formal relationships. When he found a moment free from attention, he slipped out. Passing through a room full of empty coffins, and a broom closet, he found a small room with a couch and a table of refreshments. He put some water on to boil, picked out a bag of tea, then lay down to rest his eyes for a few moments. He fell asleep immediately.

Faust was walking along a flat gray plain. The light was not unlike twilight but it was as if it came from a colourless sun. He could see nothing but small stones, the ground being but granite, broken here and there. The wind was still, but howling like a hyena. Beneath the howls it whispered to him. The more he marched, the clearer he heard the whispers. They told him of every little secret he kept hidden from fear, shame, or guilt. They brought faces to his mind of people he’d hurt: the five year old half-French boy, the girl with the golden curls and the voluptuous figure, the married simpleton who believed in salvation, his own mother, his brother, and so on. Tormented by the whispers, he did not see the orchard approaching on the horizon until he was upon it. It was filled with shrubs, their branches bare except for the strange fruit that hung with great weight upon them, decaying rather than growing. He approached the nearest shrub to examine its resident. He recognised his brother’s corpse resting before him. The legs and arms were splayed out in what would have been an uncomfortable, even impossible, position were they attached to a living person. Blood dripped from the branches and down along the multiple trunks from numerous gaping wounds and sores. Maggots slid through his flesh, whilst rats crawled all over him. His head hung back with his mouth open slovenly, like he had just fallen asleep in front of the TV. Bile trickled down his chin as drool used to. Faust looked, contemplating the almost lifelike expression on his dead brother’s face. A shriek cracked through the sky, waking Faust from his reverie. He looked up, bending and ducking as he did so. Flying above him was a pack of savage harpies, vigorously extending and flapping their immense wingspan, and feasting on the abandoned cadavers. Their dirty yellow hair whistled and whipped behind them in a tangled matte, and their wrinkled and sagging breasts flounced violently against their chests. They clawed with their talons as they wheeled in Scythian circles, diving at their many and defenseless victims. They were constantly gnashing their near toothless mouths, their cracked and blackened lips becoming stained red. Their eyes were dark as opals, glittering malevolently in the reflected light like so many stars suspended in the hostile emptiness of space. One of the clamor came down and snatched at Erkenwald’s ring finger, and struck a branch as it went by. The branch broke and out came a hideous wailing scream. Faust recognized his brother’s voice. He clasped his hands over his ears and fell to the ground, groaning before he realized that it was only the kettle going off.

Faust stared at the kettle in confusion. He got up and poured his tea. The door to the room opened and his mother looked in. “Oh, here you are,” she said. “What are you doing? I was worried when I couldn‘t find you anywhere. I hope everything’s alright.” Her eyebrows lifted questioningly.

“I’m as fine as can be, mom. I was just getting a cup of tea, and I fell asleep on the couch. I needed to get out of there for a bit, you know.” Faust looked up at her. “It’s a lot to deal with right now.” Faust looked down into his tea and then took a sip, jerking his head away when his tongue met the boiling liquid. His mother let go of the door and gave Faust a hug, cheek to cheek. “I know,” she said, “I love you. I’m sorry this is so hard on you.” A crack came into her voice. She released Faust, giving him one last squeeze. She turned around, walked to the door, looked back with misty eyes, and said, “I’ll leave you alone for a bit.” Then she walked out. Faust wondered again why he couldn’t talk to her. He had been thinking, over the past few days, of all the things he should have said or done for his brother. Now here he was in the same pattern, locked down and uncommunicative with his mother. He had developed a fear of being vulnerable with others. He walked the easy road, hiding anything that showed the true state of his heart and avoiding direct, open intercourse with other people. He felt it guarded him from pain, but it also shielded him from joy. Hell, he thought, I should have told her about my dream. He needn’t feel uncomfortable about sharing it with her. Dreams, stories, all flights of fantasy were perfect for broadcasting how one felt with out being put on the line. On the other hand, he hadn’t had any time to process it for himself, and it was only a silly, meaningless dream anyway. There was no reason for him to tell her anything that might further upset her. She didn’t need to carry his burdens; she had her own.

The door opened again and Uncle Polonius appeared. “Hey, your mom told me where to find you. We’re wrapping everything up. It would be nice if you came out and said goodbye.” From Uncle Polonius’ tone, Faust gathered that his mother had mentioned that Faust was in a mood. Faust scowled, irritated that she would blabber about it to Polonius of all people. He wasn’t in a ‘mood’ either. He was just sick of dealing with people’s lying smiles and weak handshakes. He took a few more sips from his tea, nodded to Polonius, then put down the half empty mug. After about an hour of winding down, saying goodbye to people, gently dragging the stagglers away from the bar, Faust found himself in a car with his mom and his uncle. Polonius was driving. Nobody said a word. Faust was staring out the window, watching the storefronts go by, looking at everything and seeing nothing. Eventually, his head, bobbing back and forth to the motion of the car, his eyelids sliding up and down, he fell asleep.

Faust saw Erkenwald standing before a large wall, like a battlement, with a wooden door painted a deep, dark blue. Erkenwald looked extremely pale, his mouth hung open and his tongue was lolling out of his mouth. His pants, soaking wet all along his inner thighs and crotch, sagged as if weighted. He had a noose tied around his neck and held the several feet of extra rope penitently in his hands. When Erkenwald approached the door, the air around him seemed to implode. Faust felt he almost saw Erkenwald’s soul flipping. The door swung open smoothly without sound. He was flanked on one hand by a man with the head of an ox, and on the other by a man with the face of a horse. The ox head carried a gavel made of bronze, breathing heavily from his forceful nostrils. His horns were soaked in blood. The horse face had with him an enormous iron spike; he whinnied slightly, smiling a horse’s demented smile. The two animal things were mangy, there fur matted and disheveled. On their hands, it came up to their knuckles, and it grew in large tufts on their toes. Around their mouths it was crusty from former meals, and the fleas jumping in their fur were the size of bees. Erkenwald stepped forward hesitantly; his otherworldly guards struck and jostled him roughly. Their weapons left deep gouges and black bruises all over Erkenwald’s bare back. Erkenwald stumbled forward under their blows, being pushed into a large crowd . When he crossed the threshold, the door closed up as if it had never been. Erkenwald was in a vast expanse, closed in by the battlement. People, so many that there was hardly any room to move, filled the enclosure. They carried disfigurements of every imaginable kind. The field was mute save for the shuffling of the multitudes as they shifted back and forth unable to sit or find any rest from their tortures, yet constantly searching for some relief. Erkenwald joined the mass in its aimless dance, his eyes matching all others in their vacant gaze and hollow expression.

Faust woke up with a slight jump as the car came to a halt. He looked out the window to see that they had arrived at the house. Uncle Polonius turned around with a friendly, if patronizing smile. “You have a nice little nap?” he asked as he unbuckled his seat belt and opened his door. Faust’s mother was already stepping out of the car. Faust looked out the front windshield, trying to get his bearings. His dream remained perfectly vivid. He was left disturbed by the unfamiliarity of the imagery. He found it hard to believe that it all came from his own subconscious. “Are you coming?” said his uncle. Faust fumbled with his seatbelt. As he came into the house his mother asked him if he was alright.

“I’m fine,” he said, as he passed through the foyer and flopped onto the couch with his coat still on. “I’m just exhausted. I haven’t been sleeping well. Weird dreams.”

“Dreams?” his mother looked at him inquiringly, “About Erkenwald?” Polonius was taking off his coat and scarf, and pretending to be uninterested in the conversation, he drew it out as long as he could.

“Yes, about Erkenwald.” Faust replied with vehemence, as if he had confessed some horrible sin. “In my dreams he’s suffering in hellish places. He’s being tormented, and everything that makes him who he is, his soul I guess, is being annihilated. I mean, these are some sick, twisted dreams. We’re talking R-rated. And they’re so real. I’m starting to wonder if that isn’t what’s going on. We don’t know anything about the afterlife. Maybe suicides do go to hell, how can we know? ”

Faust’s mother looked puzzled, “Faust, I don’t know how all these ideas got into your head. Maybe you’ve been thinking too much about your brother’s little Christian thing. All I can say is that those stories passed around about a wrathful God who punishes the wicked are idiotic. Its not a wrathful God out to get us, it’s those petty hate mongers crucifying everybody who’s different from them in their small minds.”

“God’s a far stretch, I know, mom, but the Devil, now there is someone I can believe in. Look around you at the world today.”

Polonius, finally removing his shoes, decided to jump in, saying, “On the other hand, you can’t just throw out the experiences of thousands of people over thousands of years.”

Faust’s mother began to get offended, “Shut up, Poly. This is no time for your philosophizing. My son is not roasting in the lake of fire, no matter what a bunch of whacko priests and starved ascetics say. He was a good boy. If there is a God, I can’t believe that he’d damn a poor kid to an eternity of despair, just because he couldn’t handle that which he was dealt on Earth. If He’s supposed to be in charge of the show then it’s His own damn fault that people commit suicide.”

“Except,” replied Polonius, “that we create all the sorrow here on earth.”

“That’s enough you two,” Faust cut in, “this isn’t about God or the problem of evil. This is about Erkenwald. My brother! Who may be suffering. I’d give my soul, my life, to save him if that was the case.”

“Don’t say that Faust.” His mother commanded, “I’ve already lost one son. I don’t want to think about losing another.”

“Whatever. I’m going to bed.” Faust retreated upstairs and collapsed onto his bed.

Erkenwald was in a field of fire, completely naked. He was screaming, raw and harsh, at the top of his lungs, his vocal chords sounded hoarse and his body was frozen in pain. Faust found himself next to Erkenwald, but unaffected by the flames. They flickered, coiled, and leaped all about him in streams of red, columns of orange, sparks of yellow, flashes of green, foundations of white, and hearts of blue. Faust ran to his brother and tried to talk to him or get him to move, but he could find no way to help him or communicate with him. Faust looked around frantically, distraught and disoriented by his brother’s wailing. He saw a tall tree grow in the distance. He flung his brother over his shoulder and began carrying him towards it. When he came to the tree it was like walking into a clearing; the area surrounding the tree was bare, the ground cracked and dry from the excessive heat. In the clearing were many people, some, covered in enormous blisters, their skin red and oozing, were crawling towards the tree. There were many, however, who had no burns, yet they writhed on the ground in savage hemorrhaging and pain. Faust watched one woman take one of the berries from the tree and place it in her mouth. Her burns seemed to begin healing she kept eating. Faust, relieved, rushed his brother, still screaming, to the tree and, taking berries hastily, stuffed his mouth with them. His brother’s burns began to fade away. Erkenwald’s shrieking ceased. Faust released him, and he got up onto his feet. Erkenwald stretched as the last of his burns disappeared. He smiled and sighed, then his face contorted into a grimace. He bent over and clutched his stomach. His face went violet. He fell over and began to roll around moaning. His moaning grew into a frenzy of squeals more primordial than his last bout. Faust looked at him in horror. Turning to the tree, he grabbed one of its fruit and gave it a closer look. The berries were shaped like people’s faces only distorted and disfigured. The berry he was holding looked up at him and smiled; he dropped it in shock. It began to hop around on the floor. A laugh came from behind Faust, he spun around quickly and briefly glimpsed a lizard-like behemoth rippling with muscle and flesh before he awoke.

Upon awaking Faust sensed a presence in his room. It was dark and he could see no one. He peered into the darkness and heard a laugh identical to the one in his dream. “Who’s there?” he demanded, sitting up in his bed. “Show yourself.” He heard a crack, felt pressure on his forehead, and his eyes crossed. He saw Erkenwald wrapped in chains in a dark pit. Then he witnessed himself unwrapping Erkenwald’s chains and putting them on himself. Erkenwald walked away smiling and met their mother. He hugged her. The vision ended and Faust was conscious again of being in his room. “Is this what you’re here for? A trade?”

A voice that came from the ambience of the room said, “Yes. He will live if you take his place.” The voice was deeper than any that came from man. It was hoarse and menacing. It’s guttural and alien cadence did not fit well with the English it spoke.

“How do I know he won’t end up right back with you next time?”

“That is his decision. We will give him, as you say, a fair chance.” The voice chuckled, an eerie rumbling that gave Faust some misgivings.

“Am I to gather that there is the possibility of being saved from you, of being free?”

“I will not speak of this,” the voice became abrupt and impatient, “Do you accept?”

The voice’s irritation made Faust feel smug. “I accept.” He said. There was a burning flash, and he disappeared from his room. He was engulfed in indescribable pain.

Erkenwald woke up on Faust’s bed. He was alive and well. Looking around him he was confused for a second. He shook his head and, gradually, his memory returned. On realizing what Faust had done, Erkenwald began to cry. “You fool,” he said between tears, “bringing me back to life does not cure my misery. It is only expanded by my experiences. How can I be free from hell when it lives inside me?” His grief turned to rage, he began screaming and throwing things to the ground, turning over the desk and smashing the pictures on the wall. “God damn you! God damn you! Why didn’t you leave me to my fate!?” He began to claw at himself. Polonius and Erkenwald’s mother, hearing the noise, came rushing in seeing Erkenwald they stopped, amazed. Polonius then tried to restrain Erkenwald who had not noticed them in his madness. Polonius wrapped Erkenwald in his arms, but Erkenwald broke free, and, running from him, ran through the window and fell three stories. He did not survive. The brothers, who loved each other so, were together again.

The Other

2010-10-11T05:50:00.001-07:00

This piece was published at sillymess on July 8, 2010.

The Other

It has been growing for some time. One might have begun to realize that it is a He.

It began as an idea, easily rejected. The nature of an other to existence, something outside of, not a part of, external, is non-existence. To define the essence of the other there needs to be the under girding of the common inherent properties of all things. Rejection in an idea is an acknowledgement of meaninglessness. Meaning can have no common property with the other. It may merely be illusion, but that illusion is grounded in its nature as predicate of reality. The other comes as an object of existence and not an other. Its essence, requiring existence, paradoxically presupposing its nature as an other to existence. Too big for itself, the logic collapses inward.

Yet, the other remained acknowledged as such. As such it grew. One began to see that the necessity for the other preceded the structural support of common inherent properties. The common inherent properties themselves, being a foundation built on nothing, were in want. Only the paradoxical suffices to erect the erroneous picture of actuality that is purported, by simple observation, to exist. The other, at once in and out of what is, finds itself suddenly, against all probability, inflating. When the essence of the other, being eliminated, abandons preeminence to its nature, then the other is suitable as foundation. From the very conflict of essence and nature emerges the inscrutable and ineffable, that which can cause movement without moving.

Finally, the other imbues from its disenfranchised environment, being entwined with, superceding even the common inherent properties. It lays claim to the paramount position among concepts. And meaning will bow and be defined in the light of the other. Essence will find its own essence to be the other. There will be no definition that does not presuppose that the other is implicated. Still, it grows. All that is real, all that is unreal, it encompasses. Its very nature demands that all the imperfections fall under one heading. Perfection becomes only its mark, the view from a distant vantage point. It speaks, and nothing does not come from its voice, and so it lays claim even to person -ality and -hood. One might have begun to realize it was a He.

Taxonomy of Corporate Stoolies

2010-10-11T05:46:00.000-07:00

This piece was published at Everyday Weirdness on July 9, 2010.

Taxonomy of Corporate Stoolies

James had been having a hard day at work. When he left home twenty minutes late he knew he was already sitting on a bed of nails, and it was just his luck that the police stopped him and nearly ripped his nose hairs out for speeding. When he got to work his boss decided to test the resiliency of his eardrums by shoving a large steel pole directly into his ear lobe. Then the secretary, in collusion with the boss, tied weights to him, and his department head spent the morning trying to pry the unfinished Holgate report from his hand. Tim, the man with the hearing trumpet in the cubicle across from James, hoping to move up in the business world, kept checking for signs of life, that he might hear the telltale sounds of an expiring career. James was tied up and strapped down. When he left his chair it seemed as if someone was watching him from behind, or maybe even from above, and drills were bored into him by many eyes when he took a water break. He knew that his coworkers were envious of his new promotion, and that his superiors were expecting more from him, but this was beginning to take its toll.

Finally when it seemed that things could get no worse he put his foot in a bear trap. He heard an eerie chuckle echo around the empty hall. Then Tim came from around the corner. When he saw James he looked at him in horror. “I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry!” Tim said as he raced up to James, but the grin Tim wore said something completely different. “I was only going to leave it here for a second. I never thought anybody would come along in such a short amount of time.” James finally, recovering from shock, began to scream. The following moments were all a blur, but the next thing James knew he was being rushed out the front on a gurney. Someone shouted, “Yes!” as the doors closed.

James wondered what he had done to deserve this. He had always been friendly and reliable, but never too reliable. He worked as hard as he should, and did all that was asked of him. He never gave anybody any trouble. At the Hospital the doctor dismissed James’ injury as being mostly psychological and said that he didn’t need to be operated on anymore than he already had been. When James returned to work he found his promotion had been rescinded and reassigned to Tim. The boss said that he’d much rather have the man setting the traps in charge than the man falling into them. As James sunk back into his cubicle of anonymity he thanked his lucky stars that he had escaped a worse fate and been so easily rid of ‘that job’ as he would call it from then on.

Greater Love Has No Man Than This...

2010-09-25T17:23:00.000-07:00

In North America and Europe today, it often seems easy to forget what makes Christianity truly different. When we are faced with the super acceptance and brotherly love of hippies, or read articles about how we can be more loving with our family and friends and articles about how to have healthy relationships? When we are surrounded with "good" people who have never done anything much worse than jaywalking or getting in a shouting match with the car insurance company, what keeps us convinced that we still need Jesus? What sets the whole system Jesus preached apart from life in the world? Didn't the Beatles say that all you need is love?

Greater love hath no man than this, to lay down his life for his friends. I think everybody can agree with this. This is the most powerful act of love. It is a fulfillment of love. When this is complete, that love cannot be taken back or rescinded. That is the best we can do. Here is the greatest love no man can grasp: to lay down his life for his enemies. To do this is absolutely crazy. In the world it is perfectly reasonable to hate your enemies, to wish pain upon them and to do unto them before they do unto you. In fact, that is pretty much common sense. Jesus shows another way, a greater way. For while those who persecuted and hated him were dragging him to the cross, he went willingly for their sakes. Jesus died on behalf of those who wanted to wipe him from existence. That is absolutely crazy. There is something uncannily similar between divinity and madness. But if Jesus was crazy then I love his particular brand of it.

It is also the only thing that can heal this messed up world. We all acknowledge that there is something off about the world, but we can't escape it. What would stop the cycle of hate, destruction, and pain? A refusal to continue in it and a determination to love no matter what. No other person in history has done what Jesus has done. To die for His enemies He was either completely mad or God in the flesh. The answer lies in the fruit of His way. To know the truth of it we need to do as He does and see where it takes us. We constantly fail to do so, but it is the fact that that is what we are called to do that sets our religion apart. There is no way to find out whether Jesus is God other than to ask Him into your heart and see if He shows up.

The Corner Stone

2010-09-18T18:30:00.000-07:00

Here's a little story that was given to me when Britta and I were discussing church division:

A Baptist preacher, a Catholic priest, an emergent theologian, and one of the Lord's saints were standing around talking. The preacher was telling the priest that he was a heathen and a pagan because he practiced the veneration of saints and the theologian that he distorted the gospel and obscured Jesus. The priest told the theologian and the preacher that neither of them were welcomed into the fullness of Christ because they did not have all of the sacraments. The theologian told the priest and the preacher that they made Jesus a culturally irrelevant anachronism that failed to respond to anybody's real problems. The saint, in the midst of the bickering and backbiting, cried out, "I don't know what's right or what's wrong; all I know is that I wish to serve the Lord as best I can."

Here in Humboldt, I sometimes feel like the saint; I know that's presumptuous but there it is...

And With Blood the Ending Comes

2010-09-18T08:14:00.000-07:00

This piece was published at Danse Macabre on June 8th.

And With Blood the Ending Comes

And with blood the ending comes
Washing through pipes, breathing force
A chamber concave impounds the heart
Flesh become one, is flesh ripped apart
There’s nought left but bare walls
To stare through at dusk
And the knowledge that she’ll soon be porcelained with love
Whilst I gnaw the rent throbs of memories she’s left

The yellow has spent itself from starry night
One twinkle of many sequined in the sky
Not missed, but if rare, more precious to shroud
Not nothing breaking through layers and shakes
My tense will tears at regret and at loss-
Being just a bead ‘mongst her pearls-
And with blood the ending comes

Traveller

2010-09-18T08:08:00.000-07:00

This story was published as a short short at Fiction at Work on June 16th 2010.

Traveller

An unknown foreigner (for I am foreign wherever I go), a twenty-two year old man (if I am that yet), died (for I am that already) at ten o’clock on the night of November the twenty-second while reading Cortazar against a lamppost which a car, derailed by the fog, smashed into at one hundred and twenty kilometres per hour, passing first through his body like butter before hitting the stale, rock-hard bread of his illuminated support. How well this would all fit in with Oliveira’s wonderful conception of the absurd, and mine as well, that I could sit here looking for a blank page in a near full notebook to write about my own death. For I am dead; my epitaph is written. So I wonder why I hitch all through this countryside, and others, looking for beauty, recognising it in everything from the worm returning from its concrete exile to the sewer grate I have used as a urinal, and all those green fields, hills, and trees, each resonating with a praiseworthy internal aesthetic I cannot find in myself. Is that why I keep traveling? Because I only find ugliness within, and I hope and I pray that the more I ravenously devour of this external wondrousness the better it might hold back my dismay? For I am dead, it is true, and rotting away; this shell is my mausoleum, tombstone, and grave. I will go to sleep beneath that bus shelter across the street and wake up tomorrow knowing I died today and maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to start again.

There is No Time

2010-09-14T08:58:00.000-07:00

I have often thought about this whole idea of God's foreknowledge and it seems silly to me. Did God know everything that would happen when he created the universe? Yes and no. I believe it was C.S. Lewis who said that many of our questions are nonsense from God's perspective; he says it's as if we're asking, "Is yellow round?" I think this question of God's fore-ordination is like this.

To my mind time is one of the aspects of the creation God made. God is He who was and is and is to come. Everything has, is and will happen. There is no when in the question of the creation of the Universe. When was created along with everything else. This gobbledegook that goes around about whether God knew ahead of time or whatever raises time up to some sense of deity because we submit God to time. To God time is just another field before Him, and He sees everything that happened, happening, and yet to happen as if laid out geographically. God is outside of time.

In Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. describes aliens for whom time is just another dimension they can move through at ease. He gives the image of how they see a star as a line across the sky, instead of a moving point, for they see where the star has been, is, and will be. This image helps me to try and grasp in my limited way some small part of how God must see things.

The problem with this conception, is however that it makes us think that everything is set in stone and that we cannot change our fate. We imagine creation as a painting that is already finished, sitting before God to peruse at his discretion, but that is not how it is. We must be wary of taking metaphors too far. We can only explain the things of God through metaphor because there are no direct corresponding conditions in our reality. God's reality is larger than the metaphor can grasp, we cannot assume that the metaphor and the reality correspond in every way.

God's creation is dynamic. We are free beings with freedom of choice. When God creates the universe, we must understand that this is a timeless being interact with a time laden creation. How mind boggling, we can't possibly fathom what this looks like or how it works. We shouldn't even try. What we know is that we experience everything God already knows in a straight line through time. We are making our decisions on our own. God creates and his creation responds. It is like a duet, where one calls and the other responds. God brings forth possibilities, we bring them into actuality then he calls forth more. To God, however, it has happened, is happening, and will happen. He dances in and out of creation with us.

Heresy In the Highest Levels of the Church

2010-08-21T12:48:00.001-07:00

I needed to be silly today.

Eternity

2010-08-19T11:07:00.000-07:00

"...that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life."

Eternal life? What does that mean? How can we conceive of eternity? How can God promise this? An essay I read recently, leads me to believe that modern theology is talking about whether God has possibilities or creates them. But eternity is a complete annihilation of possibilities, everything becomes possible to him who has eternity. Time becomes irrelevant in an eternity. Logic, too; in fact, everything we understand or know is defined by finitude. But when infinity is open all the rules change.

The Greek word used for eternal is specifically translated as a description of duration that is undefined because endless. The key is that it is undefined because it is endless. It is impossible to pin down eternity, you can't describe it in seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years. It is not a division of time because it comprises all time and beyond. Even if time itself ceased, eternity would encompass the time without time.

It is the same with infinitude; it holds everything and all of nothing. Couldn't that be why God is so hard for us to understand? Because He is everything and He is nothing. In our theologies and our sermons we try to pin down God and define Him. What hubris. He is by His very nature undefinable, because He is limitless. God is bigger than our puny minds could ever grasp. Even by saying that he is undefinable, limitless, or any other way of describing the sheer mind-numbing incomprehensibility of God, we fall short of truly grasping the ungraspable because we are trying to grasp it. When we act as if God is definable or limited, how can we believe Him when He offers us eternity which is by definition limitless?

So, eternity is limitless and merges time with its opposite, essentially annihilating not only time, but the absence of time. The whole time concept structure becomes irrelevant. But what is the opposite of eternity? What do we have to contrast it with? What is Satan trying to dupe us with? Eternity can't really have an opposite, it would by its very nature have to encompass its opposite. So what is it that contrasts eternity, and is Satan's lie in response to God's promise? Perhaps it is time itself.

If God is limitless and undefinable, then time does not exist for Him. Time is only an aspect of the creation, but our thoughts are so caught up and bound in time. That is not God's doing, for he does not want us to dwell in the past or worry for the future, but to live in each moment. We have made an idol out of time, believing it to be an overarching, incontrovertible reality. But Einstein showed us that time is relative. God shows us that in each moment there is an eternity offered. We only have to take it.

Remember, "Everything is possible for Him who believes."

Time is Short

2010-08-17T18:43:00.000-07:00

How do we spend our time? The rapture is coming, and we don't know the time or the place, but it is coming. People are suffering all over the world, right now. Children are being sold into slavery and prostitution, poor families are forced to choose between food and shelter, lonely hobos are dying gakked out underneath well used bridges. There is death, starvation, worry, sorrow, pain, loneliness, violence in the streets. Women think their value lies in their bodies, children are told that goodness is a performance, men remain stolid whilst the turmoil and heartache builds up inside. People are being born and people are dying without the light of Jesus. And what are we doing with our time? My entrails are turning inside me. My God is within me, yearning to come out, but I don't have enough faith to put myself in his hands. What am I doing with my time!?

Outside our churches the world is exploding with horror. What are we doing with our time? There is no time. Each movie, each book, each video game, each hour on facebook, each inspirational but ultimately unprovoking church service brings us closer to closing time. The master is coming home and we have not kept house. We need to be praying, fasting, doing works unto the Lord, talking about Him, testifying. If I can think of no other way to serve God than to pray, then so be it. But instead of watching a movie I should pray, instead of being angry that someone lied to me I should pray, instead of complaining that I have to go to work I should go and preach at work, instead of worrying about my bills I should be giving my money away, instead of protecting my self-esteem I should be loving my neighbour, instead of arguing over God's foreknowledge I should be accomplishing His will, instead of ...

Peter Rollins

2010-08-13T12:03:00.000-07:00

Last night, Britta and I watched Peter Rollins' insurrection tour. Our church showed it this past Sunday, at our small group we heard that some people had been offended or confused, and one person had walked out during the Sunday service. Britta and I hadn't been there on Sunday, but we really wanted to know what this video was all about. We watched it right away once we got home. It challenged us and provoked a lot of thought.

Peter Rollins tells us that we, as a church, do not act as if we believe what we say we believe. He uses stories and examples to illustrate what he means. He explains that doubt is an essentially Christian quality. I believe what he is saying when he speaks of doubt is that we as Christians do not engage with our faith, but doubt would allow us to do that. We have lost the immediacy of the cross. Through doubt we can regain that immediacy, by being faced with the possibility that the world is meaningless and God is not real we are forced to look at our faith and judge it. He calls us to strip away the safety nets, to go outside the church and find God, for as he says, the church believes for us so that we don't have to. The church acknowledges Christ on our behalf. When we doubt, we wrestle with God as Jacob did. By feeling the trauma of doubt we cease to take the cross for granted. As Christians often we candy coat things and act as if everything is hunky dory, but what if it isn't? Millions are starving or have aids, or are killing each other. What if God isn't there, what do we do then? Is our God really just a deus ex machina we use to make ourselves feel better. By confronting that question that essential doubt we come to the place of Christ when he asks why God has forsaken me. And in the weird paradoxical quality that is so like religion and God, it is through that question that we confront God fully. The question itself is God's answer, He put it in both testaments.

Rollins then brings it to the resurrection. He says that if we do not engage in the immediacy of the cross then we have denied the resurrection. We say that it happened, but we definitely don't act as if it happened. I don't act as if my life were int he hands of the omnipotent. Most of us live as if God was not crucified on that tree, as if the end of the world and the coming of the kingdom was not heralded. We live as if the world is it. Do we do as Christ taught? No. We hide behind Grace, and thank God there is grace because none of us can live up to His standards, but we aren't even trying. When we ignore the cries of those in need, we ignore Jesus' cries on the cross, we deny that he rose again. This doesn't mean that we need to go to India and take care of lepers. Giving someone a ride who needs it is an act in Christ. But we can no longer put things between us and God, deciding our actions based on what we want and need. We are supposed to be an example to the rest of the world, but we don't look any different. We have not laid everything down at the cross. We have failed, so let us admit it and come to Christ more humbled than before. Through doubt we can drive ourselves closer to the heart of Christ by truly grappling with our faith, and only when our faith is a struggle can we bring the divine to Earth, affirming the truth of what we believe.

My explanation is a little bit messy. I'm still sorting out the relationship between doubt and living in Christ myself. The video is thought provoking, and I recommend that everyone watch it and see what you get out of it.

The Frame of Fame

2010-08-11T10:42:00.000-07:00

"You're gonna be a star kid. We're gonna have your name up in lights," he said. His enormous Cuban cigar creating a cloud that obscured his face. And I danced in the fields of joy, twirling. Then my bubble popped and it was back to ordinary life, two jobs a beautiful wife and a adorable daughter. But who doesn't dream of being famous. The first examples of human literature exhibit the desire for fame; the yearning to be remembered, to gain a kind of immortality. It is an obsession for us and for me especially.

I have always had delusions of grandeur. Everything I do, I build it up in my imagination to the most extravagant scale. I have been praying over this recently, because it gets in the way of my spiritual life. When my imagination gets going, I dream of my own glory not God's. It can even accost me as I pray, imagining myself becoming a beloved saint like Francis or an admired author like C.S. Lewis, the greatest prayer warrior or the humblest hermit. There is nothing wrong with being any of these things until one lusts after them.

So, how is my praying affected by my awareness of this problem. I find that, other than being a distraction, my constant focus on problems and difficulties affects how I talk to God. Instead of bonding with Him or basking in His presence and praising Him, I come to Him with a long list of supplications. Why do I only concern myself with what I can get from Him? I think that in praying I should be seeking to serve Him. Jesus says that we should praise Him(Our Father in Heaven, Hallowed be thy name), ask that His will be done(Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven), ask Him for our needs(Give us this day our daily bread), and for forgiveness(And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us), preservation from evil and temptation(Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil or from the evil one), and then affirmation that everything is His(For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever.) He did not tell us to think of all the things we want to see happen and list them. I seem too often to forget about His will, His praise, and affirmation that all is His.

When I pray over other people should this also apply? How many times have I heard myself pray "Lord I lift so-and-so up to you, and I just ask that you put Godly people in their path, or that you speak strongly to them today, or that you protect them from their desire to drink or whatnot? I say God fix this problem, God do this, God arrange things this way. When do I ask God to provide for them, or to forgive them, do I pray that He guards them from temptation and evil? Yes, yes, and yes, but never all together, only when the specific request coincides with one of those categories. My compliance is coincidental. I am not conscious about how I pray; I don't think about how God wants me to pray, only about what I have to ask for. That is not any way to build a relationship. I don't think that we are called to pray so that we can further our own self-serving. Nor are we called to pray primarily to see things happen. We are called to pray as a service to God, and as a point of obedience. Prayer when done right, I believe should make us more amenable to obedience and service to God and others.

So when I pray over my starstruck dreams, I shouldn't say, "God, help me with my lust for fame." I should say, "God you are the most deserving of everlasting remembrance and the name of your son Jesus is the most famous. I cannot compare. I want only that your name be enshrined and glorified unlike any other in human history and that the spreading of your gospel would not be in name only but in action. Lord give me spiritual strength and focus today, and thoughts that edify and are outgoing. Forgive me Lord that I have sinned against you in thinking that I might be capable of making myself immortal. My immortality cannot rest in my name alone, but only in the heavenly presence of Your grace. So shall I forgive others when I witness their pride, vanity and ego, for I am just like them and cannot condemn without being condemned. Guide the wandering of my thoughts to the needs of others or to the works of your hands, and keep me from paying attention to the stirrings of my own lust, pride and ambition. You are the giver and taker of fame, in the end only those you remember will be remembered, and only those that are famous in you shall be glorified. You know the names of your saints from before they are born and past the end of all time. Amen."

Patron Saint Proposal: The Patron Saint of Understatement

2010-08-09T07:54:00.000-07:00

Brother Lawrence was an unlearned lay brother of the barefoot Carmelites in Paris, 17th Century. His conversations and letters are compiled in the book, the Practice of the Presence of God, a Christian classic marked by a certain terseness. Brother Lawrence takes subjects that would be given whole chapters, or sermons that would lengthen into series' that last weeks, and gives them two sentences. Here is an example:

"[He told me] that we should establish ourselves in a sense of God's presence by continually conversing with Him. That it was a shameful thing to quit His conversation to think of trifles and fooleries."

Period. End point. No elaboration, or exposition. He says what he must and leaves it at that. Here are some more examples:

"I renounced for the love of Him, everything that was not He, and I began to live as if there was none but He and I in the world."

"That our sanctification did not depend on changing our works, but in doing that for God's sake which we commonly do for our own."

It seems that Brother Lawrence was too taken up with practicing the presence of God to be much willing to enter into lengthy discourses. It is interesting that this humble monk who had come so far into God's peace was a mere cook at a monastery, while the popes of his day were corrupt and worldly. Urban VIII demanding that Galileo recant, used his rank to advance the wealth and social standing of his family, and expanded papal territories by force of arms. Innocent X had a mistress named Olimpia Maidalchini, forces loyal to him destroyed the city of Castro on 2 September 1649, and he opposed the peace of Westphalia, which ended the thirty years' war. Alexander VII came from a family of bankers, handing over the governance of the papacy to them because he disliked the business of state. Clement X was a figurehead, Innocent XI payed for the invasion of England, Alexander VIII practiced nepotism, Innocent XII suppressed treatises that expressed that the love of God should be the highest goal of mankind. In the midst of this turmoil, there was Brother Lawrence cooking and praying away. How wonderful and beautiful. That is why I propose him to be St. Lawrence, hope for all those who say much in few words.

The Perfect Man

2010-08-08T10:02:00.000-07:00

This past new year's eve, I had a very enjoyable discussion with an atheist who thought much as I had before I met the Lord Jesus. He talked about his anarchist political beliefs, and I tried to tell him that I didn't agree and that my concerns went beyond the political. I don't think that people will be better if we change their material conditions. The problem is in the heart, not in society. Change men's hearts and society becomes irrelevant. Afterwards I told him about what I believed and why. I don't think I was too dogmatic, which is good, because he wanted to hang out another time.

There was one question that I asked him that I felt was most poignant: If you met the perfect man, would you do as he says or would you continue to go your own way?

We should, when engaging with this question, dispense with all semantics and simply assume that we can know that this man is the perfect man. Some of us do know that He is the perfect man. I think, though, that it is a simple choice. When we make it theoretical, it could, if one is being honest with oneself, open someone's eyes. It's simple to see that if I would choose to go my way that that would be foolish, because we all, or at least most of us, know that we are not perfect and that we screw things up. But we are so attached to our own idea of freedom that we don't want to relinquish anything, so it is a very big admission when someone says that they would be willing to sacrifice the gratification of their own whims and desires to try to follow something that is perfect and good.

My atheist friend refused to answer the question even as a hypothetical because it was too ridiculous for him to conceive of. I think deep down, he didn't want to admit that his life could be governed better than he was capable of; I know I would never have admitted that, until I was broken.

God is Love

2010-08-07T11:47:00.000-07:00

I've been talking about love in various ways. Repeating over and over again, that God is love, that His love is free, blah blah blah. Well maybe not blah blah blah; it's a pretty important concept, but I feel like I'm going to bore everyone, harping on about the same thing day in and day out. I've had this strange idea-- this is where my yearning to be a twelfth century mystic comes out. I don't claim to have any scriptural backing for this, though I might someday. I don't claim that it is the truth; I don't think that there is any way to verify it. It is completely experiential and theoretical. I don't know if anyone has ever thought this before, but I think it can change things a little bit in my heart and my way of thinking.

I feel that there is a tension between the idea of rationality, or in essence the preeminence of thought, versus intuition, or the power of emotion. I have often heard Christians talk about emotion in a derogatory sense. It seems that we're always getting down on feelings. I'm not saying that we should let our whims get the better of us, but I feel that the charismatic churches that are always getting nailed for being hyped up on feelings, are also not thinking right. They will say, "I feel like God's telling me that you should..." That is not them feeling anything, they are just jumping on every stray thought they have and saying it's from God. The way they get hyped up is off balance, but the way their thoughts are engaged is also off balance. On the other hand, God is not a box of rational thought. No man, or woman, has ever thought himself into the kingdom. It has been completely proven, to my satisfaction, that logical thought is completely incapable of proving anything, because it can prove anything. When I became a Christian, God did not reach me through my rational mind, he struck my heart. God reaches down into that which he first put there, our primordial attachment to Him, and we are struck with need for Him. That need, in my experience, surpassed both thought and emotion, but it was more like emotion than rationality. I think we are better able to know where God is at work in our lives when we notice emotional patterns, when we feel heavy-hearted or overjoyed, and so on. Most of all when we are honest and not manufacturing emotion, I think it is a more powerful tool than solid syllogisms and logic. When we walk in faith, do we think and question everything? I think it is more like feeling your way through something, letting God lead you from step to step.

This next thing is going to be difficult to express, because I have it more on feeling, on intuition, than on rational thought. As with so many things that are God related, rationality can barely hold it. God things don't make sense, neither does this. But I wonder if maybe, perhaps, God has no rationality. Or He is without knowledge in our conventional sense of the word. I don't want anyone to think that I believe that God is some sort of demiurge that does not have personality and person hood; that's not true. When he became man, he did think like we did. But the Father, he is admittedly different from us. Why not different in how He thinks? What I'm trying to get at is more like God's thinking is not divorced from His love. Love is big, it is huge, it is more than just an emotion. Maybe at the heart of things love is a substitute for logic. God's thinking is not logical, it is loving. That is the system He works in. And I think that that changes the whole make-up of the Universe. Love is not bound by any kind of sense, like God. Logic is the system imposed on us by the world, but love is the system imposed on the world by God. Through love God is limitless. If God was not love, or love was not God, there would be no God, or He would not be God, you get the idea. If God was not love in his barest essence, love would be an aberration. It would have not be so important. If we could give ourselves completely over to the system of love, as Jesus did, we would not be bound by the rules of this silly, sad mess. How do I say it!? Love is twisty, and it warps the universe to make it straight. If we let love lead our thinking, we would not be thinking in the sense we think of it now, but we would never make a wrong step. Everything that is outside of love is, in a sense, false. It has nothing to do with God. God is inextricably bound up in love.

Anyway, I am at a loss. I feel that I have only shown you only the tip of the iceberg. I cannot express the deepest mysteries of my heart, how could I do it with God's? I apologise for my ramblyness. I hope you can take something from this thought, but if it is not helpful ignore it. I am only a raving lunatic like everybody else anyway. Thank you for your patience. Please, Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind, and love your neighbour as yourself. Amen.

Love Money

2010-08-06T18:13:00.000-07:00

I was recently dreaming of the future, not that I often fritter my life away on useless activities, but we're all human. I was thinking about my future Lilja and how it'll break my heart when she will ask for something and I won't be able to give her that, whatever it may be: a trip to the Maldives, the hardcover boxset of Chronicles of Narnia, an original Van Gogh for her wall. Who knows she could ask me for anything; maybe she wants to meet the Beatles. Again, I'm dreaming; she'll probably just want a trip to Disneyland. What'll I say if I can't afford it? How do we let our children know that we have limits? Every parent faces this dilemma, I think. We all have to teach our children that everything comes at a cost, and sometimes the cost is too high. Everything comes at a cost, except for the love of God.

I will elaborate; the only things that are truly free are those that come through the action of God's love. We can't get 72" televisions for free, or even 12" ones. Even if you don't pay cash, you're paying in time you spend. Parents don't even always give love for free. They give love to their children because they are good at football, or have a 4.0 GPA, or whatever. When, as so often happens, parents do love their children because they are their children that is God working in them. That is the only kind of Godly work I think comes through more people than not. The only thing that doesn't have conditions is God's love. Jesus gives us his love, even when we took him and scourged him, mocked and murdered him. I feel like a broken record. How many times do I, and so many others, need to say, "God's grace and God's love are free!" before people get it. I like the opening to the ragamuffin gospel. The author describes how he went to a conference and talked about the free gift, emphasis here, of grace. When he got off stage a pastor said to someone, "That hippie didn't tell us what we need to do to earn that grace." Hm. Free gift? Earn? How do the two interact? They don't. You cannot earn a free gift, if you did it would be neither free nor a gift. We earn the wages of sin, but we are given the free gift of love.

All right, I'm bringing it around. I once, cannot remember when or where, heard someone speak, who is gone too. This brother of mine, and yours, I hope, was pointing out the conceptual metaphors we use for relationship. They are often economic. We have free love, we spend time, we invest in people, etc. So, according to my understanding of the theory of conceptual metaphor, we talk about relationships in such a way and that affects how we think and act about them, which is not necessarily good. (The talk I heard discussed the negative impact of that kind of thinking, I won't go into that here.) Conversely, when I think about money and economics, I can go back to relationship. So, when my daughter asks me for something I can't provide, I can teach her about love. Because love is not like money; it doesn't run out. Love, is by nature, very costly, but beyond price. It ceases to be when it is exchanged or bartered. It has nothing to do with what I can and can't give you, and everything to do with the spirit in which I give. Love is God's nature and God is perfect. Thank goodness money is not. Everything has a cost, except love. All love that is not the false kind Hollywood sells, which is not free, comes from our God, the most High.

I Am Who Everyone Else Is Not

2010-08-05T07:54:00.000-07:00

I have thought about how I used to be before I met Jesus. I think about how I treated my friends, how I treated people in general, the attitudes I espoused. I thought I was so enlightened, that I had it down, that I knew it all. If nothing we do matters, then the only thing that matters is what we do. Everyone is responsible for there own sadness, happiness, and joy. I was impatient with the weak, envious of the strong. Freedom was fulfilling one's desires (though even then I would suddenly reveal certain inconsistent ascetic traits.) I refused to acknowledge any responsibilities to anyone else. "I am who everyone else is not" was my motto. Another good one that described me was, "I always make the mistake of walking through fields of mud." I think, too, about how I treated Britta. I was not very nice to her. I admit that I loved her in my own way, but that I was corrupted and twisted by the lies I believed about reality and my place in it. I was marked by a limited ability to love. The independence, those two strong legs I stood on, I prized so much was false, it had merely bound me, lonely, to myself, estranged from others. I am thankful to the Lord for that little love I held for Britta; it was that which He used to save me.

All love comes from God. God is love, as we all know. So, how did I limit my ability to love? I denied God's work in my life. I didn't like God's rules, as I thought them then, little realising that that was simply how God had created us to be. I wanted some other than what God had for me, I thought I could do better than Him. I wanted to be my own God. I would often tell Britta that I didn't need God, I was already good. And it is hard for the functional people to find that they need God. The life God offered looked to me like bondage, and a life apart from him like freedom. I didn't realise that the only things that are truly free are those things that come through the action of God's love. Everything comes at a cost except that. God's love builds you up, it makes no demands, there are no strings attached. God's love is given no matter what you do, and it has no adverse affects. It is unconditional, that means, for I think we often forget this, that God gives his love to us even when we are most blasphemously spewing hatred in his direction. He gives his love when we are pilfering, raping, destroying his creation, when we humiliate and denigrate his people, when we murder, enslave, torture. God gives his love to sadists, despots, killers for hire, pedophiles, and to all of us joe schmucks who are not so bad in the world's eyes. We are just like them in God's eyes. When we share God's love with anyone even the most despicable of mankind, it can have no negative repercussions. We could be killed or beaten, robbed or kidnapped, but sharing God's love will only work good. Mark the contrast with everything we do apart from God. Every action is the lesser of two evils. Every thing we do leaves us with more mess to fix later; we solve one problem and create two more. I have never heard of anyone having anything completely resolved through their own decisions. We try to dig ourselves out of a hole by digging down, or at best sideways. So when I tried to love under my own steam, I was bound to do a bad job.

"I am who everyone else is not." I have thought about this phrase that I had used to describe my own unique identity. It is the title of my blog, yet it does not have the same meaning I meant when I used it before. In a sense, it still means that I am a unique human being unlike any other created by God. At least, I think I'm unlike any other, who knows maybe God loved this model so much he made a bunch of us. Barring that, I am unique. However the significance of the phrase has changed. I am now more than I ever was before who everyone else is not. I have the life of Jesus within me, and it is that which sets me apart. Jesus is the one who is truly unlike anyone else ever to have inhabited our planet. When I accepted Jesus into my heart, without any understanding of what that meant, I became a part of the body of Christ. In him I am joined with all my brothers and sisters. When I deny them, I deny Him. The old man rises up within me, in him I am alone for he has more incarnations than there has ever been human beings. But there is only one Jesus Christ. Hear, O Israel, the Lord, our God is one.

Greater is He that is in me,
Than he that is in the world.
-John 4:4

Nietzsche Vs. Jesus Round 1

2010-08-04T07:40:00.000-07:00

Someone Britta and I know has been posting quotes by Friedrich Nietzsche on facebook. Get your pitchforks, lock the children away, Satan's on the loose! The author of the anti-Christ has found another victim. I'm stuffing my shirt with garlic, and preparing my silver bullets. I have fallen under alarmist influences.

I used to be into Nietzsche, in a pedantic way admittedly, but I read and quoted Thus Spake Zarathustra frequently. When I heard about our friend who had been quoting Nietzsche, I rolled my eyes, thinking about yet another person who is going to try to base their identity on existential philosophy. Smoke and mirrors, that's all I found it to be. I love philosophisimerating with the best of 'em, discussing being-there as a North American human creature, posting blogs, extending self-awareness through electronic means. Bring me the Ubermensch and the Knight of faith; let us compare them. Where did it get me? I was a being being-there as a created being denying its own nature as a creation. My ontology couldn't get very far while I denied one of existence's most basic premises. So, when I encountered these Nietzschean quotes about self-ownership, I felt the urge to crusade against yet another victim at the altar of self-worship.

I made a post in response to some of the quotes that had been posted. Her next post was vicious and defensive. What did I say? I looked at what I had written. Uh-oh. I was a little to crass. Here's an embarassing judgemental quote, " ...or are you going to serve your own whims and desires, slave to your own stubborn independence and pride of life?" I really put my foot in it. I'm not saying that what I said isn't true. It might be; I personally believe that Nietzsche is on the side of stubborn independence and pride of life. The point is that I was not acting in love. I was focused on winning the argument, not on having a dialogue. I became an alarmist, burning torch and all, who can't stand that someone sees something different from me. If I were to win the argument, batter this poor friend in to submission, as I dearly wanted to when I read her defensive and vicious response to my judgement, how would I be living up to my calling as a servant of God? I could be the best, the smartest, the most successful debater in the history of the world, without love I am... You know. We can't sacrifice relationships in order to win the argument. Has anyone ever been converted by a well-reasoned argument? No. It is acts of love, humility, gentleness, kindness, peace, patience, goodness, faithfulness, joy and self-control that win points. Christ-like behaviour, and that alone, with or without fanciful words and well ordered logic, is the only and the best argument in favour of our beliefs. We better make it a good one.

Looking People In The Eye

2010-08-03T07:51:00.000-07:00

So we've got all these angels in disguise, they hide in clothes of corruption and sin apparently, running all over the planet. What do we do? How do we begin to change our ways and be loving to them? It is the hardest thing to start down the path of love. Especially, when you want to love strangers, not just the church family. A lot of Christian literature tells us that we need to perform huge stunts to show our love to people; set up confession booths, pray for healings, ( and by golly, they better happen) or whatever else. If it's not grandiose, it's not worth it. What about the little things? Being married, I find that it is a little different showing love in real life. On TV it seems as if you can be the biggest jerk, but if you show up with a big bouquet of flowers, a box of chocolates, and a teddy bear every once in a while then your good. In a real relationship, however, it's the little things that matter: doing the dishes without being asked, sending surprise love messages over email, asking and anticipating needs.

I recently had a job interview where I was asked many silly questions relating to customer service. In customer service one needs to anticipate needs, be open to helping people, be attentive, be polite and curteous, smile, etc. In essence, you want to show people that they are valued. Being married you do the same things to show your spouse that she or he is valued. Now, this is going to sound really cheesy, and I hate that I'm the one saying it, but... As Christians we need to adopt an attitude of customer service, without the alterior motive of trying to get people to empty their wallets. The key here is that we Christians must do it because we actually value, respect and love people. In customer service many people notice the fake, two-facedness of the interest and respect that is being shown. As Christians we cannot fall into the same trap. If we are nice because we want to convert someone to our point of view, we have lost. People see through that, and it is a sin. A sin, you say? Yes, a sin. Pretending to like someone, and it is pretending when you are only doing it to get them to do something, is lying and deceitful. You have reached the Christian standard when you want to show someone they are valued even if they never hear a word you say, spit in your face, scourge you , and murder you. That kind of patience and respect is called love.

So, how do we open the doors of this love? An easy way, that God has been teaching me through this small town of mine, is looking people in the eye as you walk down the street. I don't know how everybody else feels about this, but for me it's very hard. I'm used to the big city, where people keep their gaze to the ground and ignore each other. It's a form of oppression, we have become afraid of one another; just what the serpent wants. When you meet someone else's gaze it leaves you vulnerable. I believe it's Paul Simon who has a lyric about leaving his house for a stroll, and not turning away from anyone's gaze, he ends up not getting home for two years. Looking people in the eyes is like that, anything can happen. That's why we hate and fear it, we can't stand being vulnerable or facing the unexpected. We need to learn to be open to letting people jump into our lives unexpectedly. That is when we will be able to show love. The other person might be just as uncomfortable with the whole thing, and we need to be willing to be rejected and turned away, hurt and trampled. It might encourage them to open up, a little thing but it makes a world of difference. I know that it's scary to let your guard down, but we are naked in the eyes of our heavenly father, so what does it matter if we bare ourselves a little more before others.

My Brothers And Sisters

2010-08-02T08:07:00.000-07:00

Recently, Britta and I were blessed by one of our sisters in Christ. I haven’t asked her permission to put her name online so I won’t, but she gave us the money to cover our water bill. We were wonderfully blessed by that and so grateful. It is great to see God working through the body. It strengthens my faith and helps me to understand all the verses that tell us that if we concern ourselves only with God’s will he will take care of the rest. When I considered telling people how God was caring for us, I began to think about how I would describe our sister. Obviously I have decided to call her our sister, because that is what she is. We are all brothers and sisters in Christ. Read the end of Galatians 3, for Heaven’s sake. When I considered calling her “this woman we know...” or something like that, it sounded so impersonal, as if she was a stranger. How can someone who has so willingly done me a good turn be a stranger to me? How can I treat as a stranger someone who has shown by their work that they love Jesus as I do?

When I described this sensation of mine to Britta, she drew it back to experiences where we have felt unwelcome at churches and to the condemnation I described yesterday. She said that they have treated us as strangers. Isn’t it sad when the church forgets this simple element of doctrine? We are all adopted into God’s family. We inherit Christ’s sonship through our communion with Him. I think we don’t take this communion seriously enough. When we take communion, we are not only putting ourselves in communion with our congregation, but with Christ Jesus, and through him all the other believers in existence. When we commune with Christ and with each other, we acknowledge that we would like a place in His family. If we accept a place in His family, we must acknowledge kinship with all those who are called by Him. We cannot pick and choose the family of God, when we try we are looking to subvert Him. If you are loving, you are obeying; I want to remind people and myself that we are brothers and sisters. Britta told me that the brother and sister thing was big in the seventies, but now it isn’t fashionable. Doesn’t it say in the bible that fashion, death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. We are all in a huge family. I will call my brothers, brothers, and my sisters, sisters.

Crushed For Our Iniquities

2010-08-01T08:40:00.000-07:00

Recently, Britta was spending some time with a group of Christian women. They said some things that really offended her because they were spitefully criticizing people with dreadlocks without realising that Britta identified with and was friends with those people. She was shocked and hurt that these Christians could be so judgemental and superficial. When Britta told me about it my scripture wheels started turning. I want to share with you the verses that came to mind and what I was thinking about them. We have all judged people and said nasty things about them; it is one of the easiest sins to fall back into without realising it. I just want to try to put things in perspective, for all of us.

The first verse that came to my mind was Matthew 23:25, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites For you cleanse the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of extortion and self-indulgence.” When we judge people based on appearance we are acting just like the Pharisees. We show that we are more concerned with the show, the outward appearance of things. In the same chapter, verse 5, Jesus says of the Pharisees that “all their works they do to be seen by men.” When we become obsessed by appearance don’t we fall to caring only about what others see of us, not what God sees of us. Jesus says that the Pharisees are “Blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel ” (Mt 23:24) and “whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.” (Mt 23:27) That is what the Pharisees became because they cared only to please the world.

In the bible we don’t learn much about the Pharisees as a religious sect or a political force in ancient Israel. We learn about the Pharisees as a type of people. They figure so much in the bible, because what they became is what anyone becomes who is too concerned with the value of appearances, with the values of the world in essence. If we judge others we show a lack of faith equal to that of most Pharisees in the bible. Aren’t we told that Jesus is alive (Mt 28:6), that he is always with us. (Mt 28:20) When we act as if Jesus isn’t watching, we are acting as atheists. We show we don’t believe that he rose again, that he dwells in us or us in him. Jesus is there when you say or even think mean things about someone, and I guarantee he loves and cherishes the person you’re talking about.

The final verse I have for you is Matthew 25:40 “Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.” Jesus is talking about the last days when he will call in those who helped him and send away those who didn’t. Both groups say, “Wait a minute, when did we or did we not help you?” That is when Jesus drops this big one on us. Do any of us think much about this. Every single little thing I do to someone else I am doing to Jesus, the Christ. Do I really call Him Lord and then treat him that way. I must be faithless. Not only am I failing to love as he has loved, but I am wasting my time, my energy, all God given, to wrong others, and by wronging them I wrong my God. Thank you Lord for dying on my behalf, but could we have one more round please.

“I said, ‘You know they refused Jesus, too’
He said, ‘You're not Him”
-Bob Dylan

A Simple WWJD

2010-07-31T06:56:00.000-07:00

Abortion III

2010-07-28T12:22:00.001-07:00

I think the most interesting case study that can be made related to abortion is an examination of sex selective abortions. Those who are pro-choice and those who are pro-life find these kinds of abortions reprehensible, but for different reasons. Pro-lifers dislike the practice because it is abortion, obviously. Pro-choice people, however, dislike the practice because it targets women. This turns the issue into a battle over sexism. It isn't right that fetuses should be terminated because of their sexual identity, that's true. It is interesting, however, that those who try to deny the unique identity of an unborn child to justify abortion turn around and defend them when they are persecuted for that identity. The moral compass gets a little cloudy here. Are fetuses human or not? When they're being aborted because they're girls they are, but otherwise they aren't? I thought that the fetus was not yet living and that her rights as merely a potential human being did not supercede those of her parents. Here is the slippery slope of a woman's right to choose coming true. It doesn't really matter if we terminate a pregnancy because we wanted a different kind of baby or because we didn't want a baby at all. In both cases we are serving our own self-interest. I wish we were less selfish, then maybe we could cut through the heart of the rhetoric. People are going to have abortions, they should be allowed to have them safely, (just like junkies should be allowed clean needles) but the discussion about the moral viability of abortion needs to stay open.

Abortion II

2010-07-28T10:56:00.001-07:00

Abortion is a choice that is made concerning another being's life, but it is also a spiritual choice. I feel that a lot of Christians ignore the spiritual aspect of abortion. They want to legislate evil away, but the problem is in people's hearts. It is in the heart that the battle needs to be fought, not in the courts. I think God would prefer it if women chose to have their babies despite the offer of abortion, rather than be forced to have their child and wishing in their hearts that they could have abortions. We don't want a return to the coat hanger days. But one out of every four pregnancies ends in abortion in the United States. That is a little much. I don't think that abortion should be made illegal, there are cases such as rape and severe risk to the mother's life where abortion may be justified. The way we go about abortions does need to change, though. In many countries there are rules about when women can have abortions, however I don't think that those kinds of limitations are right for North America. I believe the most effective means of reducing the amount of abortions would be to have abortion clinics give women all the information before the decision is made; that decision should belong to the parents.

In the film, they interviewed the staff of a crisis pregnancy center. The staff said that after sonograms and counseling and being given information, 98% of the people who had been saying they would have abortions changed their minds. This crisis pregnancy center was right next to the largest abortion clinic in the world. They asked what they were telling people that the abortion clinic wasn't. In abortion clinics, a choice is not really offered. They are corrupt like most of the rest of the health care industry; they tell you that what they are offering is best, act as if they know better, and fail to give any substantial information. They do not give sonograms(I wonder why?) and they de-emphasize the relation the fetus has to a human being. I don't even know if most people realize that abortions create tiny corpses, I know I hadn't ever thought about it. Abortion clinics have to deal with the disposal of thousands of little bodies. Should people know about this before they make their decision?

Of course, these things are not made public knowledge by the advocates for abortion. So what should be done to make people aware? In the fight against abortion what is admissible? In the film, every time pro-lifers showed gruesome pictures of aborted fetuses, people would flip out. The images are incredibly offensive to many people. They say that we don't need to see 'that,' but would they say the same thing if we were talking about images of what happens to political prisoners in Guantanamo Bay? People need to have things shoved down their throats or else they ignore it. I was personally deeply affected when I saw images of a woman handling a human corpse the size of her finger nail, but should we be indiscriminately placing these images where children might see them? We don't want to break up a child's exposure to precocious sexuality(bratz, etc.) with pictures of man made death. There are some better ways to tug at the heart strings. When women who have had abortions come together and talk about their regrets it is incredibly touching, and we see that abortion isn't necessarily a routine pain-free procedure. Having an abortion is a life altering event, with emotional repercussions that will continue throughout a woman's life.

The greatest crime that goes on in the debate over abortion is when people try to sit in the judgement throne of Christ. I was disgusted to see an army of god man holding a sign that says "god hates you." I once heard a christian say, "You know you've created God in your image when he hates everybody you do." God doesn't hate anybody. He hates a lot of what we do, but I hate a lot of what we do. We do a lot of nasty, despicable things. I hate a lot of what I do. But when we condemn those who have abortions or provide them, we aren't furthering the discussion. We are deepening the trenches. God wants to heal those who have had abortions, He will relieve them of their guilt and shame. Those who provide abortions are no more evil than any of the rest of us. Remember what is said about he who casts the first stone. God knows why we do what we do, and he can't stand seeing us make bad decisions, but he can't hate us for it.

Abortion I

2010-07-28T09:18:00.000-07:00

Last night Britta and I watched a movie called "Unborn in the USA." It is a history of the pro-life movement in the United States. It was an interesting, thought provoking, if sometimes frustrating movie. It chronicles the activities of various pro-life groups from the psychotic, megalomaniac members of the army of God to a group of women who regret the abortions they have had. I was struck by the number of things related to this issue that I had never thought about before. Thinking more about I found that I could not evade the simple morality issue. We all know that it is wrong to kill, and even more so to kill a child. But the issue isn't resolved there. We are left with several questions: is a fetus a child? What about a mother's right to choose? Should abortion be legal or illegal? What methods are justified in fighting abortion? Should those who have abortions or the doctors who provide them be condemned?

When we consider whether a fetus is a child, we have to wonder, what constitutes a human being? It seems that in different places and different times the definition of what it means to be human changes for the sake of convenience. The Nazis didn't think Jews were human, the Californians didn't think Okies were human. throughout history one group fails to see another as equal to themselves. For most people it is not malice that keeps them in the dark, it is simply that it is easier than facing the awful truth about the consequences of their actions. Because the definition of what is human is so elastic, and in fact intangible, it is impossible to prove that a fetus is a human being. On the other hand they look human, (take a look at these pictures of the fetus at four weeks and six weeks if you like; most mother's discover they are pregnant around this time.) they do grow into what we cannot deny are human beings, they have the same genetic make up as human beings. I think, in general, it would be safer to err on the side of caution; if we can't prove that fetus' are human beings, we also cannot prove that they aren't. We should probably not take the chance that what we are killing might be human.

But then does the mother get a say in whether she has a baby? Shouldn't a woman have control over her own reproductive systems? In one sense, a mother should have a choice, but if we face reality, women have very little control over their reproductive systems by biological design. Women who want babies don't always have them, women who don't want them sometimes do. Abortion is an illusion of control. The choice is made when we decide to have sex. It is obvious from statistics that no forms of birth control are perfect; if God (or whatever it is you believe begins the cycle of life) wants a life to be formed, we can't stop that from happening. Sex has become so casual, we forget that it has consequences, both emotional and physical. We try to run from the consequences with abortion; a person who is reacting isn't in control. Abortion is a choice, but it needs to be made clear that it is a choice concerning another being's life.

Jesus After the Wedding at Cana

2010-07-27T12:57:00.001-07:00

Patron Saint Proposal: The Patron Saint of Rock and Roll

2010-07-26T08:14:00.000-07:00

Larry Norman should be the Patron Saint of Rock and Roll because they say he's sinful, backslidden, that he has left to follow fame but here he is talking 'bout Jesus just the same. He is often described as too secular for the religious and too religious for the secular, but no one has done more to insure that the devil won't have all the good music. In an age where religion was extremely culturally conservative, he reached out to those who would normally be shunned by the church and talked to them in their language; kind of like what Jesus did with the publicans and the sinners. Put your life in Jesus' nail scarred hands was the message Norman gave them. He told them that you can be a righteous rocker or holy roller, you can be most anything, but without love you ain't nothing. With "Why don't you look into Jesus?" he told them that love was not found in their lives of destruction and self-indulgence. And in "Outlaw" he talked about who Jesus really is, creating the best two minute encapsulation of Jesus' life and work. Everybody should try listening to some of St. Larry Norman's songs for he knew how to show us the rock that doesn't roll through rock and roll.

Guns and God

2010-07-25T08:25:00.000-07:00

Recently, while walking around Fortuna with some friends, we decided to check out the Tom Mcwhorter Rodeo grounds(Tom Mcwhorter is Britta's grandfather), which happens to be the home of the Fortuna Pistol club. I made some ironic comment about the pistol club, assuming my friend would be on the same page as me. To my surprise he ended up saying something along the lines of, "You should know how to shoot a gun, especially now that you have a family to protect." I don't think I answered him very well. I believe my response was a wry grin and something about kung fu.

Afterwards however, I thought about it. It bothered me. Was I being irresponsible by not having a gun? Was I being naive? In the back of my mind, the small part of me that wishes I was paranoid was trying to gain more influence for itself. What if someone did come to attack my family, what would I do? How would I keep them safe? But wait a minute that has never happened before, and we're living in Fortuna-- half the population is either seniors or minors. In this town we leave our back door open when we go out. No worries. And what if someone comes in to attack my family and my gun is unloaded, dismantled and in the other room? Do I need to have it underneath my pillow when I sleep. What about the dangers my gun presents to my family? What about my five month old daughter playing with my gun when we're not looking? And what about God?

If I am relying on a gun for the protection of my family, how am I relying on God? People might say well you rely on both. These are the people who say that God helps those who help themselves. I think however that God helps those who can't help themselves. He helps the powerless and the oppressed. I don't think Rambo quite fits in that category. If a stranger breaks into my home and threatens the lives of my family, do I want to face him with a gun by my side or with the Lord. It seems a simple choice, but it isn't really. It requires that I trust in him, that I put my faith in him. We all know, if we are honest with ourselves, how incredibly difficult that can be.

My friend said that guns don't kill people, people kill people. That's true, but it is an awful sorry maxim to base your life on. It is said that it's a dog eat dog world, and that is true when one lives apart from God. But I say that when we embrace the Kingdom of Heaven we choose to deny the dog eat dog world and embrace that in which the lion lays down with the lamb. The man who breaks into homes is a human being lovingly created by God. He has been twisted and perverted by fear and pain. When we as Christians embrace fear and pain, we justify him. What example do we set for the world when we embrace fear. We end up looking just like them for fear is something that leads away from God. If we truly believe that we are in the hands of the Almighty who created the heavens and the earth and we believe that He loves us. If we also trust Him enough to obey Him, what cause have we to fear? Trials may come, and the most terrible hardships, we may suffer and lose everything but He is with us through them. God works for redemption. There is no grace in self-defense.

You can take away my kids
take away my wife
you can take away my job
you can take away my life
you can take away my house
take away my ford
but you can't take away the Lord

-Larry Norman

Bios

2010-07-23T07:45:00.000-07:00

One of the things I love about submitting my work to magazines and e-zines is coming up with silly third person bios. The whole idea of the fifty word max bio is ridiculous, but when that is embraced it's wonderful. Here are a few of the bios I have come up with:

Erik Knutsen is a writer who does not enjoy writing about himself in the third person, so he didn't he dictated. In this sense, he is trying to be the new Milton. His life seems to constantly be sucked back to Vancouver, BC.

Erik Knutsen was too squeamish to become a doctor. The only thing left, it seems, was this.

Erik Knutsen doesn't really care who he is, so long as someone is there to remind him.

Erik Knutsen is a twenty-two year old born and raised Vancouverite. He just dropped out of Portland Community College due to lack of funds. His life consists of writing, eating, and sleeping.

Erik Knutsen dreams of being a magpie. His attraction to shiny things would be more acceptable. He lives in Vancouver, BC but loves in Portland, OR.

Erik Knutsen is not available to come to the phone right now. Please leave a message with your name and number and he will get back to you as soon as possible.

Erik Knutsen was born in Vancouver, BC, lives in Portland, OR. He is unsure where he will die.

Erik Knutsen has only ever read one book. But he read it a lot!

Erik Knutsen lives in a small town. He has never tried this before. It makes him regret ever saying, “I’ll try anything once.”

Erik Knutsen is reformatting his computer for the nth time. He wishes that he could solve all of life's problems by reformatting.

Erik Knutsen lives, but does not work, in Fortuna, CA. He has been published here and there. He hopes to be published more here and less there.

Erik Knutsen is feeling faint due to the raw food diet. He wants to be healthy, but he's not sure if it's worth it. He dreams of burgers and bacon.

Erik Knutsen longs to be free. Like in the sentence: "the land of the free and the home of the brave." But, living in the United States of America, nobody can really tell him what being free means.

Erik Knutsen has never met a trustworthy fox. He won't keep the company of wolves, and his dogs are cowards. Thus he has no canine companion to join him in his adventures.

Erik Knutsen is looking for a land to call home. If you know of a good one, write down the address on a piece of parchment and send it via bottle delivery.

Erik Knutsen has being trying to live and act without acknowledging his own existence. It seems it might be impossible.

Erik Knutsen hopes someday to grow up somewhere other than Vancouver, BC or Portland, OR. Maybe it'll be in Humboldt county that he'll finally find himself some maturity.

Erik Knutsen was a good friend to himself, until he had a falling out. Now he spends his time trying to recover from the heartbreak of having been rejected by one so dear and near.

Erik Knutsen doesn't do much; he hopes that qualifies him to be a good writer. His life centers completely around the written word; he sometimes forgets that reality is out here and not in there, or the other way around?

Facing the Music

2010-07-22T17:04:00.000-07:00

I was just reading the introduction to a little book from Bonhoeffer. It's my first Bonhoeffer. It is interesting how one can sometimes gain so much simply from reading the intro or prologue. There are a few books that have affected me deeply even though I only read the prologue. Now, I'm proud to say that I finish most books I pick up. I will get around to it with this one.

In the prologue/introduction thingy, Bonhoeffer is talking about how Christ is the new and everything else is the old. He says that we as the church partake in the new with Christ. The new means the end of the old. So, we see the old world from the point of view of the end (or the beginning.) He says that the old world can't stand that the church acts as if that world is already dead.

That world is already dead, it is a world of death. Everything recently has been telling me this. I watched Food inc. and became overcome by fear of all the greed that goes into the production and distribution of everything we buy. I live in a town of red necks and white trash. Why are they white trash? Because they don't believe they are any better. They are waiting to die. I know people who take so many pills they can't engage with life anymore. I heard about a friend's brother who might face a death sentence in Indonesia because he can't pay the judges and police off. His crime was minor.

I still have my foot in this world of death. It makes it hard for me to swallow these things. I feel angry, I hunger for justice. Not only justice, but revenge. The worldly part of me wants a fair world. Christ within me says grace isn't fair. Seek love only. What is justice with out love? It may be fair but its heartless. Send impartial Lady Justice away, I choose Christ and the trinity who have set their scales aside and opened up the heart of compassion and forgiveness.

Patron Saint Proposal: The Patron Saint of Anti-Papism

2010-07-12T16:07:00.000-07:00

Martin Luther is well known as the man who single-handedly began the reformation. His ninety-five theses which were nailed to the door of a Wittenberg church made a call for a radical reinterpretation of Christianity. He demanded that the church abandon the ideas that led to reliquaries, papal indulgences and the exchange of money for salvation. He wanted the whole church to re-espouse Paul's doctrine of justification by faith. By the end of his career he became very vehemently opposed to the papacy, even going so far as to call the pope the anti-Christ. It is for this reason and his remarkable faith and dedication to God that I propose his canonization as St. Martin Luther, patron saint of anti-papism.

Clear

2010-04-05T13:11:00.001-07:00

This piece was published in the Summer 2009 issue of Tinfoil Dresses.

Clear

I have already been thinking about you thoroughly; about marble and of jade. It is becoming quickly the something I must say that it is the girl rushing through the woods and houses along the way who holds the heart for singing that ignites salacious remonstrances, or is it the other way. Her inborne dualist primacy, feral or severe, is reflected in me right here; so by virtue of wishing through another upon oneself but withal still intact - I want her to be made of porcelaine. In Pan's reedy whistle she wanders merrily, her green, green cloak a shoutback of his verdant melody. It is the shoulder that I wish to lay my hand upon. "So let me guide you," and thus I stood beguided. For I deniably stand for all that is good. While shaking off the grime, I was beckoning you in, though may I not enjoin you overzealously. But when you're through my door the knockings are louder ever more. You didn't walk this way only for yourself; I was there right with you in previous foreknowledge of the moutains and crystal lakes which praise my kind of day. Marf is a clean carpet and sweat sock footed feet. Chocolate. A Link fighting nobly to the console between our controllers' cord's end things. Candy. You and me and disney. Lollipops. The one thing I gave that I can never take away. I have abandoned everyone. I would come, I would come to visit you. My marf is your diamonds and cocaine. Is a relationship now contained in so few days, when all available recollections reflect a moribund instant of joy or two? She wants to be bone and flesh! Could the ikons love bone and flesh? When a wooded fir is trying to be an art print littered table, perhaps along the way. Hallowed be thy name; I wish but fear I'm failing to preserve thy sanctity. But that art print littered table may not have been what the fir had meant, it seems, it's strivings to achieve. So my mundanity breeds your insanity, I would still take those cut out pills with you another day. It wasn't even my affectations of nobility but my vectorised lucidity which prevented me. I wanted, oh, I wanted; please don't take away. Give me a second chance to rectifie today. Am I to keep myself from ever opening my abdomen to someone else, my entrails spilling out only onto the page where their blemishes are not shared to understanding. This next silence may even be too much for me. I forget who I'm to be writing about: a porcelain girl, or me. You seem to want to be Nastassya Filippovna, while I want to be Myshkin with a different wakeful ending. You said, "Link Absolves Zelda," which was a wonderfully beautiful and insightful thing.

The Midnight Engraver

2009-11-23T20:47:00.000-08:00

This poem was originally published at Everyday Poets on October 31st.

The Midnight Engraver

I saw the dead
come crawling out
of the latter-day
where saints are clocks,
ticking to tell us
our time is up.

The midnight engraver is chiseling my name.

Those emerging orbs
did none for me
as they clapped my back,
took my hand,
welcomed me as one of them,
while singing Bob Dylan.

The midnight engraver is working away.

The fogs they brought
stung my eyes
and sewed them shut;
I never saw
what all went on or
what I really sought.

The midnight engraver is chiseling my name.

When he’s done I’ll have gone away.

Down and Out in Madness and Hell

2009-11-23T20:45:00.000-08:00

This story was originally published at abjective the week of August 29th, 2009.

Down and Out in Madness and Hell

I have seen the men in their big, stone buildings, black suits, and ties rushing upwards towards the skies; lamplight streaking, too many voices screaming, over ears and eyes; unrecording enregistration; completely disproven absolute facts; the evolving staticity of solidified tear tracts; permanent, dizzying churning darting lightly in the darkness of smiles, hostelling Europly by glasses of wine; wileless bearing of cavernous acid blocked eyes; bowls of fauns' foals smiling through words to the heart of the times; brothers committing fraternal crimes; sickening, silver Spanish mimes jarringly turning bloodshot eyes; commodious homelessness containing pariahs untenable tries (every job is just hoisting a sail, peeling potatoes into a pail, penny whistle tweedles pretentiously dancing for impoverishing gratification); nose, cheek, and jaw handheld horrifically demonstrating awe-- it's the skeletons revealed by scientific law; penniless people binding cigarettes and time over by canals filled with murky brine, thinking forever in Seussian rhyme; the Lorax who speaks for the trees and the swammy swans but not for the diseased victims chained by diseased victims being chained by diseased victims; hungerless devouring of rumbling tumblies burning hernias into high-function thinkings malfunctioning; the unctuous gumption of presumptuous consumption which bears no interruption; seals in oil, a delicacy for new gods charitably dancing near cameras with brushes, hiding saws by buying friendship of truth's seraphim-- self-proclaimed by every course in its name; humorous, crying, protective smoker's wooden kinderlings; bringings of generous fardels disposed disheartenedly through sacred everlasting moribund blues; the whirling of vortexes of quarters and eighths perishing mildly in querying thighs (the highway was over before the last sign); snap, crackle, popped knuckles fingering arthritis in gaping cunt sores; pretty ones ignoring every entreaty not holding beastliness in its inner beatings; grumbling rumblings of Dayton's vehicular choice drying the beauty of nature so moist-- the warmth of a body is unimaginably frail; the rose dies when caretakers fail.

If I awoke would it be that it hadn't happened to me, the stumbling tumbling of my descent through infinity? Would I only be lying at my ease, no cares or worries? Sitting calmly as I let the breeze wash over me, secure in the presence of familiarity, I would see all the things around, content that they are there for me. In enjoyment, I would feel blissfully the tender security of environment mould and shape my demeanour, that within found so weak when faced with the breakers of the external, assuaging the natural resistant tendencies. Would I cringe, even a little, as my perspective was shifted aside as simply as dirt? Am I only my own when left all alone in a never that cannot come? Yet, the anxiety that is consumed by the incoming force arises from and is fed by its own consumption, and when I look out, that which comes from me will billow and be moved unmoving by that which comes from everything else. The resolution I so desire will be left in between annulment and fulfillment, hovering somewhere beyond all reach. I feel queasy.

So if I awoke, what could I do to bring together all that I knew? I can't make it work, right here, in my brain. Is it that it's too complex for me to comprehend, or too simple for me to accept? What am I doing here? I want these visions to break open and reveal themselves. Show me the line that defines the various connections that taint me with a sense of imperfection. The relation of all I act and see, all I make and feel, to the blank that fits nowhere from everything, building and floating in no way as something that makes up the aggregate poppings of images that reduce the expansion of the expanding reduction coalescing to form a single, the only, set of recurring thought mannerisms, works only to unravel the structure of agglutinised footholds. If I open my eyes, there will be more than the sighs within my mind, and I will find myself moving in from limitless to limiting. Locked apart from space and time, my nails will tear at flesh to find where, within, is me.

What was I before, and who am I now? Did I know once and have forgotten somehow? Something must have changed between one moment and another, but which? When? As I placed the cup to my lips, or heard the horse whips, some subtle chemistry shift must have brought me to this. Perhaps, a gentle sound forsook my body and took to ground, leaving me as I am left now. Here I be, a thinking divorced from any skin-covered shell, and thinking on things I know not how I know, I find that I lack the simple explanation to the fact that I am. If it was lost, in some dreary moment I forgot, it may be that someday I will know it again; maybe find it forlorn on some rain-drenched street, or find it hidden in a long unused drawer. Yet, if I didn't know, could I have been someone, something? Without the knowledge of what I was, I could have been anything or nothing, left as a quotient of the eternal possibility of anything terminal. ...Are these the first thoughts, or the last?

I know, now, though, that I'm at least something asking whether it is something, but I don't know what these things are called. Without the name, there is no limit to the accumulation of designated properties I can have. How am I to sort through all the baggage with which I am left to determine exactly what it is that defines me? How am I to sort through all the guilt, grief, and rage, and organise it into a coherent whole? I have so many internal trappings and workings that fit only deleteriously; to make the mess aright would require the formation of a whole other system of shoddy mechanisms. It would be impossible to reconcile the various reactive and counterintuitive forces at work within my make-up, to bridge the gaps between my awareness and my knowing, to harmonise my reasoning and feeling. Only a fool could, should, would try to make less crazy the natural insanity of this chaotica. Yet, if I open my eyes what will I see? Is this the blessing of a new beginning?

Opening my eyes, I see avenues and lanes of burning fire, the twisting torrent of visual screams; broken meanderers strutting disheartenedly through their vicious viscuous minds; perfidious demesnes of caustic, cathartic chammerings; venomous, boiling, cantankerous plinths and pleens jawing over dismal dalliances; vertiginous grounds; pallid skies; everything up and on its side; cormorants flying through Escherial lives; pissantic gnats knit through flies popping in washes of colourless bursts; a million billion William Randolph Hearsts driving to trench wars in a merry wheel hearse; nameless words floating like cows through a mire of hot glowing stones; the opalescent guilts of all the citizen Cohns; marrow seeping from bones with the pounding of sexual tones; pedantic hookers grinding pelvically, rump to bunt; seppuku fetishists ripping and tearing each other's livers, intestines, and spleens, revealing the oozing bodily creams; placid freak-outs through each other's ribs; gnawing teeth down to the nerve and choking on lies; suffocation, penetration, denigration, defenestration, decapitation, contamination, degravitation.

How can I hold on in the face of all this that has nothing, not even madness, to hold on to? I can't face this kaleidoscope of horror, yet it has already seared itself into my retinas as it penetrates through me to rip out whatever it is that lies within and makes me. I only hope that this is but my imagination; I hope that I will still find myself freed from whatever is happening. If it is that I am mad, then I hope it is confirmed, for if it is so I will be able to stand rejoicing that my visions are not real but merely delusions. I will be cared for and dealt with. I'll have no worries. I can never, however, know if what I am seeing is not real, so there will be no comfort there. I think it unlikely that I could ever have simply imagined all this; I am not so creative-- but real? How could it be? No such existence can be. It isn't right! It doesn't fit! I Don't Want It!

I need an exterior motivation, something familiar to use as a landmark, to determine how to shape and focus my actions. My surroundings amount, essentially, to nothing in the framework of my vague understanding of the ballistics of everything; without anything with which to engage I cannot act. I'm stuck in a putrescent limbo where the words of the mind are completely alien to the world outside. The thought collectives that reinforce whatever it is that I am are irreconcilable with the vertiginous landscape that surrounds me in its effervescent embrace. My interconnective mode of greeting the world is indelibly incapable of formatting the influx of information even into something I could recognise as only in formation; there is no ground on which to meet. I am constricted by an endless void, but it is the wrong limitlessness. I don't think this is where I should be; I wish I could tell somebody.

I wish I could tell somebody what it is like to be here. I wish I could tell them the pain I feel from the sour reality that moves down a whirlpool into me. I would tell them that I want no more to interact with it all, but at the same time I cry out for some solid understandable something to come and take a piece of me. The blotches of raw sight that are everywhere are so all-pervasive, unshapen, and meaningless that I am as good as surrounded by nothing, all alone with only myself and my thoughts; I cannot stand it. People quake in fear at thoughts of the lake of fire, but Lucifer would be a welcome sight after this. Chaos is much worse than evil. Being left alone only with crude existence-- the stuff dreams are made of, but no dream weaver-- and my thoughts, which are unfettered by the manipulations of the morass of things that exist beside me, is chaos in its purest form. I suppose that means that I am chaos, and order is only achieved by the curbation of my natural tendencies through an other, but there is no other here. I wish I could die.

Yet, I am here, so this must be some place. I can start from myself, beginning my motions from a position of stillness. My thoughts are yet discernible; they will be the reference with which I use the force of my will to propel me from this unmoved state of rest. I know I can see, so I must have something with which to see. There must also be something to see, otherwise I would not have such things. I must discern, from all this, the variousness of what is out there. I must shape and define things for ease of intercourse. I cannot allow the intransigent nature of this ephemerality to balk me belligerently; I am the one in control, and I need only force this vacuity back to the intramundane. I am the thing that sees; I am the thing that thinks. I am I, and no mere mess of fickle haziness will transgress that. I am will. I will be.

A livable world doesn't simply appear from nowhere; it must be suppressed into form. What delineates the distinctions of the everyday presences that enravel our conceits and frailties, our tears and smiles, our rages and intimacies, toils and lethargy, violence and passivity? What walls and chairs, clocks and chesterfields, lamps and rugs bear witness to our horrors and lascivities, our conundrums and righteousnesses, our beliefs and dependencies, costumes and masks, theater and perfection? What moments of motion allow us our focus and havering, our grip and withdrawal, our visions and blindness, respite and savagery, yells and whispers? It is the colour, the texture, the shading, the depth, the motion and stillness, and the spaces in between that make up the variances that allow for the structure of care that passes unnoticed all around us. It is through the isolation, perception, and divination of these aspects of substance that I will bring myself back to the balance of concretion. The firmament will be split as I stare out and begin by separating that which moves from that which does not.

Staring intently I see voluptuous visceral vehemence with claustrophobic parochial filaments shifting beneath the red and the black; collations cremating in the decoupage of a collage to learn to scream so soft and serious their silly serenities; peaceful explosions devouring, in dirt, drying decays deserving to defer; Vichy verve for velvet drapes to help escapes from fury balls with monocles, follicles, and capes; melting foghorns tooting for apes pounding and looting awful grunts and shrieky hootings; Miles Davis trumpet mutings strolling severely surrounded by four-eyes of muscle making zips from portable ears with external soundage; infernal submersibles flying in back walls of walrusy kernels; neverending cul-de-sacs hitching with backpacks round very impregnable carton stacks; dancing shacks wearing foot claps around a pounding trap; a belly crab drinking flab from ab to gab for replenishment of lost snazz; gasm gas-happy hurrahs coming from inebriate illness juiced jazz fans; the last glass running a blast though the crass formless past of life in party hats; metal sheaves formed from green sleeves for the purpose of tearing out the eaves grown in velour seas; guests welcoming strangers in, from homes so cold, to periodontal folds; buildings of ideological restraints for the holding of saints giving sin many names to make fun of those they wish they could train; no fame or gain, just erratic blurring from swishing to stirring; leftward lilting lily lummocks right handedly granting slanting chanting; moving murders, geriatrics, fitzpatricks, cat licks, poker faces, civil cases, and tearing stases; stationary times, rhymes, market lines, pillow faces, windbreakers, LA Lakers, and movie makers.

The attenuation I am trying to achieve pinches at the sides of my eyes, trying to pull my face in twain. I am, holus bolus, becoming integrated with everything. I cannot imagine the terrible grimace I wear as I attempt tear the mesh with my face, ripping my way through gauze and lace to come to something that allows for grace. The effort it takes to rip the art from the heart, I never could have foreseen. I cannot cross my eyes just right to bring the magic picture to light. I am worried; I know when a hand is enthusiastically passed through glass it tends to emerge different from what it was before. What if now that will also be so? Is there danger lurking behind the blurring? Will I come out diseased and slurring? I feel this struggle against the unknown battering the tender shackles of my soul.

Am I to arrive at the end of all this still as I am? Will I remain myself? The energy that I exert seems to reinforce the strength that thwarts me. It pummels and tumbles all over my rind, peeling each layer with frenetic free time. If the gale persists I won't be able to resist; my clay faucet garb and rhinestone protect mask will shatter and leave my innermost to the blast. It's all my fault. I am the cause, the wheel, the gear. Yet, I cannot about face; I wouldn't last in this place. I feel such fear. I don't wish to remain, but neither do I wish to, as another, continue existing. The cost seems as if it may be that great. What's worse is that I may have what it takes. I am still barreling to my wit's end, and soon I may find where I can no longer stand as I am.

This is the strongest motion of self-abnegation I have ever endured. I am beating against the rain of my own constraints, to loose the gates of my barricades. I struggle against my instincts, and pray for the destruction of my preservation. The goal I hold is to invite the shadows that lurk beyond to invade and take root, eliminating my separation and bringing me back to the fold. Individuality is not worth being alone, staring all that is other down the throat, knowing it thinks it's better and bigger than me in my hole. In comparison to the dream that I bear, I am a groveling, groping, wheezing misdemeanour. I am a flake of dust trying to scream that it is big enough to think itself worth some love. I am a pitiful speck of nothing. I am a crinkle of irritation that cannot even assist the irrigation of temporal continuation. I am the poor man's low brow. It seems I am the loser now, I have kept no dignity within myself.

I yearn to return to mundane concerns. I will shout; I will beg; I will hop on one leg. I merely want the world to renege my condemnation to this parietal lag. I want my lungs back, with a flower to overwhelm my senses with its power. Give me a lake, a tree, a plain evening. I have the right to a red-curtained life, or a house and a wife. Hand me my claim, you odious, oleaginous ocean of prinkings! I can make no demands; I must bow and grovel before the man. What man? Any man. Please, dear God, take me back. Are you out here beyond the walls? Can you see through the cracks? I will do, or be, anything anyone wants, but I can't stand to bear very long these strange haunts. I would be a pirhana, or mad-cow diseased goat, rather then continue to swim this disturbed moat. I'll bray obsequiously, or howl in hunger from unfed jowls. The only thing I want is for me or the burning to stop.

I am finished, but I can't drop off or disappear in a puff from this here. I give up; I withdraw; it's too hard to obtrude into the nude of the real. I will sink and swallow, follow the curve, drown my own-ness in the herd. No more will I look with desire to explain; no longer will I think of anything. I will take whatever I am given without complaint, foster my person with restraint. I can't force my way into that which I inveigle. I will not stand the strain or the penalties. I will just do and accept what that entails. This is the end of all that fails, because I won't take the risk for success which derails the direction of inception towards the valley of death for the feelings that ache. I feel something beginning to break.

Suddenly, eyes awake, I see vomit-caked hair in my field of vision -- you will expiate; the jagged texture of concrete meeting granulated refraction -- you will appreciate; crumpled decrammed geometrics left about by green mouths of inaction -- you will accept; rolling black circumferences with pontiac rims smiling grimly -- you will valuate; the shining brightness of unknown sightliness -- you will idle; electric pink lines brought up for hairy minds -- you will desire; syringe crimes posting wanted signs for more to involve their wealthy-built finds -- you will heed; concoctions of potions to nauseate the faint who paint a face each every which way/day -- you will need; obnoxious unresponsive unconscious blooey hats in flashing mats shambhala-ing past -- you will rely; inadvertent, perhaps, understanding of the matter of facts revealing the only truth that lasts -- you will deny; fast sassafrass shoving itself up the rear with its pass -- you will enjoy; the law of updown left uptown to keep from enforcing the frown -- you will respect; brown noise music being the only similarity to fuchsia pound sounds -- you will listen; little voices everywhere asking the way to the brilliant, blustering, blithering, boombang excitements of the rotating real estate waste -- you will acquiesce; and it all now makes sense.

I expiate. I appreciate. I accept. I valuate. I idle. I desire. I heed. I need. I rely. I deny. I enjoy. I respect. I listen. I acquiesce. It all makes sense.

Mountain

2009-09-04T10:10:00.000-07:00

This poem was originally published at Everydaypoets.com on July 27th, 2009.

Mountain

Switzerland, mountains:
the beating of hoofs,
the charge of kings,
Hannibal and his men
their souls aflame with Aries’ fire; whilst
a Citroen carries my bored imagination through this –

a lone priest walks in silence. He carries through steep terrain, as penitence for man’s sins, a weighty burden, the word of God

– landscape of terrible immediacy and wonderful beauty –

a man alone, with scarce the knowledge of what lies beyond, faces sheer cliffs of stone with naught but his hands and their creations; what gall it took, what gall it takes, the first time?

– now appropriated by tourists.

An idyllic village with thatched roofs and stone chimneys surrounds a clockfaced steeple church. The smells and sounds of home, family, friends and food waft to the nearby hills where a traveler lies, his legs buried by rocks, but his mind free to rejoice in the continuance of all he has and ever will know.

Poetry From Unfettered Verse

2009-09-04T10:03:00.000-07:00

These poems of mine were originally published in the June 2009 edition of Unfettered Verse.

Everything I Know is Passing Me By

Everything I know is passing me by
I want it all to stay still for a while
Days and days lost to my mind
Am I only a memory of better times?
I want some sort of history
To take the weight of my Self from me

Everything I know is passing me by
Am I even aware this is my only life?
As an insect’s fractural view
I know not on what to focus anew
Every facet is just the same
Pointing to the center of the hollow stage

Everything I know is passing me by
While I sit grasping at ephemeral time
But it flits away before I know
Who I am or where to go
Without any comparison to make
No decision is worth being awake

Hiding

I heard of your Father who sees in secret,
While I lay hiding in a basement

Who sees the beatings in hidden chambers?
Who sees the frantics of a lustful manger?
Who sees the lies spoken from honest eyes?

I saw everyday what it truly means
To keep a secret and hide truth away

Who sees the forcing of naked skin breaking?
Who sees the malice tightened round necks failing?
Who sees the glory promised delivered poorly?

I spoke not, for fear, that I should be found,
The hidden secret’s silent shroud

Hope

And, for a time, there was hope
How like to angry Micheal with sword aflame
Did we rage when it was lost.
We gave him more, a burden,
And found he was a man.

Applying for Freelance Writing Jobs Blows

2009-07-28T09:04:00.000-07:00

I have been applying for freelance writing jobs. I am not getting any freelance writing jobs, of course, but I am applying for them. That in itself, I believe, entitles me to pass judgment on the whole deally. I am affronted by the fact that so many job offers that come along want amazing, off-the-wall creative writers, but, of course, they don't really mean that. If those goobers were ever actually confronted with raw creativity they would pop their tops, blow a gasket, and run all the way home to Kansas. Those of us from wonderland are dying in the heat of reality. I no longer want this shining sun to reign in my horses. God, release me from the fetters of a system where I have to limit myself to prosper! I pray for freedom. I pray for clemency. I pray for soul. Why do the unimaginative rule the Earth? Why are dreams subject to the whims of reality? What kind of world can exist without the ethereal wisps? What children do not try to emulate their fathers? So, should we not as well. God wishes us to try and be like him in his goodness. Should we not also try to be like him in his creativity?

The Beautiful Sunshine Coast

2009-07-11T13:22:00.000-07:00

Britta and I just came back from spending a couple days on the sunshine coast. It was wonderful and amazing. I felt so free there. I have begun to see the benefits Britta is always going on about in country living. It was just so peaceful. I never felt the need to do anything. It was simple to just sit down and focus on playing guitar for a few hours. To take a nap and then play some piano. Nothing was rushed; nothing was frantic. It was a nice change of energy. Alas, now I am back in the city, and I already feel bored and listless. I already feel the need to be in constant motion, instead of in a state of rest. I have a headache.

No More Serving Yuppies in Yaletown

2009-07-06T21:27:00.000-07:00

Hurrah! I have ended my tenure as a barista at Fuse Pan-Asian Cafe. It was alright as far as jobs go: I had friendly co-workers, a great deal of time to read, and little actual work to do. There were some little annoyances that I am glad to be rid of: spoiled rich brats who think that a tip jar is a communal fund to help them buy junk food; twelve year old girls just hitting puberty and getting crushes on guys in their twenties who have nowhere to run or hide while at work; lulu lemon wearing, sugar-free vanilla decaf soy extra-hot no foam latte ordering, screaming child dragging yoga moms who never leave tips; everybody else who would never leave a tip, I mean you tip a waiter, and they dont' even make anything for you, they just bring it and have nice friendly chats; listening to people discuss the postings on their twitter accounts; the lady who would always look over all the caramel oat bars to figure out which one had the most caramel; the old british man with a cane who has something to talk about everyday, but nothing good to say about any of it; a lack of guidance in terms of delegated tasks; and just having to make people's god damn coffees in general.

Room of Another

2009-07-01T16:56:00.000-07:00

This is my story, "Room of Another", which originally appeared in the April 2009 issue of Static Movement:

Room of Another

I awoke strangely deranged, in the room where I had been sleeping, with the pinpricking refrain of confusion on my brain. Deluded and diluted, still, by the coruscating dreams that had been mine until the waking rang the till, the teller in me felt concretely that these environs were out of place with the expectations of my vulnerable grace, granted with the snooze I purchased. The gauze that fogged my mental cogs would not be shaken off, and, disturbed, I knew this place, in which I had been before, would not become familiar. Without intent, it menaced me. The dull glaze of matte paint tried desperately to hide the barren boards that lurked inside. The flicker of a dying bulb perched on the end of a chipped ceramic copper top lamp with moulting velvet shade made a tweaking sound with the light's up and down which poignantly found the nooks and hollows of these surroundings. The outlets sat without coverings, and the drawers of the chest were left open, just a bit, as if to let the beating of what was in it to have the space to poke its head out. The rugs lay in disorder, and even the spider webs in the corner were abandoned. I looked at the wood that stared out through the cracks in the paint, and I knew that these were not my walls, this was not my room.

Looking to escape from this seemingly ever-enclosed space, I alighted on the window sill with the promise of a morning bright. Out through the glass I gazed to find it still to be night. Without a tree or house in sight, I began to think this a peculiar blight. The landscape I had seen the day before was teeming with objects all over. I thought to myself that the twinkling of the stars seemed more piercing than I had ever noticed before. Suddenly, I looked down and saw, instead of ground, more stars-- above, below, and all around. I recognised then that the shapes were all wrong; there was no great bear, shiny dog, or horse with man's torso. The violent new forms that illumined this waste, moved with such haste they were impossible to trace. As the chamber moved on and the suns hurtled by, I began to realise that these were not my stars, this was not my sky.

I next noticed, rolling in from the east, a planet that was not a little like Earth, in the least. It seemed that my cabin was turning towards it; I wondered would I crash or become a satellite. The prospect of being bound to this room struck me with dismay, disgust, and disdain. I could not bear long the placid colours, somber sheets, and tarnished brass which gave with their good sense the feeling of something lurking that was less than this warm pretense. My fears of such an occurrence were quickly dashed against the turrets, for I was already bearing down towards the planet's surface. As I saw the horizon's curve close in and disappear, my vision filled suddenly with continents and oceans, I realised, too late, that this may be the day of fate. I struggled, in vain, panic stricken with the fear of pain, to make my way away from the grip that made me stay. I turned and tried to move, without a thought of the futility, over the chairs, desk, and dresser that were closing in around me. I tried, just as they were about to cream me to the wall, to leap above them, but I did nothing but fall unconscious. During the last moments of my cogitation, I prayed that this was not my moment, not my everlasting cremation.

I came around, somehow, to the tune of birds singing, heaped on the detritus which had been the contents of the room rejected by the sky. With amazement I realised that the room was intact and, more so did it strike me, so was I. A deep distrust arose within me of a room that could have taken such a tumble without any damage at all. I surveyed the wreckage that was piled all about and marvelled that somehow I had made it out alive and well. Then I hearkened to the melodies that came floating through the window on the cool breeze. I suddenly felt the urge to explore this foreign world, and I looked towards the door. The threatening gloom of that dour room struck me once more, and I saw in the mirror that adorned that door the terror that my face wore. I would not, could not exit that way; I looked about for some other porthole to take. My eyes hung on the window. I stood motionless, still. I looked to the door quickly, then dashed through the glass with the sense that something would try to not let me pass, but I made it quite safe on to the grass. I was secretly thankful that that was not my abode, not the home of my own.

I stood up and brushed the dust off my pants, then looked about to take in these strange lands. Yet, not so strange were they, in fact; the terrain was much as our native soil. There was a shimmering blue sea daunting the eye with its continuity and taunting the ears with its lap-lapping incessantly. Into that sea flowed a babbling brook, winding so snake-like it hissed as it went. The banks of that brook were bordered with willows which the wind shook, and those shaking willows danced a dance no one knows which swallowed and gobbled the light up in its shadows. There were the dandelions and lilies which crowded the fields in tightly knit gangs which seemed to threaten the warning not to step on the flowers. The clouds in the sky were buffed up big and white, taking the shapes of things that aren't right. And finally, down at my feet, the grass shimmered in the light, an army of swords thousands strong. But the most disconcerting thing that I saw was the sun, so bright that it put me in a daze, reaching its rays into every part of life's maze. It was then the horror took me that this was not my place, this was not my world.

All through the trees and the air, the sea and the brook meandered creatures of all sizes, from fishes and birds to mammals and bugs. I recognised every species and felt suddenly suspicious. It was strange, in the first, that my room should just burst into space and make its way who knows where, but that I should arrive on a planet so much like mine, just by chance, was too improbable to take for granted. The coincidence that another world should be populated with the same kind of antelopes, magpies, and bees was beyond the possibility of belief. I thought that this must be artificial: some holograms, perhaps, or a terraforming project, maybe it was all just a dimensional vortex. My knowledge of modern science was flimsy at best, but it seemed to me that something like this would be some sort of controlled test. As those beasts milled around like the thoughts in my head, I grew more restless and uneasy. I turned back towards my vessel, that room I despised, thinking it might be good to seek shelter for the night, but the room was now gone. It had disappeared from the spot it had sat; I lost all hope, and realised that this was not my realm, these were not my rules.

Everything, all at once, came alive chaotically. A group of trees were bulldozed over, and a giant machine emerged, with blades whirring it sucked everything in to its flaming stomach furnace. The birds flew off cawing. The fish hopped in agitation. The deer ran off, and I stood still. The machine moved past and its great noise grew, then diminished until a deep dreadful silence, broken only by water purring, came over the clearing where nothing was now stirring. I felt so relieved that the monster had passed, but then I looked to my left and saw a hungry bear come down the strife-torn path. It eyed me and ran forward with a growling barking roar; I did nothing but think that this was not my death, and that was not my life.

Atomic Lunch Boxes

2009-07-01T14:44:00.001-07:00

I am hungry right now and thinking about nuclear fission. Nuclear fission is a process, simply, where atoms are split and converted to energy. I am simply and strangely dreaming of some form of culinary fission where by food could be split and converted into energy for me. If it is so wonderful and tasty to engage in the act of culinary fission, how much more tasty must nuclear fission be? I can only imagine.