Prayer as Secular Breath

Sometimes I think that just about everybody in the world would find some point of disagreement with everybody else on who or what God is or whether she/he/they exist at all.  Many people who do not believe in a god simply cannot ~ this is a holy unbelief.  It comes from their hearts breaking too much at the suffering of the world and the seemingly implacable lack of response from any god to that.  Unbelief made holy.

Because of all of this rolling range of difference when it comes to who or what makes up God or a god, you would think that therefore there would probably be just as many differences in opinion on what prayer is.  But I'm not so sure about that.  Regardless of who it's directed to, what drives the prayer seems to be a remarkably short range of things - gratitude, requests for help, requests for renewal, expressions of love.

I don't even think you need to believe in a personal god to pray.  Surely everybody on the planet has prayed at some point. Some see prayer as praying to that higher part of ourselves, the one that acts in our best interests and seems at times to help us respond to the lower part of ourselves, that which will keep us chained in fear.  In this sense, we all pray, and it has nothing at all to do with institutional religion and that whole bullshit arena of power and control.  In this sense it is a beautiful thing that softens my heart towards the world.

"Prayer is the bridge between longing and belonging" - John O'Donohue

Casa Tomada by Rafael Larrea Uribe

Ego is Good/Ego is Bad/Ego Doesn't Exist at All?

I've just been reading a post and a lively set of comments about the ego.  And of course in such a conversational terrain, there is the usual argument going on ~ that of yes, there is an ego/no, there isn't an ego.  It's an interesting and frustrating conversation because I agree completely and utterly with both sides.

This is my personal take, subject to change or variation at any time.  I'm sure you have your own and it's probably different to mine.  But the way it seems to me out through my eyes and after pondering and daydreaming about it ~ I think that I absolutely do have an ego, and it is part of my responsibility as this particular human to learn to balance it, to learn to love myself no more or less than anyone else, which is, in fact, an entire life's journey the perfected aim of which would be me being totally in love with the entire world because I Am That. 

On the other hand, at the same time I feel like my aim is to learn to stop loving myself too much (a sort of love which, if it really is love at all, is a much lower form of it), or else I will forget that I am the ocean and that I don't believe there is any fear in death.

Because in that respect, no, there is no ego.  Damn right.  There is no such thing as an ego, just like there is no such thing as bloody anything.  The full and beautiful void.  The no-thing.  And you know the drill ... go down far enough and it's just more empty space than molecules.

So I think we can get caught up in these distinctions where different sides say "No, you're wrong.  There is an ego," and the other side saying, "No, you're wrong. There isn't an ego."  But the way it seems to me is that they are both exactly right. 

What a fucking trip :)

Change

It's both enlightening and disturbing to realise how much we make our own reality.  It comes in over time, dripping in like raindrops on carved rock, via those big and little thoughts that are constantly moving across our minds like clouds.  We are free to accept or dismiss any one of them.  Except for when we've become chained.  Most times we are chained before we are old enough to know that we are.  And then we move into our lives feeling beholden to accept certain thoughts every time they come, though they torment us.  They have become like the monster Snow White must turn and fight off deep in the forest.

Those hardest-to-dismiss thoughts become deeply carved ruts in the road of our mind, where they harden into beliefs.  Our little carts fall into them and get jammed every time.  We've driven down these roads countless times before.  Sometimes, perversely, we even like to drive down them precisely because they are painful, and we want to punish ourselves for not being what we expect ourselves to be.  The ruts have become part of our story that we tell ourselves about ourselves.

Sometimes we find ourselves down the rutted roads not out of self-punishment but simply because we've driven down them so many times that it has become second nature.  Just like when we drive well-worn routes and then realise at the end of them that we have no conscious recollection of actually driving here.  Finding ourselves once again in these spaces can make us feel as helpless as a newborn, swamped by despair at how to change what feels unchangeable, that which we can barely see.  The despair comes out of spaces of frustration where we don't know what to do, how to change, how to stop, how to start, where parts of us are still weeping, and that need reconciling, healing, hearing, patting, soothing.  What we need is encouragement that we can turn off the rutted highway and forge a new road where there isn't yet one.

Surely it's the hardest work we do in our lives, forging new paths, though the benefits are amazing and the work is honourable.  But how do you get to where you want to go when you have never been there before?  How do you know what you need to carry with you that is going to help you get there?  Sometimes our dreams tell us, sometimes what comes off the end of the pencil as we doodle tell us.  Fairy tales tell us.  Images that come from a disparity of sources tell us (for me lately it's ravens).  It's a very foggy guessing that feels quite unreliable.  But we just start where we suspect we need to start, suspecting that to carve out this path maybe we are going to need a machete, and a hoe, and a ... what the hell?  What has this bloody raven got to do with anything?  And you shrug and start hacking away, and oftentimes you find, like a present some deeper part of you has wrapped up for yourself, answers and deeper understanding further along the path.  For me, I am thinking at the beginning of yet another path that getting to where I want to go is possibly going to involve some of this tool, and some of this tool. 

The hardest thoughts of all to diminish and dismiss are the ones that are tied to unconscious beliefs.  You know, those things that in the commonplace world of logic you know you don't want to believe, and in a sense you don't.  But in another deeper sense you do, which is why they keep appearing all the time.  Oftentimes they appear disguised as irritations we feel about others, things we are projecting onto them that are really what is hounding us on the inside.

Chances are those thoughts and neuroses are hooking their tails around something that lives in that shadowy realm of the unconscious, where all those dreams and images live, where we are like enormous icebergs and the unconscious is the part that is submerged.  Where we know not what we do - or if we do, we know not why we do.  Not clearly enough to see a clear path.

I've become pretty enamoured with sitting in the middle of the road until I see where I need to begin carving a new path.  One that leads to I barely know what.  But other parts of me know very well where those paths lead.  Being prepared to walk them is part of the conscious mind's work.  Believing that there is something magical at the end of those paths becomes easier now I've walked some of them before.  I get to see the trees light up in my own forest.  I get to meet characters that I have not known before me, who wish to help me when I return to the topside world.  How beautiful it is.

Believing I shall carve a path when it relates to the biggest monster in my arsenal is much harder.  And yet, all those other paths I have carved are related to this same monster.  It seems that he needs to be beaten by carving many paths, not just one.  And carving out the new path does not really get any easier, it just gets more hopeful that there may possibly be a resolution.

But still, all I can do is walk the path.  And keep my eyes open for the surprises.

A Bum's Dream

I have this dream.  It's a bum's dream.  I read online about a man in Utah in the States who lives in a cave with no money.  Something in me soars at the idea.

Of course it's a utopian dream that the ground which we walk upon and which sustains us could be free, not fenced off into small commodities that people shore up into their bank accounts.

I know that will never happen.  And anyway, the songlines were broken up.  How else would a people live on this land when the songlines were broken up?  But nevertheless, dreaming is still free.

Living in a cave would be a crazy, wild and whacky thing to do, as far removed from my present reality as the thought of not having to pay a thousand bucks' rent a month, of having to do jobs I despise, of being paid to do things I like.  But everything changes, and strange things are realities.  Indeed, one of my best friends lived in a cave in Spain for eight months, hardly spending a cent, doing yoga in the sunrise.

I wonder if you lived in a cave in Buchan, or the Grampians, how long it would take for the authorities weed you out and move you on.  Back in the thirties in the Great Depression, itinerants set up camp in the land at the end of Dudley Street and along the Moonee Ponds Creek, over 60 humpies.  They flew under the radar until World War II because this area was considered a wasteland of sorts,  under nobody's jurisdiction.

What a grace the wastelands are.

The authorities do not like people to clutter up the landscape in this way today.  It gets in the way of tourism.  Cluttering up the landscape with your need is an ill-considered spectacle when there are housing estates that contain like-minded blocks with the same coloured roof tiles, their doors shut tight against each other.

I worked for several years in the CBD of Melbourne, transcribing court cases acted in by lawyers and presided over by strangely attired judges.  There were so many statutes and rules and sections of Acts to follow, handed down over the years, composed into tomes, that the situation right before them needed to conform into.  The most interesting conversations I had on the streets of Melbourne at that time were with a homeless woman with a penchant for philosophising who the cops harassed regularly for cluttering up the outsides of Flagstaff Station.  We sat on the ground together and ruminated on the nature of stuff.  She had irregular dreads, irregular teeth, an irregular psychology that kept her out there.  God, I loved my conversations with her.

She discovered, slowly, she was an artist in her preceding years living in the city.  She sold her art, beautiful, complex geometric patterns on black paper, drawn with gold or silver gel pen, drawn almost in a trance, soothing and smoothing out her soul somehow.

I have an overactive nervous system.  I have gone from one acronym to another, from CFS - chronic fatigue syndrome - to HSP - highly sensitive person.  It's just a label, something for me to discard on a deeper level, something helpful in other ways to understand this body I inhabit.  On a frazzled day, a visit to the shopping centre can send me almost spare, needing a good meditation session and a yoga session to boot, to recover me from the fluorescent lights, the plastic shit, the wafting anxiety of the people walking past to buy plastic shit, intent in the lie that they are different from, separate to, the other that they are hating in front of them, getting in their way.

I feel like I take in so much some days that it thumps my heart, floods my adrenals.  Too much.  I see too much, it revs up the circuitry.  Like a 5/4 rhythm composed upon a jangle of nerves.

That's how it is some days.  I think that's why the cave looks so good sometimes.  Less need for working as long, space to think, to ponder, to piece together, no rent.  Just as long as I had access to a shower, so the library would let me in to use their internet connection :)

The supermarket washing powder aisle was one traversed with bated breath when I was living in the previous acronym, CFS.  What they put in that shit I do not know, but the smell rammed itself in through my eyeballs and fuzzed up into my head.  No one is so dirty that they need to get that clean.  

You know, regardless of whether you see it as a real story or a myth, there is a lot you can glean from the Adam and Eve breakaway story.  About the fall into the false self, the egoic, fearful nature, and what men and women have a tendency to do in that sort of space.

(Much as I hate generalisations, I'm splitting the world into penises and vaginas in this post).

I had an interesting conversation with Dena on the weekend about the penchant women have to look to relationships - as seen most explosively in those with men - to make them whole instead of looking inside to the Self to, as she so delightfully put it, the place "where-God-and-you intersect".  I so like that, it has so stayed with me since that conversation, bubbling and resonating.  Pointing to that strange propensity within myself.  I do not know how much of what I am learning I can translate up from out of my gut into these little squiggles that make up words.  So much of it is not-yet, so much is untranslatable.

While I was meditating the other day, I saw, suddenly and sharply, a mass of some sort, perhaps a rock, that had a split deep into its middle.  And the light, a golden, deep light, burst forth and shone down into that crack, filling it up.  This is the way my Self talks to me.  I can't ever quite know if it is God or me talking.  They're too close to split.

These roots to go sideways and fall into a man run so oooh deep.  And you know, I used to think that this propensity in me was so strong simply because of my past history.  That my ability to fall quickly and hard was because of the things that lacked in my growing-up years.  But now I'm not so sure.

Us chicks, we get the deep-down intuitive, moonish, gutlevel stuff that most likely scares the shit out of you blokes because it scares the shit out of us as well.  And we've been trained to disregard it too by a culture that too often functions in the male elements to the detriment of the female.  That needs those female elements to make up the whole.  But they're easy to ignore.  They're often not translatable.  And a part of us women want to disregard it sometimes, because it's scary and its deep, because we're wounded, because it's powerful, because it changes stuff.  But geez, it's where all the good stuff flows :)

(Edit:  Of course I am not meaning to imply that men also do not have the capacity to gutfeel and intuit.  Because of course they do. And part of the higgledy piggledy imbalanced culture too is that men are not taught as well as they could be to value their female side.  And conversely, women to value their male.  If you can split these things.  I am making broad brush strokes here, but bear with me :)

It joys me to see some women I know, both online and in real life, regaining that stuff.  It heartens me when they speak that stuff into my life.  It's like a torrent sometimes, those trickles of words.

The propensity feels weird.  It feels like a dreamscape.  It feels lke something that's birthed in you without your consent.  It flips you sideways instead of stands you strong, grounded.  It gives your power away without you even realising you're doing it.

But of course, the beauty, and the terror, is in the discovery - so often the discovery - that it is not an it, it is a you.  And with that return to reality comes the pain and yet the headrush that while you may be finding yourself in a cage, it is of your own making.  And you have the power to dismantle it.

Here's to smashing those bastards down :)

 Pic:  Place of Healing by Mara earth light

The Dance of Body and Mind

I'm telling ya, there is something to this chakra business. Not of course that it could be scientifically proven or deduced, in the way that we often expect truth to be available to us. Some describe it by saying that chakras exist on the spiritual plane of our bodies. I wouldn't know. I'm not all that interested in being able to scientifically test whether these chakras exist so as to prove them to other people and validate my own experiences. All I know is that when I meditate upon these balls of energy in my body, I begin to inhabit my own body again. It is sometimes distressing to realise how much of my life has been spent removed from my own body, in a sense. I have intellectualised, or fantasised, when I could have been dancing too.

It is a funny thing, but I never really felt like I could dance. All clunkiness, you know? I didn't understand how other people could do it. And so in my late teens and early twenties, when my friends and I were regularly getting together on a weekend and drinking and dancing at the pub, I would sit out on the sidelines. I felt too unbalanced to dance.

The whole idea of the chakras is that loosely there are three that are related to your body, three related more to the mind and the spirit, and the one in the middle, the heart chakra, that binds them all. It is a nice thought, isn't it? It is also interesting to note that, regardless of whether these things actually 'exist' or not, I consistently notice that those chakras related to mind and spirit are very strong in me - I have a strongly developed sixth sense - and the ones that are related to my body are often undefined and difficult for me to tap into unless I work to strengthen them. This is certainly my weakness. It is becoming so apparent to me I wonder how it is that I could have missed it for so long. But then, it always feels like that, doesn't it? We see what we see and wonder how it was that we couldn't.

Last night I did some chakra meditation, and I could feel the effects of this uncomfortable period I have been going through in the last couple of months. All of a sudden I have felt back at the beginning again, before I started all of this creative and bodily exploration. Almost without realising it, I have become way more ungrounded and fearful, feeling a certain disconnection from myself. Thing is, I spent so many years feeling that sort of disconnection that I suppose in times of stress I slot back into it, unless I am aware. I suppose that it is no coincidence that this period of unsafety of the past few months has dislocated me out of my own body.

It is no coincidence that most people I know seem dislocated from their own bodies. It's a product of living in a Western society. We lose our heart because we lose our feet, and so we lose our heads. I can only pray that the Body does not forget what it is joined to. Sometimes I think we are living in the converse of the Renaissance. At that time, people were supremely confident about the ability of humans to rise up to greatness. There was a flourishing of creativity in that period, of discovery, of realising how much people had been held back in the past. Where is our vision, these days? Where is the vision of the Body? Oh, I see smidgeons of it here and there. I see it is returning. I see that one of the greatest things we seem to be grasping hold of is the untenableness of grasping hold of anything else except God. Perhaps this is all we need.

Of course, that idea that we can do nothing of ourselves, that we are the branches - well, it doesn't sit well, does it? I think it's something we all need to learn for ourselves, what that looks like, feels like, plays out in reality. We think that acknowledging that we are just the branches is taking something away from us, making us smaller. I suppose much of life involves God showing us what it looks like when the focus is instead not on what we lose but in what we gain. Life giving water instead of broken cisterns of our own hewing. This takes so long for us to learn, does it not, this overcoming the horror that we are not the Great Originators? But over that hump is the vista that we don't end up losing anything at all that is not worth chucking in the first place, and we gain everything we could desire. This is our giant collective blind spot.

The Body has sat outside of itself too much in the past. It has allowed itself to be violated by the culture. It has sat outside of itself so much that I think it is just beginning to get in touch with the levels of its own self-hatred. This is scary work. You need to be safely connected to the heart to begin to acknowledge and recognise the disconnection. Perhaps this is where we are at? I don't know.

I am seriously tempted to start up some yoga again. The lovely discovery of yoga was that it was like a form of dancing to me that I could do. How wonderful to discover that I could do these movements, these postures, with something like grace. And afterwards, the most wonderful thing of all, the settling of my fears and insecurities in some strange way. It was like tapping into my body, actually moving in it, twisting it (sometimes into such forms I never would have thought I could twist it into) settled and calmed the fears. In writing this post I am understanding over again how it is that I don't need to have all of my fears removed, as if they are a cancer within my body that I must have surgically extracted. It is enough instead to be held, and have them quelled.

I have had a deep loathing of my own body for many years. It is way too hairy, lumpy, wobbly. I believe I have still not quite come to terms with it. I also believe this is like a manifestation of some things I have going on inside of me. I am not willing to share my body with anybody else until I have come to some sort of healing, to some extent. Doing yoga, I felt that I was entering into my own body in a way that made me realise how hollow I often felt within it, how not at home I was within my own body. Like us. We're often not at home in our own Body either.

But we're becoming more so, I believe we are. I have no evidence to back up that claim except what I feel in my own heart. Do you feel that too? I think it is about acceptance, of ourselves with all of our hairiness, lumps and wobbly bits. But even more than that, it is something overarching that we need to realise. I think it has something to do with vision, with seeing, more than it is to do with getting rid of all of our many and horrible sins. I think that is a byproduct of the seeing way more than anything else. I don't quite know what it all looks like yet. I know that it is the same sort of vision and scale removal and grabbing hold of something that is not from ourselves that enabled those first century Christians to chuck all they had in common with each other. We haven't experienced anything like that yet, not really. I think maybe we've all had glimpses of it. We haven't even begun to dance yet. I don't think we believe yet that we are able to. I think maybe we are just starting to hear the music.

What's in a name?

Me 1 The cold 0.

A few interesting things have happened since I have been doing this evil chakra balancing act. Apart from it feeling quite lovely and energising and centering, I really think it has contributed toward helping me keep this cold at bay. I know that sounds ridiculous, but so does phlegm. Bear with me.

The root chakra, located around about the perineum (aherm), is the grounding chakra, the one which connects you to the earth, enables you to feel at home in your own body, to overcome a dislike of your own body, and proneness to illness. If this is all some kind of placebo, then bring it on. If I am simply using the power of my mind to get rid of a cold, then so be it. This is just about the most encouraging thing I could experience coming into Winter. I feel a calm and a groundedness that I haven't felt for many Winters, being either all CFSey and nearly karking it from the temperature changes, or recovering my health but catching every great godamn thing floating around in this or neighbouring suburbs. Last year, with the great tracheitis curse, I spent half of Spring pulling a new muscle every day for a period of several weeks and wetting my pants from coughing. If I can avoid that kind of infection, leave alone colds and flus, I would gladly flagellate myself naked in Bourke Street for the privilege.

When I started doing this chakra balancing act, I could barely feel my base chakra at all. Now, it is getting stronger. And so am I. My art therapist gave me some literature on the chakras when last there. I was interested to read that the two chakras that have been weakest in me, the base and the solar plexus chakra, have certain foods linked to them to help strengthen them, and I have inadvertently begun eating some of those foods without knowing the linkage (licorice and sunflower seeds). Cool and mystical and spooky spooky spooky.

Perhaps I am heading over to the dark side. Perhaps I am just in touch with my body's own bioelectricity. Seems much safer calling it that than prana. One sounds - well, all Western and rational and scientific and incorporable into the body of medicine and the Body of Christ. The other sounds all Indian and mystical and just plain old demonic. Hallelujah for Western science to make everything safe for us ;)

Hallelujah for different cultures learning how to tune into the body that has been fearfully and wonderfully made no matter where we're born.

Circular Time

Allow me a bit of self-indulgence this evening. I have returned to 1982 to visit my then-incarnation, the 11 year old Susan, whilst contemplating my creativity and my desire to write, and those people in the past who have unwittingly stifled it. It strikes me clearer tonight just how much Susan 1982 is told, inaudibly but comprehensively, in hundreds of different ways by the people in her household, that she isn't "real" enough to really be there. Does that make sense? And the problem is, Susan 1982's most "real" stuff is the creative stuff, the stuff that needs nurturing if you're going to plumb its depths. So Susan 1982 hasn't learned to trust what is inside her, nor her ability to bear its expression, nor the process that is involved in learning to bear that expression. I feel very sad for Susan 1982. To plumb the depths you need a pretty strong anchor. Susan 1982 has a strong anchor ... it's just that she doesn't recognise it - or Him/Her. Yet.

So even though Susan 1982 believes somewhere deep in her core that she isn't "real" enough to meaningfully take up space, paradoxically she also doesn't believe that in her core. It's the imprint of the Him/Her she doesn't know what to name yet. Life suggests itself to her that she is real, Him/Her Unnamed whispers it on the verge of sleep, and Susan ponders these things in her heart. So Susan 1982 believes she isn't "real" but she also believes that she is. For now, Susan must sit with paradox. Those in her household make her feel small. They don't mean to; they feel small themselves. But somewhere inside, Susan feels big. She just needs to meet the One that brings it all alive (and in some ways she already has; but he is patient and the greater meeting is to come. Susan 1982 isn't as into paradox as Sue 2007 is, so I'm not quite sure how much of it she understands. But she will. Paradox is a taste for a more mature palette).

So despite Susan feeling "not real", she's there, totally filling up the casing of her body to its outer edges. Despite the behaviour in the ensuing teenage years that screams from the rooftops that she is too fucking numb to cope with it all - something is holding Susan together. Despite the not real, there's no containing her. There is life in Susan 1982 no matter how suspiciously you look at her, how much you ignore her, how you don't show her affection, or show it inappropriately. Those things hurt and twist Susan but the life remains. Her spirit spills from the edges of her own body even while she feels dead. This spirit is in the other family members too, despite their attempts to quench it and kill it. Even if they do manage to kill it entirely ... it's still not dead. It's just people who are dead. But even when your body lies stiff in the ground, or walks deadly on the earth, the life is still there waiting for you to acknowledge it on your next breath in, or your last breath out, or the breath beyond the breathing. Nothing is wasted, not even ourselves.

Sue 2007 tries not to be too precious about her past hurts, recognising that she lives in a world full of people who are really generally doing the best that they can do, but she can't help thinking - could this household not see how sensitive Susan 1982 was, or did her loudness fool even them, her family members, the ones who should see past the masks and into the cracks? Encouragement - it must have come, but the words have not stayed. How stretchy words of encouragement and affirmation are. They stretch right across years and decades and down into your gut and your heart. If the words of encouragement had been spoken they would have fallen on a desert beginning to parch at the edges even at the same time as seeds were being planted by an unseen hand which I would not begin even to name for another decade. But who was planting seeds in the other family members, too, even if 25 years later you still can't see them.

Regrets are pointless enterprises but Sue 2007 can't help wishing that Susan 1982 knew that the void she was too scared to plumb was love. Then she would have known that she could jump in without drowning. But no matter. It's never too late. Sue 2007 can plumb them now because she has met Love. We have danced together unseen while the family members held themselves captive. The music is Love, and it sings out into the desert. Even theirs.

One day I will watch them dance, too.

The Church on the Streets

"What did Paul and the apostles believe was their work? It surely was not to bring churches into being. They believed that their business was to bring Christ into every place. Will you tell me where in the New Testament you have any apostle arriving anywhere saying, 'Now, we have come to form a church. The Lord has sent us to this place in order that we may form a church.' Well, you will spend a lot of time trying to find anythign like that in the New Testament. It is not there. There are lots of other things that are not there, which we think are there. Things we have come to teach as being there, and they are not there at all. That is not there; you get back to the Gospel. "And Jesus sent forth His apostles two by two." And it says, "He sent them into every place, where He Himself would go." He has never changed that principle. He does not send us to form churches or set up Christianity. He sends us before His Face to bring HImself there. That does not mean that churches have no meaning. But that brings us right to the point. What are churches? They are just people gathered into Christ where He Himself is. The supreme thing is this eternal thought of God, the Presence of the Lord. The Presence of the Lord, that is the purpose of anything that is called the church. And that is the only purpose."

T Austin-Sparks, That They May All Be One, Even As We Are One

Grace

"Grace rarely makes sense to those looking in from the outside" (The Shack).






I think this is why it's an imperative to learn to not fear (hu)man so much because no one else really understands where God is leading us except us and God. Thoughts?

Flexibility & Living With Not Knowing

No humourous morning posts here for me today. For one, I'm too tired. Not enough sleep, awakened early because it's already heating up too much to sleep. It's gonna be a 37 degree stinker here and there's that crap northerly wind thang starting to go down which creates hysteria in children and madness in adults. Time to stay inside and crank up the aircon - and even that has tinges of environmental/fiscal guilt about it, unfortunately. Like a pensioner, I have been planning my airconditioner consumption this summer, considering keeping costs down by venturing out to public places in the daytime on really hot days to save the bill at home, hehe. My granny would be so proud :) But 37 degrees - all the rules go out the window on such a day.

I have just received confirmation from Abebooks that both my books are on their way. Yippee. Like the junkie who knows that someone is coming over with their next fix, the world seems a friendlier place when I know two of my books are winging their way across the ocean. One is another Richard Rohr book, a man whose breadth and length of vision I am swimming in and drinking in, this one about the humanity of Jesus, called Near Occasions of Grace. I really look forward to reading what he has to say. "Earthy spirituality," someone called it in a review, which sounds pretty damn edible to me.

Thing is, if I had thought 7 or 8 years ago that I was going to be raving about stuff written by a Franciscan priest, I think I would have found it quite difficult to believe. I had quite a loathing for Catholicism back then. It was my favourite ranting stop. Particularly, it was to do with the whole veneration of Mary thing - it seemed so fundamental that this whole deal was taking something that just plainly wasn't there in the Bible and making something out of it to suit people's needs. These days, I still don't think the whole Mary thing is any closer to being reality, but I can definitely see how a refusal to acknowledge the female side of God in the Church as a whole has resulted in something like that happening to balance the scales. But I digress ... again.

So yeah. It's amazing where the journey leads. Sometimes it seems to almost double back on itself. I think that if we haven't changed our minds totally on some things over, say, a 10 year period then there's probably something wrong and we're not wading out deep enough. I have found the willingness to sit in not knowing - a difficult thing for Westerners - yields some pretty amazing goodies if we can stand the tension. It's the death Jesus talked of dying. The death to our own knowing what the hell is going on.

In times past of not-knowing, my well-meaning AOG attending Kenneth Copeland loving next-door neighbours said to me on more than one occasion, "Well, God is not the author of confusion," with the inference that because I was feeling confused about something, therefore I have dropped off that oh-so-narrow path. Bah to that. Where's the fun and the discombobulation in that? Where's the end growth? What kind of shallow roots that sort of journey provides. If we really are in some sort of relationship with God, then surely it stands to reason that we will be (often) disorientated if he is leading us in new directions? I can't understand how a religious system could get so damn intellectual about everything that it removes all the mystery and the not-knowing, an element of the experience so eloquently set out in the OT.

Well, it's been fun, blogosphere, but I need a break from this place today. I find that when I spend too much time on the net, and particular in the land of blogging, as fun as it is, it gets a bit disconcerting and disorienting and paranoia-inspiring. Just seems to be the nature of dealing in such a flat medium. This internet thing is way cool and way weird but it needs to be managed a bit better than I have been managing it this weekend :) Time to get out into 3D and get a bit more balance going today.

Holy Foolity (by request from Kent)

The right-wing, conservative, law-abiding, goody-two-shoes political Christian Americans have hogged the limelight for w-a-a-y too long (and with too much world carnage). It's time for a rehaul of what it means to be Christian. Time to go a bit loony tunes loopy for God. Time to bring back Holy Foolity. Time to become homeless, to speak in riddles, to answer questions with questions (very Jewish, very cool). Time to befuddle the Empire and make them wonder, "Just what is it those Christians are smoking?" (From my corner, the answer is, well, nothing. So :P).

We have got it wrong, in our buying into the culture. Trying to look like everyone else with a bit of Jesus thrown in may have increased visits to Kent's hairdressing salon, but it's done nothing for the cause of Christ.

Time, methinks, for the crazy ones of the Body to step out and begin doing crazy things in the name of God. Some ascetics in the past have chosen to sit on the tops of giant poles (I think this just proves that marijuana smoking was going on even back then). Others have chosen to live in caves, to leave their underwear lying in weird places until it decomposes and then use it as a visual to show the Jews how rotten their faith was*. It's this kind of thing which will bring Jesus back into the spotlight, return a bit of cred to the Body, prove points, and get good YouTube viewings, all at the one time.

And we get to run around naked, too, which should be interesting (I think I'll check out on this one, but it shall be interesting to watch everybody else).

Holy Foolity. It's the new black.

For starters, see:
http://stnicholas-billings.org/Saints/HolyFools/holyfools.htm.

* Edit: did you know that that verse in Isaiah (?) where God says "your righteousness is like filthy rags", what it actually says is "your righteousness is like used menstrual cloths". Which is rather - well, shall we say, in-your-face? God really does know how to get his point across, doesn't he. He doesn't mince nothin'.

Suffering

I think I am turning into a crazy mystical woman :) The day draws ever nearer when cats shall begin to appeal to me and I collect 10 of them. Then I shall stop washing, remove myself from society and start eating only lentils.

My intentions for today are not coming to pass. I feel unnerved, as if from some alternate universe I'm trying to get my own attention. I can't hear what the alternate me is saying, but it's distracting me from the day I planned, a day of soup making, reading for my literature class, housework etc.

There are all of these things I want to talk about, spiritual things that I feel I'm beginning to learn, but which are untranslatable, falling down as they do in the gulf between my spirit and my mouth. I think I need to write some fiction before I go a bit loopy(er).

I wanted to talk about suffering. Having just come out of a two-month long bout of it, I feel like something has shifted. But again, it's indefinable, spiritual and untranslatable. I am getting used to this feeling. It's like every time I go through a furnacelike experience, something gets drossed away. And when I come out the other end, no matter how unbearable it was at the time, I whisper in my spirit that I welcome the next time; I consent to doing it again. It's like a spiritual birthing process. But I don't know what the baby is.

Well, it's me, isn't it. There is purpose in everything. All of this falling to the ground, dying. It effects. It unsmudges a portion of the glass.

Can someone explain to me what this verse means from Colossians: "I am glad when I suffer for you in my body, for I am completing what remains of Christ's sufferings for his body, the church."

"What remains of Christ's sufferings"? Huh?

Control, Well It's Slipping Right Through My Hands (Thank God)

Control. I've been pondering it a lot recently. I've always prided myself on being the kind of person who is aware of and unwilling to control other people, to give them the freedom that I so value in my own journey, to learn their own lessons without me giving them advice, so that the lessons become their own journey, not something someone has imposed from without where they cannot gain the benefit from what they've learnt. Institutional and cultural control is something that I have always been aware of and seen the inherent dangers in. People must have the freedom to be able to make their own way without undue control from outside. The human tendency to control others must be guarded against vigilantly because it springs up so readily that it's scary. So when I get a glimpse of how I do succumb at times to control mode ... well, it feels funny. It's irritating to see the shadow side of your apparent strengths. Just when I thought I was heading closer to being some kind of breezy Zen master, it's a rather disconcerting kick in the guts when I see how unattractive and untrusting of God I still am when I'm really afeared.

(I remember someone saying once that your biggest downfall is not in your weaknesses, but in your strong suit, which is kinda an interesting thing to ponder. But anyway, I digress. Controlling others is never going to be my biggest downfall. It's just what I'm dealing with right now.)

These ruminations have come out of a two-month-long bout of illness, preceded by a new friendship that I think in hindsight I handled badly and which has apparently ended badly, preceded by a marriage breakup, so it's not like that's anything resembling general real life. But it's definitely a rubber hitting the road-type scenario - the waters rise, and then you get to see some stuff in yourself which you thought maybe had gone, stuff that you desperately wish would go. Fears that may get to lie dormant for most of the time, but they're still there, informing my view.

Control. It's probably what I loathe most about Christian culture. For me it really shows how small someone's view of God is. And controlling Christian environments demonstrate like nothing else that we don't believe that God can work without us manipulating him like some giant cosmic puppet, or without us constructing elaborate structures to enable him to do his stuff.I can understand control and will-to-power in the grab-it-for-myself world, but surely that area should be very different within the bounds of Christianity. But alas, not. We are supposedly about a God of love - but all too often, our love descends to control. Christian communities are meant to resemble families. But I guess the scariest people are those that we love. They are the ones that hurt us the most.

God is able to reach anyone however he chooses - and quicker and better and more beautifully without me sticking my stupid head in and stuffing it all up. St Francis' dictum to "preach the gospel at all times; if necessary use words" should be branded on the forehead of everybody who claims the status of a Christian ;)

God needs us way less than we think he does. Way less than I used to believe that he did. I cannot subscribe anymore to the maxim, "God can't if you won't". Believing otherwise doesn't negate our ability to do stuff for God; it doesn't send us to the couch to be potatoes (that would be something else that does that ... perhaps even a God-inspired season of life, he being able to carry on just fine without us, thanks). It just puts it all in the perspective with which we can walk in a life alongside God and do stuff for him on the way if, as Jesus said, his yoke is light.

So much amazing stuff happens when I relinquish control, loosen my fisted grip on things that scare and discombobulate me, and I get to see the texture of my life so much better. I am realising lately that in certain aspects of my life, the more broken, darkened parts, it takes less than what I originally thought to get me scurrying back into the confining jail of not wanting to budge unless I can see the outcome. Like a cockroach. Those fears limit my horizons. And after all, it's the horizons that get my heart beating faster.

Ah, the human ability to be able to see further than we can travel at any given point. It's a frustrating one, to be sure, but I guess it's all about how you look at it. If I take my ego out of the picture, glimpses of yet-unreached horizons become an opportunity to prepare myself better for what is to come, so that when the horizon becomes my reality I have conditioned the soles of my feet a little bit better to be able to walk in it.