Whoever. Whatever

On my town’s main street are three public toilets. They’re set back about 2.5 metres from the footpath, with a large square piece of concrete with sculptural taps on top providing a vague buffer between the sounds of you urinating and the good people of Belgrave going about their business. Whenever I use these toilets I always feel like I’m weeing on the street.

See? They’re a bit odd, don’t you reckon? To the left of them, you’ve got the Petal and Pot, a lovely-smelling cafe which also sells flowers. To the right you’ve got a Sushi Express that makes a nice don buri. In the middle you’ve got a faint waft of wee.

But I was busting this day, so I used them. As I tinkled my ablutions I noticed some graffiti on the otherwise clean door of the stall.

It said, What you are seeking after is seeking after you — Rumi.

Beautiful.

But then, underneath, someone had struck through the What and written Who and the Rumi and written God.

I pondered this, then and in the days following my public urination. I was a little peeved. Not so much because the concept of god infuriates me (it doesn’t — as long as they’re the good version worthy of god status) but because this vandalising of someone’s graffiti is ultimately pedantic and also a little … well, violent. Now, I’m the Princess-and-the-Pea-pre-menopausal version of hypersensitive, so I don’t know if it would seem violent to others. But to me, it felt like right there in front of me was the reason for wars the world over. It felt like the whatever Rumi was pointing to — those experiences of exquisite flow, when it’s like the world speaks back to us, those events of synchronicity that make us stop and wonder how alive this universe actually is and indeed whether someone Other than ourselves is speaking back to us — had been with a few slashes squashed down into tediousness, into someone’s dogma, their own concept of a being who, if they exist, is not able to be seen or proven, the accounts of who vary somewhat the world over.

A perfectly lovely Rumi quote, which had wafted a slight breeze of freedom through a public dunny stall, had been killed, right there on the wall, in the same way a joke loses humour once you deconstruct it, or a butterfly its life once you impale it with a spike.

I felt like Rumi had sniffed the quantum field, where we are all included, and then someone with an urge to poo and a texta came along and turned it into the dull pulpit of a dry and dusty minister for whom God is not so much an experience as a set of dogmas to line up like toy soldiers in the correct order and only then will the far door open and the light shine in.

That’s what I felt — but really, how would I know what that second person’s conceptions were? To presume that just because they were annoyingly zealous with an irritating habit of correcting perceived wrongs that they therefore must have a really crappy, fundamentalist view of a god’s composition is presumptive. They could have quite as easily been driven by a beautiful urge to try (and fail) to point more clearly towards what they experienced as some sort of transformation. Trying to resonate how, when they had asked whether life has any point to it there came, days or decades later, an out-of-the-blue surprise answer somehow, like music set to starlight. Maybe their experience was incredibly intimate, a pervasive feeling of recognition — that they were looking at a Someone who was looking back at them. That it was somehow personal.

I could understand then that to have this someone referred to as a “what” could be insulting, could cheapen it somehow. It would be like being in love and someone saying that your lover is no different to any other person. Even though you know on the mundane level they’re right, you are not living in the mundane. Your lover is the only one for you, the only one you are in love with and ever want to be in love with, ever again. The exclusivity that comes with being in love would make you want to bop that person on the nose or pity them their Muggleness. It would be like saying to someone who flies in wonderment because the one they love also loves them back that what they are feeling is just a bunch of biology, a set of chemical reactions that occur every day and that you would do just as well being in love with that person over there. You would surmise from that statement that if the speaker had ever been in love, that they had surely forgotten the experience by now.

Their words would be as intrusive as, say, crossing out someone’s entirely fine Rumi quote to impose your particular worldview. It would be like saying, when someone has been dumped, that there are plenty more fish in the sea. I don’t have any quibbles with people framing the experience of that immeasurable space as God. For all we know, She could well be. Or perhaps what so many of us experience so profoundly is something less … personal ~ the quantum field, the morphic field, the cosmic consciousness, the Us, the Whatever.

Whatever or Whoever it is, it’s mysterious and it’s beautiful. Rumi was onto that. It’s why he resonates. It’s why you never need to mess with someone else’s words which are trying to pin down the unpinnable, that which can only be experienced. To do so is to piss into the wind.

In the Midst of Summer I Am Dead

The Sinusitis Blues.

Today, it is almost-midsummer and

I feel as dry as a leaf at the end of autumn and

As dead as the midst of winter and

As fragile as a spring shoot.

Today, I feel like I have lost myself again.  I lose myself every day and then find myself again.  Reborn every day.  Today, I feel the monster reaching out his claw from the green murk to clutch my ankle.

I look back on things that I have written in previous years and they sparkle in a way that I feel like I have lost, at least for the moment.  Today, I am beaten down.  Perhaps it's just simply the fact that I am in the midst of yet another sinus-related thing, and I feel bad because I feel useless.  I feel like I want to be a hermit and never go anywhere and yet I feel guilty about that too.  I do not feel like I will be able to sparkle anymore.  But then I look at something I wrote two weeks ago and there it is again, the sparkle.  And tomorrow or the day after or the week or month after I will be back in that space again, actually walking around in it, all three dimensional.

Time is becoming stranger to me as I go on.  And I know that it is a false conception to think I sparkled in previous years more than I do now because I wasn't sparkling then, any more than I am sparkling now.  It's just the benefit of hindsight, the safety that comes from the past that is sealed, combined with reading the things that come from the writing space where I feel more myself and safer than the me who walks around bumbling.

Some days, I feel so exposed, like other people are tsunamis and I am a baby beech.  Some days, I feel like the stuff that is in me, the good and sweet and lovely, is not for any of you to see because how could I trust anyone with that?

I know what this is.  This is trauma.  This is limbic and wordless.

I have gained some traction with this space, believe it or not.  I will tell you about it sometime soon. 

But today, I feel so beaten down by the world, by everything, by the spaces that I love and which for today at least are lost.  I have lost the Godspace.  Which probably means it's closer than ever before.  Sometimes when you feel like you are losing something, what is actually happening is that you are gaining something new.  Transmutation.  My word for the year.  Sometimes the monster swims up from the depths into the space where you can see him.  He's been there all along, under the conscious sea.  But when he comes up, though he is you and he has lived within you perhaps for your whole life, you recoil from him in horror.

But perhaps he is a monster only by dint of him being the Other within your own body.  You react the way all humans react when they are scared and something other than them is facing them:  you feel an antipathy, a horror.  Sometimes the horror is in direct correlation to the things that are stored without your knowing in the undersea of your own self.  And then someone out there pops up and presses buttons you don't even know you have and would be horrified to know that you did.

We are a deeper sea than we like to think.

But it's not all clunking chains and dead carcasses and hairy monsters down there.  There are the most beautiful schools of fish, made of gossamer.  There are laboratories of alchemy down there, sealed from the water and hidden from sight.  The You that you don't know very well is cooking up things and while S/he does, it feels like it is some sort of evil.  It feels like you are dying.  But sometimes hairy monsters do not stay hairy monsters forever.  That's why stories exist about frogs and princes. 

I feel today like I am dying.  But everyone who swims in these waters knows, that's not the end of the story.

And yet even so, I feel like help!, like I have lost myself again, and that feels very unsafe. Even while I know it's not the whole of the matter or the end of it either.

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

The Uncreated?

Follow my ways and I will lead you
To golden-haired suns,
Logos and music, blameless joys,
Innocent of questions
And beyond answers.
For I, Solitude, am thine own Self:
I, Nothingness, am thy All.
I, Silence, am thy Amen.

~ Thomas Merton

So lovely.

Mujer Saliendo del Agua 
 by Leopoldo Gonzalez

For so long I swam in that Space Merton talks of.  It felt cleansing and purifying and all the other words advertising agencies like to use to describe skin care products.  Issues of ideology or theology aside - I am talking here simply about presence and communing with that, innocent of questions and beyond answers.

But then I started asking this one particular question, and it kept growing and growing until it got so big that it started clouding out that innocence and exploded like an airbag until it felt like there was nothing left.  I started thinking, "What if this 'presence' is something other than Source, the Uncreated?  How do I know that this ... whatever I commune with, that feels like though it's in me is in some ways not-me even though it is not separate from me - how do I know that that thing is not a created being itself?"

It seems such a silly thing, writing it down here, sort of childish.  But regardless, that is the question that I asked, and it has muddied the waters for a lot of years now.  It's perhaps a reflection of my pyroluric tendency towards greater levels of paranoia now I'm dealing with the whole premenopause thang (I can't believe that menopause is still something that is not spoken of, or if it is, it's still considered something that women need to "get over".  But I digress).

De la cintura pa' bajo, de las rodillas pa'rriba by Leon Ricardo

More likely that question I asked - who is this Source I am dealing with? - is a particularly fine question, I don't know.  But it stopped me swimming.

If the God I have been communing with is anything existing independently outside of myself, then that leads to the possibility that it is a created being itself.  And then that means I cannot trust it anymore.  Because a created unknown being is a finite being and from my perspective here, feels far more unknowable than an uncreated being that is infinite.  Even though on another level, the first would be far easier to understand than the second.  But a created being is capable of evil.

I don't know if I am making any sense.  I am open to the idea that there are many other beings in the universe apart from us.  I think that many of our religious texts (for example, the Old Testament) could quite possibly be accounts of encounters with those beings.  It makes total sense when you read them in that way.  And it also explains why the god of the Old Testament seems almost like a split personality.  Maybe s/he is!?

Blessed Are the Poor For They Shall See God
by Kathryn Cook Hernandez

Last night I talked to that "God", because I miss communing with them.  The communing goes on inside of myself, and it's the whole world puffed out on my insides, and it grounds me in a way that I have been missing.  I talked to that "God" in the hope that they are Source. Thinking that the idea that used to frustrate me so much - that of God being an invisible being, unseen, uncreated - is really the only palatable choice.  It is the only way to be able to trust that space that feels like I am most fully myself, that feels like it is a combination of me and the universe.  Conscious consciousness. 

I miss the swim.  It's like swimming in the dark.  It adds an extra 193,000 shades of depth to every colour.  It floods me with innocence.  I communed with that unknown last night and it was like a five-minute delve into bliss and homecoming.  I do not think I can resist going back for another swim, even if I still don't quite trust the origins of the water.

God

*Please see this link for an explanation as to why in this post every time I refer to God what I am really meaning is Godde.  And even though I'm not happy with referring to s/he becuase it is clumsy and just plain ugly, until we invent a third category in the English language that is gender neutral, or gender inclusive, I can't for the life of me work out what else to call ... them/it/her/him.

~

It is very uncool to believe in God these days.  Whenever I hear someone referring to God like I did the other day on the radio, it gives me a bit of a jolt.  We are a secular nation here in Australia and when I attended my second cousin's Scouts meeting the other day and the Akela prayed a prayer at the end, that sort of shocked me too.  Not because the prayer was boring and perfunctory but because a group of six year olds bowing their heads and talking to God barely happens in this country.  It just felt really weird!  And I turned and sort of smirked at my cousin who was standing in the corner and it might have looked as if I was turning to smirk and say, "Wow, what morons.  They're praying."  But it was more the delivery that made me smirk.  I am always sort of touched when people pray out loud.  It is a vulnerability.

But anyway.

I remember a few years ago my cousin telling me that if I stopped believing in God, then things must be really bad because I had such a strong belief that God was just there, and didn't seem to waver off that.  And I know what she means.  For ages I that a sense of that thing that threaded its way through everything like a perfume - the golden thread weaved through all living beings - well, that was God.  It just didn't really seem to make me waver at all because I felt it there, every day.  It strengthened when I meditated, when I did creative things, when I loved.

I still do feel that.  But the last two years - only sometimes.  I have wavered over the past two years in ways I haven't in the previous 16 years simply because it has felt like God has flipped the off switch.  Just ... not there.  That sense of the golden thread is like a golden memory in some ways to me.

And then it comes back, out of the blue, and the world all turns golden.  And then it's gone again.

Maybe it was never really there all the time like I thought.  Maybe it's still here just as much now as it was then, but I'm imagining a golden age.  Memory is bizarre and weird and deceitful and we imagine things were all sorts of ways in the past that they patently just weren't.  Hindsight and frozen history puts a glaze over things, makes them seem clearer than they were at the time.

You know, it's never really been an intellectual exercise for me about whether God is there.  I find reductions of God down into doctrine and dogma to be patently really fucking boring really quickly, and everything gets lost for me then.  All the things that feel like God to me are not reducible.  They just are.  To get caught up in what therefore you need to do or be or behave in order to show that you are following after that God in the particular camp of [insert your particular tribe here and tick box] seems weird and childish to me.  I just don't want to play.

So intellectual exercises about God have never really been the main point.  It's been the experience of God that I've been after.  If God exists, you must be able to feel him/her.  You must be able to interact in some way.  When I believe that God is everywhere, I begin to see God everywhere.  It is as if a fine layer of gold dust descends on everything, and it makes people more lovable somehow.  I notice much easier that spark inside of everybody that makes us all priceless.  This might sound like squibbly bullshit but it's how it has been for me.

And Jesus ... well, I don't know about Jesus any more.  And I'm not talking about the believe-in-the-resurrection-or-you'll-go-to-hell-forever kind of stuff.  That has always seemed like banal nonsense to me from the get-go, ever since I first picked up a bible and started reading it when I was 21 years old and felt something stirring in there somehow.  I still feel it whenever I read the words ascribed to him.  Whatever or whoever he was, he had a fine grasp of the absolute shining pinpoint of it all, the gist, the stuff that humans diligently must work on all the days they breathe so that life on earth is not hell.  I am still hit by the profundity of his words.  I still love him, or the thought of him, whatever he is.

I remember reading something Mother Theresa had written maybe a few years before here death where she said that she'd dried out like an old leaf at the end of autumn in terms of feeling God's presence.  She didn't even know if she believed in God anymore.  I understand that space.  I guess we all do.  Everyone who professes to believe in God must often have doubts or else perhaps what they have is really only intellectual assent to a particular view, rather than any faith at all.

In one sense I don't feel any more separated from God.  In one sense what it feels to me is that I have come from that called God, and one day I shall return to it.  That I am a part of that creation and there can not ultimately be any separation unless it is wished for on our side.  That if there is a hell it is a purging.  That if there is a devil it is in every single one of us and we all come under its fire and influence at certain times in our lives.  And if that devil, then that god too, in every single one of us.  I do think maybe I believe those things, and that maybe they are more than just archetypes (though as real in archetypal form as in literal, and work as such too).  But those are intellectual assents.  What I would like very much is to feel God close the way I did before.  But maybe I have gone from the person of great feeling faith to the person of very little.  Perhaps that is all I need in the end.  Faith the width of a thread.

How about you?  What do you think about God?  What have you experienced of Godde?  Has it changed over the years?  Are you surprised/amazed/loved/disillusioned by/with Godde?  I know there are people who read here who cover the spectrum when it comes to your beliefs.  If you feel comfortable sharing here, whatever your ilk, I would love to hear how it is all looking for you :)

Dreams in the Midst

I turned 40 on Wednesday.  I shared it with the people that I love the most, eating :)  That was lovely.  But I came into my birthday on the back of some physical cleansing I've been doing recently.  A good thing, and necessary for me to regain better health.  But in hindsight, a very unwise thing, to continue on with detoxes when your body is clearly telling you it needs a break, that you are taxing your own system too much.  That your ideas about what you want to get done here do not always fit in with the reality of how slow you must go.

Seems I don't get to have as much wisdom as I would like now at 40 :)  Perhaps the next decade, or perhaps the one after, I will get as much wisdom as I would like ;)  Because really, when it comes to almost everything, the slower the better.  Less is more.  This is why I plan, this Summer, to once again try to immerse myself in the world of test cricket.  Because what could be more delightful than a slow, meandering river of a sport, that allows you to read in the middle of it, to daydream?  Gotta love that.

The detoxes were why I found myself in a cloud of suicidal depression that night, with every inner demon screaming.  Feeling toxic.  A feeling I find hard to describe and which I have felt before when I had CFS and was on a big regimen of antibiotics.  Like a veil, that comes over your eyes, so your perceptions are warped (even more than usual ;)  A fog of confusion, of headaches, of brain fog, of toxicity.  A fog of ammonia, as the things you are cleansing themselves of die off and leave their poison in your bloodstream on their way through.  Cloudy ammonia, indeed.

That night, after distress, a dream:  a disembodied voice dream.  It's said that these types of dreams often occur in times of distress, coming directly from your soul to get your attention.  It said:  "Love comes from God.  You have to let God's love flow through you.  It doesn't originate from you, no matter how much your enormous ego wants it to."

My enormous ego doesn't like that much but the rest of me LOVES it.  Loves the thought, loves the idea, loves that river of flow.  There's a whole lot I don't feel sure about these days when it comes to matters of faith, of whether Jesus even existed at all historically, though I still love him as I used to.  But what hasn't changed though is the feeling and the sense, even if sometimes flimsy, that God is there weaved and wefted through everything, like a breath.  In the midst of it all, the good, the bad, the ugly.  Gotta love that, too.

I Don't Know, and I Don't Care :)

I don't know what or who or if God is anymore.

Conversely,  I feel just as close to God as I ever did.

I don't know what or who or if Jesus is or was anymore.  I don't know if he's just the invention of a bunch of people, if he was an enlightened being of the best sort of kind (the kind that leads the way for others ~ or is supposed to, if he doesn't get hijacked into the ugliest religion that ever did make horrors of people who would be far better off not having fallen into cultural religion).  I don't know if he was the Son of God, rescuing the entirety of humanity from itself in the most beautiful possible way, or demonstrating to the souls of humanity aspects they could never see about themselves without someone so unafraid of death laying their life down.  I don't know if Jesus was one of many, or one of one, or none of one.

Conversely, Jesus is still as dear and wonderful and challenging and scary and inspiring to me as he has always been.  Just without so much crap surrounding him.

I don't know about God.  All I know is that when I was reading something before (Julia Cameron's Walking in This World) and she mentioned God as "he", and I said in response to the God within, "I am SO sick of us talking about you as if you have a dick," and inside I felt like this shapeshifting, gurgling laughter.  And I don't know if that is just me, or if it is God.  It feels as if there is a space within me that feels like the me that is mySelf, the Me of the future and the past and the now all wrapped up together, and this Self is connected intimately with this god and yet is separate.  Joined and yet separate, with no loss of myself and yet myself swallowed up inside the vastness of this ... whatever, this Great Creator.

And all I know is that sometimes when I think about that, or feel it in my body and my soul, the joy is intense and I want it to be so, and I want God to be there, and I want everyone in the world to shut up talking about God, and naming God, so that we can reclaim some of the magic.

And all I know is that last night I crawled into bed, and I was listening to my favourite storyteller at the moment, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, talk on my mp3 player about creativity, about Persephone and Demeter and Hades, and she was lulling me to sleep like a child being told a bedtime story.  And all I know is that how it feels to me is that all of those elements are inside of me, the devil inside, the god inside, so much beauty and wonder and mysterious sexy dark, and destruction, and hot sunny creation, all inside.

All I know is that am sure of less than I was 15 years ago (and shudder when I think of how I once was, which is perhaps how life should always be if we are growing enough).

All I know is that I don't need to know so much anymore.

Insulation

I was watching Grand Designs Revisited last night (oh, how I love thee, Grand Designs :)  There was a man who lived and worked in the forest.  He cared for the trees, resold branches and charcoal.  For the past 10 years he had lived rough, under a tarp, or in a leaky caravan.  And now he was building himself a house in the forest.

This man enlisted the help of many volunteers to craft something simple.  Everything to build it was taken from the forest surrounding.  The A-frame was joisted up by hand and rope, with not one large piece of earthmoving equipment in sight.  It was all very hands-on and quite inspiring to me, in many ways.  (Although that's not to say that he was an architectural technophobe:  the clay to smooth on the inside of his walls was taken from the creek at the bottom of his land by a big Tonka vehicle;  the wood for the frame, the walls, the roof and floors was chainsawed down and the floors, though hammered in by hand, were planed and had the nail holes put into them by a drill so as to prevent splitting).

What emerged after seven or so months was something that closely resembled my dream house.  Totally simple, and very beautiful, the antithesis to a McMansion.

The insulation between the outside walls and the inside plasterwork was barley straw bales and pulped up newspaper and phone books.  Something has been resonating in me ever since about those bales.   It's got me wondering (and maybe even contemplating a visit to the paintbox to see what, if anything, my cave spaces think of this) - what is the best process for a sensitive human soul to fortify their walls?

I want the answers to that to all come at once, and to come for good.  A pill to take once, and everything is fixed.  A McMansion solution.  Move your stuff in after the builders have left the site.  The alternative is frustrating, and yet much more inspiring.  The alternative is walking into the answers as they are required. The second way takes a lifetime, the crafting by hand of walls, of roof, of floorboards, of your own habitation.

The fortifying answers come, over months and years, as I make space, make myself quiet, carve it out.  The next step to take.  Or no step to take at all.  The wisdom of my inner self astounds me.  It goes so deep.  I have discarded so much of Christianity (it seems) that sometimes all is left are some choice life-reverberation words of Jesus (sometimes I think the Bible could simply contain a couple of verses - the kingdom of God is within you, love your enemies - and we have our work cut out for us our entire lives without the need for all the other sideline stuff, all those stupid verses of Paul forbidding women to teach, etc etc.

And yet something tells me that doctrine is like a McMansion.  We want prefab.  But Christianity as doctrine has about as much soul as the two-storey monstrosity I walked past on Duke Street last night.  All straight, cold lines, and little warmth.

I seem to have come upon an inability and antipathy to read anything these days which talks about a male God written by a white male.  It's just where I'm at right now, dealing with the next layer of rage.  But there is little space for me there.  There never has been.  And yet what remains underneath all of that is still the very small voice within. It runs so next to and entwined within my Self that I can barely tell the two apart.  Maybe I'm deluding myself and there is no God speaking there.  But whatever it is, it is my experience, and it is part of the fortification I continue to plug my walls with.

The Difference Between Food and Restaurants

I saw K tonight.  She has been homeless for I don't know how many years, has lost track of how old she is until her assessment worker told her today (55).  K is hoping that Centrelink are going to start paying her some sort of an allowance.  She has fallen through the cracks there.  They keep putting her on Newstart allowance even though I'm not real sure how you can manage to get a job when you are sleeping in a a park and showering in a train station and you don't know when your next meal will appear (tonight, it was a ham and tomato sandwich from some bloke from a nearby cafe.  They do look after her).

"Hey, will these fit you?"  K asked me, as we both sat on the ground with her artwork surrounding us.  She took out of her bag a pair of Ripcurl white jeans, ladies size 14.  Probably a pair I could fit into if I keep doing yoga for another month.

I have no idea how these jeans came to be in K's bag.  Apparently someone in the park had them.  But I took them, because I take everything K offers me - well, everything except one of the ham and tomato sandwiches.  It wouldn't keep till the next morning - not with tomato sogging it up, but I couldn't eat it because it was ham, I explained.  But most of the time I eat her food - last week we ate a nectarine each.  I'd rather take a pair of stolen white jeans that won't fit me for another three months than to say no to them because I want our friendship to be as equal as it can be.

We were both in happy spirits today.  K has had the flu earlier in the week and is struggling now to make up for the days she missed, bombed out on cold and flu tablets.  I bought a card off her today, one of her cool little designs she's doing now, $7.50 for a card with her awesome geometric designs on the front, hand drawn.  I slipped her another red lobster because she was struggling to keep up and then I will go and ask my mother for some money when I run out from gving K money but that's the trickle down effect, right?  :)

So we were both happy to see each other tonight.  I'm so out of the loop I sort of forgot it was Thursday night and I rounded the corner and there was K in her customary spot.  I walked up and said,

"What the hell are you doing here?  It's .... it's ... it's Thursday."  And we grinned at each other.  And K told me I bring her luck because while I was sitting there someone else slipped her 5 bucks and suddenly she was 25 up on what she was five minutes before, which was kind of cool.

And I'd had a shitty sort of a day seeing the thoughts go through my head about depressing things and over and over again having to say to myself, "Well, no, that's not true.  You're not a loser because of XYZ."  It's a bit of a theme at the moment with me.  The tail end of my depression and isolation and the thought monkeys are chattering.

But the flipside of chattering thought monkeys is walking outside of your workplace, and suddenly you think a thought - or maybe it thinks you - "The joy of the Lord is your strength."  And you could read that in the Bible, or someone could tell it to you from theirs, and it would have about as much resonance as a brick.  Because nothing from God comes secondhand, nothing.  But tonight, it thinks you, and you feel it, it resonates like a universe, and you feel God bubbling up in your chest like a fountain.  All that living water, and suddenly you feel it and it's like you are cloaked in this godness, and it encourages goodness, and you love everybody in the street suddenly, as if you'd just taken a few tokes on a joint, but it's not, it's just the heart bubbling.  And you think,

"Goodness me, how I have missed you."

The past several months have reminded you how black things can be when the presence of God is not felt.  When you don't even really believe that God is there.  When the numb looms up and threatens to overwhelm you.  When you think that maybe you are lost after all.  And then suddenly, out of the blue, there he is again.  Unshackleable.  He will not bend down and do your bidding, he will not.  And you can feel him laughing at you for thinking that he would, but he knows that you do not suffer from that misconception.  But you still try anyway, out of pure rabid frustration and hurt.  You try and he will not bend.  And he says,

"You have no idea what I doing, not in him, not in all the things you think you have an idea.  You have no idea what I am up to."

And so you walk to the train station.  And you realise that you have shifted your perspective from the train station back to your workplace and yet now here you are walking back to the train station again, and you have shifted from first person to second person and you think, ah, what the hell.  A bit of variety is always spicy.

And so you get to the station and suddenly, even though nothing is different and you still have the headache that has been plaguing you all day, and the tiredness from not having had enough sleep last night because you were out having a delightful day with your most beloved cousin, and even though you still feel like your heart is gaping open and ugly and you do not know what God is doing or if God is doing ... nothing is different and yet everything is different and suddenly you're back in the feeling again of being enveloped, and you know that in this space you do not need very much at all.

And you and K talk and chat and you are both happy and cheered to see each other and as you share your cheer it multiplies so that when you leave each other behind with a hug and a blowing of a kiss across the grey concrete of Flagstaff Station you are both twice as happy as you were before you saw each other.

And you talk a little abut God and about how you are feeling him bubbling away in your chest.

And K pounds lightly on her own and says that yes, she has no doubt that God is in here.

And then you go off on a philosophical ramble about the past three thousand years of human civilisation and how long it takes us as people to learn anything and you say that hey, isn't it funny how all these centuries and millennia God has been seen as a bastard and imagine if he is wonderful.  Now, there's  a concept.

And you agree that organised religion is a distortion of everything, the same way that bureaucracy is a distortion of our ability to be able to be and do for each other what is there waiting if only all the red tape would bugger off out of the way.  And then K says,

"I think that the difference between organised religion and the experience of God is like the difference between eating good food and then just being in a restaurant.

Don't forget," she calls as we walk away from each other.  "He's in here," pounding gently on her chest.

A Relationship

On retreat I once wrote in my journal, “How good of you, God, to make truth a relationship instead of an idea. Now there is room between you and me for growth, for conversation, for exception, for the infinite understandings created by intimacy, for the possibility to give back and to give something to You—as if I could give anything back to You.

You offer me the possibility to undo, to please, to apologize, to change, to surrender, and to grow. There’s room for stages and for suffering, for mutual passion and mutual pity. There’s room for mutual everything.”  This is good religion, worthy of free, intelligent, and mature people!

Richard Rohr, From Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality p. 67

What a beautiful way to put it :)  I always felt like there was some sort of truth to this thing underneath all the masses of weirdness and creepy christianism I traversed my way through upon first coming upon this God in Christian form.

It was something like this I was talking about.  Room.  There's room here to just BE.

God, You Really Piss Me Off

It's times like this that you really piss me off, you know that?

Because it's such a small thing you could have done, but you didn't. And I could get upset at the larger things, and I do, but just because there are larger things doesn't negate the small thing you didn't do. It just adds to it.

The sparrow was there when I got to work, in the foyer. Trying to fly out to its mate that sat beyond it through an invisible pane of glass. The door to freedom was right below. It could have flown out if it just flew down a bit, felt the breeze coming in through the door, stopped bashing itself against the glass.

But sparrows don't know anything about glass. Although apparently you know about this sparrow. And hairs on heads. You know everything that is going on. You could have done something. You could always do something but you don't. So often you don't. And I know the theological arguments, and I am at peace within myself with certain philosophical conclusions I have reached about free will and about bad shit happening and about healing and love and growth and etc etc and that's all fine and dandy but it still doesn't stop me from being really angry at you. Because it's different when it comes to animals. They have an innocence and a dependence on us, and we make the world so difficult for them to live in with our insistence on vomiting carbon and on foyers and on glass and such things.

I went upstairs and I was sad for the little bird and I hoped that somehow when I next went out to the foyer it had flown its invisible creepy coop. And so then an hour went by and Mary came back upstairs after being downstairs, and was visibly upset. Me and Mary are the biggest animal lovers in the office. We look at each other's photos of our dogs and coo. We say cynical things like who needs men when you've got a dog. Mary was visibly upset because the bird was still downstairs beating itself against the window trying to get out.

And so we went down. And there were two other people there as well. And we armed ourselves with brooms and scared the poor little darling who didn't have any idea what was going on, only that these weird smelling humans were coming at it. And we tried to coax it out the door but all it kept doing was flying into the window and then sitting on the ledge and then flying over to sit on the overhead lights, and then back into the window. All it needed to do was to look down, change its trajectory. Stupid thing. Trying to do the same thing over and over again. But yet we do that too, don't we, with our massively larger brains. And anyway, it's not true what they say about birdbrains even though it's a cliche in our lexicon. We think that size determines ability but it's been proven that birds can think and reason, beyond what they rightfully should given their brain size. Magpies grieve when their mates die; cockatoos mate for life; chimps virtually cry when one of their own dies and visibly go into depression.

And so that's why it upset me because this poor little thing was trying to get outside to its mate, and it would have been distressed in some sort of fashion, it's heart would have been beating fast, it would have been in pain bashing itself against the window, and it would be no skin at all off your invisible nose and did you do anything? No, you didn't. And I come out to leave work at 6pm and this poor little thing has been tiring itself out, and now there is a man with a bike in the foyer standing holding the door open, and people have been holding the door open all fucking day for this bird. And I prayed earlier in the day that if you didn't do something directly to the bird, whisper to it in birdish to fly down and out, that you would do something in the people, that you would inspire someone who was standing in a particular spot to move one inch to the right so that it was in the perfect place to create the necessary angle for the animal to shoot out the door. Or that someone would come with a ladder and a towel or whatever. It's SO not a big deal, right? People are dying every day of debilitating illnesses and drug overdoses and heartbreak. Why can't you at least give a bit of an extra helping hand to a stuck bird?

It was SO not a big deal. But we both know it doesn't measure out like that, because what seems small is actually big and vice versa, and you are love and all that stuff I know that in my bones. And I know lots of people will say it's not a big deal worth even worrying about but when it comes to these creatures my heart is fully open and it is a big enough deal that I have cried tears and I know it's some sort of prayer. I always feel this way when I cry to you about the animals, and it is you crying through me to you about the animals because it grieves you.

Even though you've got it all covered even when we can't see that, and that you know when this particular bird will fall to the ground. But even knowing that and knowing you grieve and care and love makes it even worse because you could have done something and you just fucking well didn't.

And I'm really angry at you that you didn't. And that you don't.

+++++

Edit: next day. Mary took some bread and water to the bird this morning, after it's day and night of no food. And she led a trail out the door, and it flew out. Yay for a happy ending :)

Good Prayer/Bad Prayer

I came across a blog post about centering prayer recently where the writer was roundly condemning it as a tool of the devil. Which quite befuddled me for a few seconds while I got my bearings on how he was viewing it. Everybody has their own worldview and everybody is informed by that. I left a comment detailing my experiences, hoping to be able to have some sort of a conversation, but the problem often is that Christians are encouraged not so much to love their enemies but that interacting with them will taint us somehow. "Love your enemies," Jesus said but we prefer to retreat into safe notions of black and white because we are fearful of being deceived. Such a vital element of the human condition, that when someone is in error, we want to send them scapegoated out into the wilderness, keep ourselves pure. And so therefore this man did not respond to my blog comment. This is common enough behaviour in blogland, but it still pisses me off.

I have been thinking so much recently about what prayer is. Even if he did not want to enter into a conversation with a heretical being, the mental dialogues (arguments) I had with him in my own head were quite edifying anyway, to help me identify to myself what I think prayer is. Because the longer I go on doing it, the more mysterious it becomes to me. And I think in some ways too I am still trying to differentiate between meditation and prayer. Meditation feels like preparation for prayer in some ways while it also feels like prayer at the same time (and I am using the words "meditation" and "centreing prayer" interchangeably here, just to muddy the waters further.)

I think it is that severe differentiation between prayer and meditation, Western and Eastern concepts, and the fears that come along with those differentiations that cause many Christians to fear the idea of using a "mantra" as a scary, demonic thing. The man on the blog I commented on said that using a mantra is the same as the "repetitively babbling" we are admonished to not employ as our method of prayer. He also said that this sort of prayer is found nowhere in the Bible, and to that I concur. Not found in a six step methodology. But neither are millions of other things. As far as Bible verses go, the "be still and know that I am God" is the very foundation from where I do these practices, and it is also prayer in its most basic form to me. Jesus said "When you pray, do it like this," but is that where it ends? Is prayer the rote repetition of "Our father in heaven?" Does that not bring us full circle back to the "repetitious babbling" I was just talking about?

And anyway, as far as I am seeing it right now, my use of a mantra is purely as a box to put my monkey mind in. The real effect of using a mantra is actually silence in the end. Those verses that talked about repetitive babbling seem to me to really be talking about not praying in a way where you feel you are not being heard, or in an egotistical sort of a fashion that involves big grand prayers to be heard by God. That is part of what those verses mean to me. Using a mantra is not so much something I am doing to God as it is a way for me to harness my anxious mind so that I am free to enter into being still and knowing that he is God. But I understand why he thinks the way he does about it, I really do. I'm not critical of his observations, but I do think that he perhaps misunderstands the differences. But I could be wrong. I suppose I often am.

How delightful it is to see the Bible in a place where I am still allowed to have my own thoughts and come to my own conclusions. It is something like having the law being begun to be written on your heart instead of it sitting inside a tome I must consult outside myself. More scary, more room for error, sure. And so much more real.

I understand why that man would consider using mantras and repetitive babbling to be much the same as the other, and I also understand from him thinking that that he has no real experience or understanding at all of what he condemns except for what Apprising Ministries has informed him is the evil thing.

What gets me about Christians also is that our thinking is the outrcrop of a childish black and white view of things, our segregating things up into neatly packaged little sections with "Christian" over here and "evil" over there, and "prayer" being the reciting of words in our head (without ceasing? Goodness me, how exhausting then, if that's what it is. I like this version better).

When we have that idea, about being a pure unblemished people set apart from the evil in the world, we are unable and unwilling to see our faith centred in his historical space, nor to see the common heritage it shares with other cultures and other religions. Looking at things in this way, we think that, for example, if we practice yoga asanas that therefore we are practising something "Hindu." We think that meditation is something those Buddhists do, so they've already claimed it and it can't be something that Christians also do, because if we do, then that is just the one world religion. I understand the fear of people who do not want to be led astray and deceived, who want to be faithful to God. To each his own apprising of his conscience, you know? All those verses speaking of not eating meat sacrificed to idols are necessary for us to heed because Western 21st century Christians have the most soft and spongy consciences.

But some of us are free to eat meat sacrificed to idols. As far as I see it these days, yoga practice is a philosophy of the body that was learnt by a bunch of people in a particular time and place that had stacks of knowledge about how our bodies work. They happened to have as their religion the Hindu one. I'm more interested in the people these days. Whatever religion they happen to be is of secondary importance to me. I do not think that God is centred within all religions. I do however think he is centred within Humanity. I think all people have access to God if they so desire to.

And so this man on this blog could look at the methods of centreing prayer and say that they were wrong because they were "Eastern". And Eastern gets equated with Buddhism and other religions which everyone knows have nothing of value to benefit us poor Christians cut adrift from our heritage in so many ways (which reminds me, I still haven't written about my thoughts on the Passover meal. Such a beautiful thing! The history of the Jews' wilderness wanderings, played out ... in food! God is so embodied! Like playing dress-ups. Makes the modern thimble of grape juice and bit of Salada so uncreative in comparison).

And so we are taught that we can't let the worldviews gleaned from any other religion inform us and teach us because that is indulging in false gods. Well, I say that when you get to a certain point of faith in God you become free to eat the meat that is sacrificed to idols and there is nothing in there that can taint you. And yet there's a wisdom that comes too. I do not know why but several years ago I desired to return to practicing yoga but for me it felt wrong. At that time it did feel like I was doing something that was somehow wrong to me at that particular time. To have indulged in it would have been stupid, even if only for the fact that I would have felt guilty, and guiltily practising asanas brings all sorts of physical problems when you're contorted up on your mat. Just no need to go there.

But no need now not to go there.

Eastern religions have plenty to inform me about the inklings I have, the things that I feel I am learning from living within this Matrix, to learn to see in the ways God is teaching me to learn to see, to move forward within my own faith, because my faith has its roots in Eastern thinking. Because so many people are looking to the affairs of the world and seeing antichrist brewings and one world religions festering (I do not criticise that; I see many of those sorts of things myself) they automatically presume, the same mistake made over again and again, that to keep our religion pure and unblemished, to remain undeceived, is to retreat into our own camp of "Christianity" and to do "Christian" things and see life in from a "Christian" worldview.

To live out of fear. I do not want to live out of fear. I would rather sin boldly in my pursuit of life and the Father rather than to fear with that horrible Pentecostal fear that takes all of the evils of the world - the one world governments and evil politicians and systemic crushings - and makes it the centre of everything.

God is the centre of everything. That shit is happening in the world. I refuse to let "Christianity" teach me to lose my focus. I trust God to help me maintain that. And he does.

Changes Come

I'm watching The Abbey at the moment. This three part doco is about five women who spend five weeks at an enclosed Benedectine monastery, Jamberoo Abbey in New South Wales.

I kept thinking as I was watching it (I've got one episode to go), "How will these women be able to cope if they go into something like this, such a discipline, without the love behind it to fuel it?" you know? Sort of like an arranged marriage, getting married to someone you don't love. Or like getting out of bed every night for months on end in the middle of the night to feed a Tamagotchi instead of a baby. Or like being a Fundamentalist Christian ;)

And so I admired these women for doing what they were doing. And at the same time I was surprised and gratified anew at the beauty and grace of God. S/he's just everywhere, taking us now, taking us on. Pretty cool.

So much about that sort of life appeals to me, you know? Not that there is any sort of a calling there, even without the 4.30 am vespers (is it vespers? I can't remember). No thanks, very much. But it's funny how things change; where once I may have looked askance at a bunch of Benedictine nuns, these days I see the way they are living their lives as something of quite rare beauty. The ritual, the turning aside to prayer seven times a day, the structure, the silence, the craftwork, the gardening. The mindfulness, a life spent praying without ceasing. The work. The rhythm.

Till the day they die. Wow.

I once used to wonder how that sort of a life would have any kind of value to God. And yet I couldn't help imagining as I was watching it how God must be particularly fond of this bunch of women. So much of their lives resonate with me; I see so much of my own life in theirs, too, though our lives are so very different.

And I think I am beginning to understand a little the topsy turvy nature of things, the first being last, the hidden being of great value, the things that we have been squeezed into thinking are important are actually the things that kill, the spirit that we think is gonna kill us (and who does) bringing life.

All topsy turvy.

Second Sight

If the early monks [the desert dwellers of the third century] paid close attention to themselves, it was only because they knew that rigorous self-analysis was an indispensable spiritual practice. Change was the point of the discipline, and they nailed narcissistic self-definition, correctly, as vainglory. To people schooled in a religion that has often seemed to define sin as a grocery list of dos and don'ts, these monks can seem, as the Dominican Simon Tugwell explains in Ways of Imperfection, "rather casual about morality." They were not all concerned, he writes, "that people should behave correctly according to the rules, but rather that people should be able to see their situation clearly for what it is, and so become free from the distorting perspective which underlies all our sins."

Kathleen Norris, Acedia and Me

I've been thinking a lot the last few days. I commented recently on a blog post (here) about my inability to attend a church building. I said, "why would I commit myself to something like that?"One of the comments was this, which has given me food for thought:

I get what you’re saying. I feel the same way sometimes.

I think you see where dealing with the awkwardness and difficulties and failures to connect are pretty much what “loving the church” actually means in context, too. All that crap you instinctively dislike is more or less what you, as a Christian, are being groomed to overstand, forgive, transcend and love and grow through; saying “why would I commit myself to something like that?” is just unrepentant hypocrisy and we should know better.

I thought it was an interesting comment and while I bridled a little at it, of course it is something I need to keep in mind. I can criticise Christian communities' sin and failure and refusal to admit their own sins, corporate and otherwise, truly. That is what I mean when I say "why would I commit to something like that?" If the community I join cannot be true and real and vulnerable with itself and its people and me, then I do not wish to be a part of it. I cannot. I cannot be a part of a group that is unrepentently hypocritical itself. But I cannot be an island unto myself either. What is one to do? (I guess one is to wait and ask. But I have been waiting and asking for an awfully long time now, I cannot help but wonder whether I am being deliberately obtuse in hearing in this regard or whether this is one of those thousand years as a day type scenarios. Perhaps I am waiting for perfection. I don't think so. I am waiting for transparency though).

And yet, of course, the same defections I criticise in those communities are the same ones in myself. That is probably why I dislike them so. I have had cause over the past couple of days to see a little bit more into my capacity for acedia, betrayal, commitment phobia, lust, and on and on and on. I am viewing these things as I do from within what has been the greatest evidence outward of these propensities in me: my leaving of a perfectly good, though not perfect, marriage. The things I told myself about brighter horizons. The daydreams about other men, the insistence that I could not stay and it could not be fixed. I did not believe that life could flow after death. It's been a most sobering experience for me to realise how little I see in this regard, how I viewed my marriage like a consumer (with a hope to upgrade to a Christian model). I am, after all, a product of the same culture that I despise and decry. It's just easier to see it in the culture than it is within me. Because what I see within I despise and scapegoat, I guess.

(And yet, of course that description of leaving my marriage is a one-sided simplistic sort of one. I had nothing left after being sick for so long. I was sort of falling apart and I couldn't stay. And yet ... and yet ...)

But it is safe for me to view my murkier depths, from within the enfoldment of God. I know that I am loved. I know it not because I prod myself to believe something that will be good for me to believe. I know it because I know it. But still, seeing these things hurts. I am so much more and less than what I used to think I was when I was more blind than I am now. And now I am less blind than I was, I know that I am pretty damn blind. *Sigh*

(And a sigh of relief, paradoxially, also. I need God to see. I cannot do without him/her. And the small realities and seeings that slowly, drippingly, over days and weeks unfold are so different to what I once thought. Where once I thought small and constricted now I see a little bit more how beautiful things are in God's economy. I am understanding the differences between wholesomeness and holiness, for example.) Places where I have hope that I can one day stand).

HT to Barefoot Barbara, who I have linked to not once but twice in this post :)

You Had a Bad Day ...

Discombobula is feeling discombobulated today. I have a ton of things to do and very little motivation to do them. My fatigue level's ramped up the past several weeks, and while it's low-level, it still scares me. However, once I get going - like last night at Theatresports with my friends - everything's good. But stick me on a chair with no outside impetus and it's easy to get stuck for hours online, sinking into my fears. The anxiety that comes out of feeling unwell has always surprised me with its weight.

There are so many fears surrounding my health dipping downhill even slightly (why am I feeling worse? Is it endometriosis? something horrible like cancer? a return to CFS? What's wrong with me?) Trailing on the ends of those thoughts are fears that I have brought this upon myself. This is an intermittent thought and one which is frustrating because there are strands of truth mixed in with error there. After all, it is taking responsibility for your health and tuning into your body which enables you to begin to act to do the things that lead to health. But sometimes I think we are encouraged in our pill-popping culture to feel a strange sort of over-responsibility whenever anything does go wrong and doesn't rectify itself in 13.4 seconds.

And yet, I am the owner of my own body and therefore responsible for what I put into it, and feeling bad today is partially linked to the McDonald's I had yesterday - twice - and the evening before that as well. Three lots of Maccas in one weekend, and I can feel it. I once hated McDonald's when I had trained my taste buds to a better place than they are at the moment. I saw it as cardboard unfood and now I gobble it up, yum yum, to comfort eat. Maybe comfort punish is a better thought. We do so easily punish ourselves with doing awful things to ourselves, do we not?

So these fears and worries about feeling more fatigued are strengthened by two underlying fears that bob their head up intermittently. I wish it was not so. I wish I could say that I would get to a certain period in my spiritual life where these thoughts have no power to affect me, being the sorts of unreal illusory unthoughts not worth my consideration, but they seem to creep in unawares sometimes, without my even realising it. The first thought is that there is something lacking with God and he is not as lovable as I believe. The second thought is that there is something wrong with me and I am not lovable. Pretty obvious how the two fit into each other, right? And yet I am more dismayed about the first thought than I am about the second, however. Even though my lenses have cleared in ways unimaginable at the beginning of my journey, I still see far too easily in the Scriptures when I open them the ogre God, as Baxter Kruger calls him, and it is dismaying. Where do these pockets of unbelief dwell within me? How do they dwell co-existent with the beliefs I do have about God? It takes courage to admit those pockets exist, or that they have sprung up again from when I last called them out onto the carpet and shot them with my reality gun.

How we want to be pearlescent. It does feel we are made to be so, and seamless and open, with no hidden pockets to trip ourselves up. How much courage therefore to steady your eye upon them and not flinch away. Their existence does not mean I am a complete giant freak but hey, who doesn't feel this way about themselves? And how hard not too when everywhere surrounding us in the world we are told we are freaks if we are imperfect.

And so even though I do not like the hidden pocket I look at it, because I am far enough along in my faith that my unfaith is acknowledgeable. These thoughts about unlovable God and unlovable us are so entrenched into our hearts. It's why the bastard God of Christianism has been given so much power and emphasis; it creeps me to ponder that it seems easier for us to believe in that God than a good god. This is surely a shocking thing to consider, and so we dismiss it. And yet the evidence seems overwhelming that this sort of God is easy to believe in even when our hearts whispher otherwise. Because hey, look at the evidence in the bible, right? There are all sorts of verses to prove that God is basically a prick. And how quickly we believe that we are seeing clear-headed when this God is presented, the petulant Jonathan Edwards version of God. But what about those times when we experience something numinous about God? How good this God is. How love, how beautiful, how massive and expansive. And then we see Jesus and we get to see how far our conceptions of God stretch as compared to this man Jesus. We are so very blind to the reality of God.

It's such a wrench to look inside yourself and see, sinkingly and with some dismay that here you are - at least today - believing small things about God again. Not even consciously. You don't believe these things consciously but then you act in ways that seem to bear out the fact that unconsciously you are believing those very things, from out of the delicious murk that comes up to you in your dreams and sculptings and ponderings and writings. You are believing what has been told to you every day by many and varied sources that because of your obvious imperfections and your self-centredness and self-absorption and your failure to continue to love your husband and the fact that your father did not show you hardly any affection and the way that person looked at you and the fact that you are stuck doing the same shithouse job you were last year and the fact that that thing over there in your soul is still there and blah blah blah blah blah means that in actual fact you really are not lovable and not loved by God (who is also not lovable himself, being a bastard, so who really cares? Let's all get drunk).

There is enough in that sort of state of mind to despair for several centuries. You feel you could sink into oblivion in that headspace. And yet sometimes faith grows upon the back of unbelief, if you let it. It's hard to climb onto the springboard from those sorts of quicksand thoughts. How surprising then the quick bounce once you have from admission into yieldedness. So much yielding in this faith life. Like a woman's pelvis cracking open for birth. A return, once again, in the spiral of life, back to somewhere you've been before. You always wonder when you come back to this place how you could ever leave it. When you are here the air is so fresh it is much easier to acknowledge just how much Vaseline sits on your lenses.

And how strange, the comfort in that. The amazement that the depth of my blindness when viewed through the lens of a loving trinity God is a far greater comfort than any of your unbelieving illusions. How good to be able to fling them off again.

Artwork by Erdmute

Workin' for the Man Sucks

He came upon a pond and as he swam there it became colder and colder. A flock of creatures flew overhead, the most beautiful he had ever seen. They cried down to him, and hearing their sounds made his heart leap and break at the same time. He cried back in a sound he had never before made. He had never seen creatures more beautiful, and he had never felt more bereft.

The Ugly Duckling

Listened to a podcast last night about a bloke and his wife and his four kids who launched out into an artistic career, because he felt God telling him to depend on him, with everyone around him telling him he was being "irresponsible" and quoting verses at him about "if you will not work you will not eat" and he felt like a loony but felt like God was telling him to. And he hasn't gone without a meal ever, even though the electricity has been cut off from time to time, and he still feels like a loony but he feels free and like he is doing what God is telling him to do.

Sometimes I wonder if God is telling me or suggesting things to me and I'm not listening. Or not believing because it sounds too good. I'm inclined to think, "Why me?" Why should I have a satisfying job being paid to write when heaps of people have shitty jobs bored out of their skulls? I don't want to buy into that Gen X thing we were brought upon that all of us are meant to have wonderful amazing jobs. But then on the other hand, why not? Hope deferred makes the heart sick and I've been working shit jobs for several decades. Writing and being published is right there in front of my eyes on the newstands but they might as well be on Jupiter if I don't believe it's possible. And I don't really. But I do. But then I don't. Sometimes I think the greatest yearnings I have for freedom, to run out the door and fly into the wind, to go and work in Alice Springs, to write and keep writing, are the most responsible followings after God I could do if I had the courage. Other times I don't know if I am hearing anything at all, or if I am it's just my own ego. Sometimes i think if I could just hear him tell me in that crystal clear/hardly heard way that I so love and hate, along with a few wet fleeces on the ground, I would be off like a rocket, going wherever or doing whatever. Other times my knees knock together at the thought.

I am at work feeling unwell. Feeling inspired by what I heard last night. Wondering and wandering. Working for the man.

A Right High View of God ...

'O Lord, they tell me I have so offended against your law that, as I am, you can't look upon me, but threaten me with eternal banishment from your presence. But if you do not look upon me, how can I ever be other than I am? Lord, remember I was born in sin; how then can I see sin as you see it? Remember, Lord, that I have never known myself clean; how can I cleanse myself? You must take me as I am and cleanse me. Is it not impossible that I should behold the final goodness of good, the final evilness of evil? How then can I deserve eternal torment? Had I known good and evil, seeing them as you see them, then chosen the evil, and turned away from the good, I know not what I should not deserve; but you know it has ever been something good in the evil that has enticed my selfish heart - nor mine only, but that of all my kind. You require of us to forgive; surely you forgive freely! You may be bound to destroy evil, but are you bound to keep the sinner alive that you may punish him, even if it makes him no better?

Sin cannot be deep as life, for you are the life; and sorrow and pain go deeper than sin, for they reach to the divine in us; you can suffer, though you will not sin. To see men suffer might make make us shun evil, but it never could make us hate it. We might see by it that you hate sin, but we never could see that you love the sinner. Chastise us, we pray, in loving kindness, and we will not faint. We have done much that is evil, yes, evil is very deep in us, but we are not all evil, for we love righteousness; and are you not yourself, in your Son, the sacrifice for our sins, the atonement of our breach? You have made us subject to vanity, but have yourself taken your godlike share of the consequences. Could we ever have come to know good as you know it, save by passing through the sea of sin and the fire of cleansing?

They tell me I must say for Christ's sake [or in Jesus' name] or you will not pardon. It takes the very heart out of my poor love to hear that you will only pardon me because Christ has loved me; but I give you thanks that nowhere in the record of your gospel does one of your servants say any such word. In spite of all our fears and grovelling, our weakness, and our wrongs, you will be to us what you are - such a perfect Father as no most loving child-heart on earth could invent the thought of! You will take our sins on yourself, in addition giving us your life to live. You bear our griefs and carry our sorrows; and surely you will one day enable us to pay every debt we owe to each other! You will be to us a right generous, abundant father! Then truly our hearts shall be jubilant, because you are what you are - infinitely beyond all we could imagine. You will humble and raise us up. You have given yourself to us that, having you, we may be eternally alive wiht your life. We run within the circle of what men call your wrath, and find ourselves clasped in the zone of your love!

George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons
(translated into more readable English by my good self ;)

"For God has bound all men over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all" (Romans 11:32).

The Prison of Limitlessness

Fear of the smallness of our world and its life may lead to a kind of claustrophobia and thence, with apparent reasonableness, to a desire for the “freedom” of limitlessness. But this desire, paradoxically, reduces everything. The life of this world is small to those who think it is, and the desire to enlarge it makes it smaller, and can reduce it finally to nothing.

... In our limitless selfishness, we have tried to define “freedom,” for example, as an escape from all restraint. But, as my friend Bert Hornback has explained in his book The Wisdom in Words, “free” is etymologically related to “friend.” These words come from the same Indo-European root, which carries the sense of “dear” or “beloved.” We set our friends free by our love for them, with the implied restraints of faithfulness or loyalty. And this suggests that our “identity” is located not in the impulse of selfhood but in deliberately maintained connections.

Wendell Berry, Harper's Magazine, May 2008

It takes wisdom and faith to enter into the life that goes even smaller than small. It feels like death. It is death. And then it is life/death/life. What opens out the other end is as vast as the entire universe, contained in a grain of sand.

God seems to be the only limitless resource I have found so far. Love. Not coal, not the economy. How childish a concept, a continually growing economy. It is blinder than faith in an unseen God. Especially when the latest economic growth figure report on Lateline dovetails into the report about the climate falling apart. The spiritual vistas are limitless; our economic vision makes us blind. The coal will last another hundred years.

Lord, we are blind and tired and have lost our way. Hear our prayer.

Knowing Me Knowing You

Do you ever feel like what comes out of your mouth weighing 5 grams is taken by other people as a ton? Or what comes out silk is received as wood? Or what comes out in freedom is received as manipulation?

I suppose it is a common enough experience. What we say must be filtered through someone else's stuff. Nobody is ever truly objective in that sense. It's why we will never ever completely know how others perceive us. It is something patently outside of our own control. You can try - which is why friendship takes work, a continual reconfiguring of what you understand about someone else, of realising how askew your perceptions were about them, of adding a small piece to a never-ending jigsaw puzzle that is other people.

Of course, the flipside of that is that we are responsible for changing the way we come across to others if we begin to understand that what we project is not what was intended. I was shaken into this awareness when I was 18 years old and realised, with a sort of horror, some things about my dealing with people that were overreactive, spiky and defensive. Sometimes we cannot see in ourselves what is plainly before the eyes of others. It is as valuable as gold to have kind people clue you in to yourself. It's hard and it's raw and it is difficult to say and to receive, but these are precious things, these feedbacks. They help us along the path to knowing ourselves.

It is a difficult thing to realise that our protections become our fortresses and that we use them to butt others with. I guess it is a melancholy sort of a thought, really, on this dreary Saturday morning - that in a sense, we are all alone because nobody ever truly "sees" us as we really are.

Except God. I often feel lonely but paradoxically I never really feel alone, even when I am by myself. Your rod and your staff they comfort me.

That is the starting point, for me. If God is there and all flows out from him, then perhaps in some future age we shall all know each other as we know ourselves and know God. Like Mack in The Shack, meeting up with the father he was alienated from in life, in a field, a diamond and emerald and amethyst field.

(Oh, and go Hawkers)

Non-Duality

- When right and wrong are united, I experience compassion.

- When love and hate are united, I experience forgiveness.

- When good and bad are united, I experience non-judgment.

- When male and female are united, I experience balance.

- When hope and despair are united, I experience trust.

- When Heaven and earth are united, I experience peace,and joy.

And when I see that, I can enjoy this world around me far MORE than when I used to fear it as "evil"...!

~ Dena

Nice one :)