I'm pretty sure Jesus just rode past me on a bike

OK.  Long title, I know.  It's also been a really long time since I posted anything.  Bygones.

When I run in the swamps every week, it's a real spiritual time for me.  Like John Muir, that's my church.  It's common for me to come out with a revelation of some sort.  Sometimes these are very profound, sometimes kind of silly...like the time I realized that "catch your breath" is exactly the opposite of what happens.  More like we outrun our breath and it has to catch us. But no one says, "I have to stop and let my breath catch up."  But I digress...

This week, the place was entirely deserted when I got there.  Humans are usually pretty scarce when I go, but this day, there was not a sole around.  That alone makes the wild places more majikal (my spelling distinguishes between the real otherworldy supernatural quality and the performance art).  Things just come more alive, seriously, there's more animals visible, etc.

This time though, I was also wearing some natural bug repellent.  With zika on the rise, I figured some form of protection might be prudent.  But this stuff smelled intoxicatingly sweet, like standing in a field of wildflowers.  If you haven't stood in a field of flowers and felt the light-headed giddiness of the perfumes, you don't know what you're missing.

So these two factors were making the place seem way more majikal than usual.  I kept seeing shapes move in the periphery that were gone when I looked, hearing sounds that seemed to have no known cause, feeling chills and shivers, and I thought, it's easy to see why Romantics were so taken with the idea of Faeries.  If they were real, this would be the time and place, you'd find them.  I half expected to fall into a toadstool ring and find myself in different world. Or to stumble across a party of them and be whisked away into a some adventure.

Then I thought, well maybe they aren't real.  But something sparked the notions, so perhaps other forms of being were actually afoot.  That's when I quickly recognized the danger of courting spiritual forces, which I have ample experience with.  So I turned my thoughts to God and thought whatever was up, He was in control of it.  And I asked if I could meet anything like that. Just have a peek behind the veil for a moment.  Then it occurred to me, that if I was asking for that, how much grander would it be to meet God himself moving through the swamp and how all it's glory would ignite with His presence reflecting and radiating through it.

That's when I felt the wind at my back.  It's hard to describe.  It's not there until I start running, and then I feel it pushing up from behind as well as running into it.  Stop and it stops, start and it starts.  In the extremely humid Florida swamps, much of this may be the very air flowing around me as I move through the thick vapor.  But if I've learned anything from my predecessors, it's that one must never assume that because something has a rational explanation, it doesn't also have a majikal dimension, like Uncle George's faerie realms where every flower and sunbeam is a palpable metaphysical argument.

I say this because as the wind whips around me, I often feel it urge me on, like a ethereal being swirling and gamboling around me.  I can almost hear it telling me to run.  And then it struck me deep inside like God often does...crack...Divine Wind...boom...like lightening in my deep brain.  What if that WAS God flowing around me.  The Gentle Blowing.  The Kurios Pnuema!  And I whispered, "God show me."

I kept running.  Through the hotter places, the new growth forest and the heat rippled sand flats.  Eventually I made it to the edge of the swamp.  Just like in a movie, this is the line where it goes from hot to cool, Sun to shade, open to heavily treed.  This is my cathedral.  Just in, I slowed and climbed the vine I usually scale.  4 meters up and then hang in the air.  Then slow back down.  It's my gate to the swamp, the antechamber of the sanctuary.  If God was going to meet me, it would likely happen in there. 

I slow to breath and cool down a minute, when out of nowhere I hear a clatter of bike wheels and a young muscular man with slightly long sandy brown hair erupts over a rise and cranks down hard.  I stayed to the side of the trail.  He made eye contact as soon as he came over the rise.  As he passed he smiled a big knowing smile, gave half a nod, and blew past me down the trail.

I padded off behind him as he disappeared out of site.  I thought how weird it was that he would come out of nowhere (usually I can hear them coming farther off)  and was going so fast in that heat that far from an entrance, and the look on his face was not the usual polite trail greeting; almost a knowing smile.  And then the second of my revelations hit me.  Maybe that was Him!

As I ran, my intellect argued, "Come on, just some guy.  He was probably smiling because you and he are the only crazy ones out here. Or he saw that we were half covered in dirt or something."  But I answered myself, "Yeah, but how else would we expect Jesus to look if he was to show up out here?"

My intellect responded, "Good point."

So I continued, "Heck, for that matter, he could be anyone!"...crack...Angels unware...crackle...least of these...rumble...When did we see you...BA BOOOOOOMMMM...

My intellect, my soul, my skeptic, and all the other parts of me stopped in their tracks...Whoa...

Answer

Today I've been surrounded by awareness of God's presence.  I don't know why.  I'm aware of what He's saying and feeling toward me more than usual.  This morning He impressed upon me that someone was praying for something and that I was the answer.

No, not that I, particularly, was an answer to someone's prayers in the cocky sense.  But quite the opposite.  It is tremendously humbling to think that someone has cried out to God to provide something they need desperately and that in answer, He sends me.

I don't know if this refers to something that has already happened, something that will happen, or just a parable-like lesson.  Maybe it's a combination of them all.  But I am honored and humbled.  I know my own flaws.  I know my own inadequacies.  I also know that I asked God to use me, to send me where He will.  I figured I'd be part of something or more likely a voice in the wilderness declaring God's message.  But to think that I, messed up and willfully rebellious, am the medium of God's answer to someone's cry from their heart.  It's so personal and tender I can barely allow myself to process it.  I'm trembling and crying as I type this.  I don't deserve to do it.  How can I represent God in the flesh?  How can these hands and this tongue convey a fraction of His love.  It's so far beyond me.

I know I am nothing more than the vessel.  What good comes from me is not me, but the Spirit Lord in me.  So logically, I know I can do this.  But I don't even feel capable of conducting this kind of power.

I will go, though.  I will do it.  Maybe I am, or already have.  Good God!  Thank you for using me.

Aha!

A while ago I mentioned briefly this feeling I've had at times in churches when I try to let go.  There's two reactions: uncontrollable crying and desire to tear the place up.  This happens when I try to open up to God in the service.  Not every time, but a lot of the time.  See usually, I sit quietly, but feel a bit like I have to strap myself in the seat...restrain myself you could say.  So I have various techniques for doing it.  Over the years they've become habitual and I don't really think about them that much.  This lets me get through the service without making some kind of scene. But when I decide to see if God is doing something; open myself up to whatever He has in that moment.  These are often the reactions I get.  I have never known why.

In the last post that mentioned it, I ended up going off in another direction and never explored it.  But then today, I tried again as I watched all these people doing similar behaviors, one arm raised, head to the side, swaying to the music, hands clutched to chest, etc.  I was thinking, is this just mimicry picked up from watching others and assuming that's what it looks like to have a spiritual experience of worship, or is it something universally real that I am missing?  So I opened myself and asked God to tell me what He was doing.  I felt the old desire to tear the place up!  So I quickly shut it down...but not before the thought hit me in connection with a recent Facebook post I made which quoted a modern adaptation of Isaiah 1:11-17.  I had posted it after reading it because it affected me so dramatically at the moment.  This connection was fleeting, but lingered long enough to make me question...am I really connecting with God's heart here?

Is my desire to tear up the place coming from His sorrow and frustration at the facade of religion that obscures who He is?  This is not unfounded.  Jesus tore up the temple courts in Jerusalem for the same reason.  There are many verses in the Bible where God expresses his displeasure at this very thing and the destruction it would cause.  Could the tears also be the other side of that coin?  Anger is just an expression of hurt, as is sorrow.  We feel both at the same time on many occasions.  Since our image is God's it follows that He feels it the same way.

So I delved a little deeper into that feeling and discovered that there isn't any malice in it.  I don't want to hurt people; I don't even have any ill will.  I just want to tear out the facade.  So I thought, what would I say if I did it?  This is what I discovered:

I would charge the stage, take the mic and as I set about tearing apart the decorations and apparati, I'd ask everyone if God was real to them.  Is He really real to them?  Is this all they expect?  Wake up and for once follow their hearts fully!  Let's see God really show up then and there!  I'd jump across the rows of chairs toward any person who responded, climb the light fixtures and rafters and bring the place into chaos.

No doubt most people would be terrified and I'd probably be tackled and drug out screaming...but if God did show up, there would be a moment like Pentacost...the real deal, not the equally fakey occurrences that happen weekly amongst groups of the pentacostal bent.

Has this ever happened to you?  Have you ever longed for something so real and hated the falsity of anything less?  Have you felt things inside you that you aren't sure where they come from?  If so, don't settle. You're not alone and perhaps even less alone than you think.

Great Book

I just read a book that has taken a place among the life-changing reads. Right there with Practice of the Presence, Ishmael, and just about anything by C.S. Lewis. It's called So You Don't Want to Go to Church Anymore.

It isn't the writing that makes this book so good. It's the content. If you read this blog, you'll know many of the attitudes and struggles I have regarding religion. And if you know me personally, you'll know there are many more than what's made it onto this blog. This book spoke to nearly all of them and a few I hadn't even thought of. And it validates a direction I've been heading over the years without really knowing it and in spite of trying desperately not to go that way.

I received this book as an indefinite loan and shoved it on the shelf to take it's place at the back of the list. At the time, I had just finished Organic Church, which made some great points that I emphatically agree with and made me think. But it had too much of an agenda to really sit well. This book actually addresses the attitude behind Organic Church and points out the flaws in the thinking. But, at the time, I wasn't into another apparently similar book, so I let it lay. But recently, things have come up that I have really been struggling with. Inadequacies and injuries that should not exist in what touts itself as God's Way. And people, when confronted with them in an effort to legitimately gain understanding, react in odd ways. So I was aching inside and the book dropped off the shelf at me...quite literally, it almost walked right out into my hand. So I took that as a sign to read it and can see now how the time was so right.

This kind of thing should not at all be surprising if God is truly alive and willing to be known. (This book addresses that as well!) But I think what struck me the most was that the overall theme is not, 'leave the institutional church'. It isn't 'fix the church as we know it'. It isn't anything like that. If it had been, I wouldn't have liked it. The theme of this book is simply, "follow Jesus". Radically, completely, personally, follow Jesus in direct and real ways. It points out how various styles of contemporary American protestant 'churches' fail at this for various reasons. But the freeing thing is, we don't have to fix it. We can stay or go or do something different because we are only responsible for ourselves. We may be told by Jesus to leave. Or we may be told to stay. The point isn't the outcome. The point is the process. Where we fail is in the process.

It radically redefines for me what it means to be a Christian and blows so many of the old rules and manipulations out of the water. Where to start? I don't want to describe them all here. It would take pages. In short, I'm done playing the games. I want something real. I want the amazing fulfilling life promised in the Bible. I have experienced it and want it back. Unfortunately, at the time, we didn't understand the process and it failed as our corruptions perverted it. But now I can see to the root of it and will be able to avoid it...How? Because it isn't up to me. It's up to Jesus. I just have to follow him with abandon. I'll probably get sucked off into error somehow. But he'll pull me back. And I don't have to worry about the ramifications for others because He is doing the same for every person on the planet. We're all on our own journey.

You see, salvation is for all people. God loves us equally. And Jesus opened the door to draw us all to God. He abolished the old system. I am not responsible for my own salvation and God is not withholding His blessings until I get it all worked out. It isn't a reward/punishment system. This is good news, man! This is the Good Spiel, the Gospel, the Good News. We are free! Every one of of us is loved by God and freed from all the bondage we have created for ourselves. Does that mean people will abuse the freedom. Yes. But that is no excuse to crawl back into the chains.

The thing is, I knew this stuff all along and was afraid to give it sway. I had been shown them and pushed them aside from fear and pride and misteaching. Trust me, I've seen the results of threatening someone's comfort level. When you walk out on the water, people will first try to haul you back in the boat. When you tell them the boat sunk eons ago and they're clinging to an illusion, they freak out and start trying to shove you under! "You need the boat! Heretic! Idiot! Pervert! Thief! Liar! Sink damn you!" And then they turn and defame you as a poor lost soul in need of prayer. When you won't play the game, people get torqued. But I'm going to be ok with that. I have to be. It scares me, yeah, but I've been there before. As I've said before, following Jesus is not an option once you know what's real. To deny it makes me a liar.

So here goes: Your Sunday gathering doesn't make you closer to God. Listening to a concert of songs with praises in them doesn't constitute worship. The building you meet in isn't God's house. You don't have to say a prayer of forgiveness or salvation before God will listen to you. A Christian doesn't look like anything particular. You don't need instruction or covering from professional clergy or denominations. You're job title doesn't make you appointed by God. You're children don't need hyped atmosphere and reward games to stay in church, they need something real and will leave when they are old enough because they will see through it. You can't even go to church! That's like saying, you go to human. Wherever Christians go, there church is. You don't have to save the lost or fix what's wrong; Jesus did that and does that. God's purposes run crosswise through our efforts, including institutions, ministries, home churches, pagans and atheists, and as such the organization or lack thereof is irrelevant. You don't have to figure it out or defend God. God loves you. He died to have you back. And He actively, daily, minute by minute, draws you to Himself in His ways on His timing. This is reality. All you have to do to experience it is quit ignoring it. And God will reveal Himself. He will prove Himself. You need no more faith than to believe He exists and wants you to know Him. You're emotions are ok. You're questions are ok. If you feel uneasy about something it's probably because something is wrong. You don't have to blindly accept it, or "just have faith." And if someone teaches you that, they are probably wrong.

God it feels good to write this!

Space & Silence

I just finished watching a promotional video and reading the website for Virgin Galactic. This is a company created by Richard Branson of the Virgin brand. Today they unveiled their second generation commercial spacecraft. The spaceport and runway are under construction. Everything done to the Greenest specs. Reservations are being taken now. The promotions are impressive. This is not an airline, so much as an adventure tour designed to make a reality of what Epcot and many others have dreamed of. The current price is $200,000 for a flight with a $20,000 refundable deposit. Still out of range for most people, which will give it time before it becomes a bus for a villanous rabble of crowded seats and bad service. Right now it is clean and pure.

Looking it over and reading the material, I am struck by the intense emotions it stirs in me. It is this sort of thing that keeps me in the Bright Green camp. A vision of a beautiful merger of human ingenuity, poetry, science, and nature. Humans at their best, which is pitiful rare and less than is necessary. We cannot save ourselves, but the divine spark is in us. We are not all bad.

Thinking of the otherworldliness of such an experience, reading the descriptions from the test runs, it will be a world of experiences pressed together. The expectation, the intensity, the release, and the compression back into the everyday. I have often looked for good descriptions of what it is like to experience space. To live outside of our realm. I am struck by the silence that they describe. As the rocket engines cease, there will be utter silence it says, surrounded by sublime otherworldy visual beauty and the experience of no weight pulling against ones muscles and bones, the loss of up and down.

Space is silent. If God is "up" in our conception, then this is His realm. Amazing that the metaphor extends so well into an experience the writers of those metaphors could never have known. God dwells in silence. In perfect peace. Be still and know... Our senses fail and cannot fully appreciate what it is to be in that mode. But it is attractive. Once it repelled me, but it has drawn me in as I have glimpsed pieces of it.

I am not wholly ignorant of it. I have often sought out these kinds of otherworldy experiences. I am reminded of free-diving. The stillness, the cold, the quiet, the loss of up and down, the beauty. I wonder if in space, I would hear my heart beat as clearly as I do under water?

I have taken a deep breath (the expectation) and plunged head first into the blue deep (the intensity). No air, so sounds are perverted, and ultimately stilled, though those that persist are long and distant. The rhythm of my lungs, my constant accompaniment, is stilled and the pulse of the liquid within me replaces it, slowing, slowing, as I hang between planes(the release). Up or down, right or left have no meaning save in relation to my own body. The zen masters were right. The center of the universe is 6 centimeters below my navel. Strange shapes move about me, sleek and fast. Eyeing me and ignoring me. I am insignificant here. And as my body undergoes the mammalian reflex and shadowy webs begin to obscure my vision I am at perfect peace. Just then, I am keenly aware that I am not at all alone. There is a presence pervading this place, pervading me, dwelling here. And it jolts me. My vision recovers, I look for the glimmer and glide toward it. My chest expands with some invisible substance (the recompression) and then I burst back into my world with a deep inhalation.

In some ways this seems the same as the description of space. In other ways it is different. But in both, God dwells, depths and heights. He inhabits these worlds that are not for us. It is sublime.

The Veil

If you know anything about contemplation, or even contemporary Christianity you must have run across references to the veil. It's in songs and literature. Without going into a whole dissertation on it, the image refers to the cloth that was hung in the ancient Hebrew Tabernacle to separate the area known as the Holy of Holies...or the place set apart for God's presence to reside. It was a very restricted place because...well, it was holy...in the true sense. God's presence was too powerful for people to experience. It would kill the mortal who entered without the proper preparations. I'm not going to go into why right now; that's a whole different topic. Suffice to say it became the symbol for the necessary separation between God and man.

When Jesus died, the Bible says that the veil in the temple was torn in two, symbolizing that there was no longer any separation between God and man. Also possibly that God's presence was no longer residing in that place...but that is a thought that just occurred to me on the spot...I'll have to think that one through more.

Anyway, throughout Chrsitianity, the symbol of the veil remained as a metaphor for the aspects of God that we can not comprehend or know. Sometimes it was called the Cloud of Unknowing. It is also used in a variation on this sense when someone refers to experiencing God in a way greater than normal. They may say they, "passed through the veil." or that the veil parted.

I have always wondered, and longed for, sometimes even raged at the lack of experiencing God more fully. If He was real and He represented ultimate reality and this world is but a shadow, why did He not show up like a pillar of fire! If not that grand, at least a concrete experience that could not be mistaken or denied. Why didn't He simply make Himself plain!

Of course I've heard all the answers about the need for faith. But that is insufficient. I'm not talking about a lack of belief. I believed as much as anyone could, but I wasn't going to pretend to be blind or deaf. If by faith someone meant pretending to be satisfied with arid prayers and the occasional emotion stirred by music, that was not going to cut it! Were those "charismatics" as I heard them called growing up, really experiencing something I wasn't or were they all wrapped up in emotion and mass-hypnosis/hysteria as was supposed by many?

Even as I learned more and experienced more and was given answers they were still not sufficient to satisfy that longing for something real. Now that I had experienced God in ways that I never had and was totally assured of His existence, why couldn't I touch Him? Hadn't Jesus parted that veil? Why was He still hiding behind it? I had read the mystics experiencing perfect union and describing it in very physical terms. I wanted that! Why only glimpses? Why nothing sustained? I had heard the explanations that it was so I could function in this world as I couldn't if His presence was that strong, but that is not sufficient either. World be damned! I would take all of Him any day! Plus God was a God of order, why couldn't He reveal himself more concretely without harming me if He chose? Why, why always the veil!

Of course, I have gone through the entire gambit of responses. Pressing harder until Iwas ground to the dirt straining against the immovable, fasting until I was so weak I collapsed, holding myself to such strict account of my behavior that I was locked in self-loathing, giving up and resting in that there was nothing more, feeling rejected and unworthy, striving to mentally unlock the secrets...and many more. Through it all, I still didn't understand that blasted veil that shouldn't be there.

Recently, I ran across an article that really lept off the page to me. I was reading, in a modern voice, what Contemplation was and how to verify it. I felt like I was reading a chronicle of my own experience. I had read this same kind of thing many times, but always in such an ancient voice or muddled by the incoherance of the mystic that I couldn't quite grasp it all. But here I was reading it in clear modern English. The effect it had on me is too deep for words, especially blog words. Lest I start babbling like a mystic, suffice to say I understood much more than I had and was humbled.

Then today, I was thinking about the great mercy that God has given us. That's when it hit me that the veil is also an immeasurable mercy! Just as the Hebrews needed to know that God was with them, but couldn't survive the presence, just as God had to cover Moses' eyes when He passed before him, so the veil was not an indication that God was hiding, but that He was present! Now that the temple veil is split, God truly is always with us. He is not hiding. He truly does reveal himself to us, and by ever greater degrees as we seek Him. But only in His way. To get to a new place we must go by the directions we are told. If we don't follow the one who knows the path, we can't expect to arrive. So we must come to know Him in the right path. Unfortunately, the Cloud of Unknowing is far more apt a term than I had ever known. There is no hard fast boundary to a cloud of moisture. We aren't outside it, and then inside. As it approaches, it gradually obscures our vision until we can not see. Likewise this Cloud gradually takes us beyond our ability to comprehend so that unless we are told what is happening, we are gradually more and more confused. We feel less and less. In truth, He is closer than He ever has been in this time. But we can't see it or even recognize the effects it has on us because He is beyond mortal sense and we are operating in that mode in the Cloud.

When He steps out of the cloud to reveal himself, it is a necessity and greatest mercy that He stays behind the veil. Otherwise we would be terrified and unmade. The veil is not a means of hiding himself from us, but of revealing when we are too unprepared for the greater presence! The fact that I recognize the veil is not a mark of how little I experience of God, but of how great He has chosen to reveal Himself to me. If I were to see Him concretely as I had wanted, that would be so much less of who He is because it would be confined in the mere mortal sense (like the tesseract is only a shadow cast by the 4 dimensional object). Perhaps this is what the apostle was thinking when he wrote that God humbled himself to the point of being human. My problem was not that I wasn't experiencing God, but that I assumed the experience would be a sensible matter. How could it be?! And how great a mercy that despite my pleas and tantrums and vanities, God continued to walk me by the hand down the road of revelation to a far greater place than I had realized.

That said, if I had the advantage of a trusted director to help me understand these things, it might not have been so difficult for me to come to this understanding. That is another reason this blog exists. Lacking any organized and wide-spred community of contemplation where we might find experienced teachers and directors, perhaps my ramblings may be helpful to other children of the woods wandering outside the Keep. And just perhaps, some Godly experienced teachers may find this letter in a bottle and realize that there are thousands more adrift looking for someone to help us understand this fog, if only you would sound the horn!