I haven't posted in a while. I tried but couldn't. I've been through one of the worst dark periods I've had ever. I don't want to go into it, but it's been rough. I'm doing better now.
I don't know what the purpose of it is, but it has revealed my weakness, my baseness, my violence, and my selfishness. Maybe that is the purpose. I just know it is not fun and not pretty. It's also not made up and I can't help it. If you've never been there, you won't understand and that's ok. Don't seek it.
I have said it before, but it is clearer to me than ever that whatever is good in me is not from me. I know you'll deny that and think it's just the darkness talking, and that's fine. I hope you never see that side of me.
But I'm trying to keep seeing it. I don't want to live in it, but I don't want to forget it either. I tend toward hubris and self-confidence without it. Even the humility you think you know in me is a form of self-pride. I'm not kidding.
People lead the question all the time. Christians are the worst about it. What do you think will happen if you constantly keep telling people how to be? Anyone with half a brain will quickly learn how to pretend at it. Put on the actions and even self-deceive that they have achieved it. I've done it. I habitually do it. And you reward the better liars.
I have a ready bunch of scripts to throw up in any given situation. I watch carefully. I have fakes backstopping fakes and will say whatever works to get the reaction I need.
And what I really need is a safe place to let those things slowly fall off. People who are not impressed by it. People who want me to thoroughly be good rather than merely seem good. You condemn yourselves in me! And I condemn myself!
Understand me, I am not saying this from a place of despair. Quite the opposite. When I was despairing, I hid from you because then I can't keep up the masks, can't keep the demons in their chains. But right now I'm in that hazy space between the nightmare and the bright day and soon I'll be fully dressed and presentable again.God forbid!
I need a savior. I am fully reminded that if there is any hope for me it is in Jesus. Not knowledge about him, but in the real living him. I am not claiming to know grand mystical things. If I did, I doubt them now. He didn't even show up in some nonmiraculous way to rescue me. But I don't care. My heart leaps when I think about him, when I read about him. I understand the meaning of hoping in him. I didn't choose this. If I did it was rigged. I am not in control. So if he doesn't have me, if I do not eventually arrive in a place of peace and perfection and learn that he was there when I couldn't see it or know it, then I would rather rush headlong into the void now. It isn't about this world. It isn't about the surface things you spend so much time talking about as if we could just decide to be something else. Even if you can, I CAN'T! I don't know how. It doesn't work. Whether that's brain chemistry, spiritual sense, slavery, karma, grace, whatever you want to call it. What I can do is lie about it though!
You'd rather me be presentable, disfigure my feelings into acceptable packages, even though you THINK you want me to let it out. Which is the most insidious part! Your words say one thing and your actions say another in the same breath. Your words are a trap. A demon maw yawns behind your fair and hopeful words, you whitewashed tombs! Damn you satans in a hollow christ's image! I've never yet found anyone who really meant it when they say it's safe to let it out and let it go. Maybe one or two people come closer than others. But if I have ever let the depth of it peak out, people take pains...no give pains to shut it in again.
So keep teaching behaviors. Keep focusing on outwards before inwards. Keep modeling the plastic masks. Keep grinding out budding faith with your two faces. Keep making liars. I don't want to be one anymore.
Showing posts with label worship. Show all posts
Showing posts with label worship. Show all posts
Thursday, October 20, 2016
Monday, May 16, 2016
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...
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...
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