New Year

Some bad habits can be transcended. Some can be diminished. Some will never be transcended or diminished. There is always the option of faith in the present moment. Hope is for a better future, but now is not the future. Hope requires us to live in the future. Hope is a form of insanity. Faith is about dropping a bad habit in this moment. Faith allows us to draw on a deep sense of our value as human beings with the certainty of union with God. The truth of this value can set us free of any bondage of the mind. It is a moving sea of reality, ordained by God by virtue of our unique birth and purpose as a minister of the Holy Spirit.

We cling to fearful thoughts which strengthen the habit's hold. We feel a primitive ring of threat surrounding us, often springing from our earliest experiences. It is an imperfect circle of brokenness. It is a raw-edged boundary of deprivation, abandonment and psychic shadow. Our core knows that without protection and love we will die.

With painstaking honesty, we can learn how to protect ourselves and how to create loving relationships, but that core -- that primitive core -- knows that it is threatened with extinction. Extinction means to put out. We may live with the knowledge that we could have been put out by the neglect or abuse, but we were not put out. In some manner that we will never see, we kept our integrity. We have persistent fear that holds us, but we have always managed to think in such a way as to take care of ourselves. We are damaged, but sane.

A power equal to the fear is the energy that surrounds us in the Holy Light of our value as a person. That value is the truth which has superseded the truth of the neglect and abuse. Each of us is worth love and care -- worth all the love and care that we can possibly experience. Whether we create it for ourselves or accept it from God and other beings, it is the Holy Cloud which replaces the ring of threat forever.

Our task is to face the joylessness and emptiness and sense of abandonment which provokes self-damage. Our task is to take ownership of our perfection in the eyes of God and our salvation from our mischief through the advocacy and atonement of Jesus. No matter how thoroughly one is rejected or abandoned, one is wrapped in that moving sea of reality. We have validity, consequence, fully developed power and the right right to BE. There is no doubt as to our wholeheartedness without the habit. We must own that reality and drop the habit now. It is no longer necessary to keep us from floating into oblivion and death. Our psyche is intact. Our spirit thrives, full of life, power and integrity.

Quick To Tears

If I look at you with exceeding tenderness
Forgive the intrusion on your privateness
I only try to see
Beyond the hair and the skin
To the roiling, gritty reality
Of you.

I am a green twig
Crushed by your careless passing.
In my darkness
The sap of that fresh wound glistens on my face
Then dries
In beads of longing and desire
Both primitive and present.

Beside you, I am beside myself
In driven waves
Of elation and guilt--
A newly sprouted branch
Moving gently in the thin, cool breath of Spring
Broken by the memory of your warm mouth on my neck,
Yet I am blameless in my intention.
I am sparkling--
Adventurous--
Clean--
And sometimes quick to tears.

Re-Posting of an Old Entry: Feet of Clay

In the midst of the worries of the job search, I have been trying to think. I’m reading Feet of Clay: Saints, Sinner, and Madmen, a Study of Gurus by Anthony Storr. He quotes Friedrich Neitzsche:

‘Faith is always coveted most and needed most urgently where will is lacking; for will, as the affect of command, is the decisive sign of sovereignty and strength. In other words, the less one knows how to command, the more urgently one covets someone who commands, who commands severely – a god, prince, class, physician, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience.’

It occurred to me that I haven’t lost the conviction that God loves me which is the bedrock of faith. I believe, however, that faith will never intercede between my behavior and my fear (because I obey the command of my ego). The only thing, then, is God’s love. This seems a good thing to be stripped down to, at the end of the day. The conviction of God’s love is a pre-surrender to a new command.

So what would that surrender feel like? What would it be like? It would be nothing, just like my ego is nothing. My fear-thoughts are just that – little Observers that Observe something as fearful. My ego is a moment in the Observer which scares me and prompts me to manage fear with a bad behavior. My sovereign commander is nothing. Surrender would be a nothing that replaces the bad behavior. Surrender would be the Observer who sees no reason to react at all.

I must stand in the path of an oncoming train and calmly let it hit me. The calm is the utter surrender to the sovereignty of Truth. The train is the devastating will of God’s love; devastating only because it is so True that nothing else is worth owning. Oh what a glorious freedom. That is why faith only in God’s love for me is a pre-surrender because if there is nothing else, then all I have left to do is to turn and stand on the tracks. Surrender. Addiction is anything that gives you peace and causes problems in your life. Addictions bring peace and calm as a sour substitute for a will to freedom and the true desire for personal command. My only chance to learn how to command is based in the love of God.

A Part of a Particular Myth

Christians are people who believe an elaborate mythology. They have found a way to explain the unexplainable. Those explanations are a part of every aspect of their lives.

Some of the mythology goes like this:

The Explanation For Suffering

Jesus was sent to earth as a full and perfect atonement for the rejection of God by all. His death made it possible for anyone to know God who seeks him. Because of that one, sufficient and perfect sacrifice—that one example of innocent suffering--no rejection of God can make an individual unacceptable to God, if the individual seeks acceptance.

Since Jesus’ death and resurrection, his living person lives in All Baptised People, aka The Church. Therefore, the sacrifice and suffering of all faithful people helps to redeem the entire world from separation from God. My innocent suffering as part of the living Christ makes it possible for someone else to get close to God. And that’s the way it is for the faithful.

Each Face of a Cut Gem

Life is a facetted jewel showing one face towards us at a time. Each edge falls away onto a new surface. Each facet points directly into our face with intense but painless brightness. Our eyes fix on it. The facets are small flames that find protection between the curved hands of our awareness. There the bright flatness is held by the mind’s eye where it is engendered into conclusion, action and experience -- into Something. We slip over the sharp edge and the jewel turns facing us again, with something new. These shining, flat moments are where we fix our consciousness with pain or indifference. With compelling determination or passionate fearlessness. The surfaces teach and slip one into the next and make a lifetime. The gemstone speaks and turns.

Mother Died

My Mother died on October 19, 2006. My sister told me to sit in the back of the church at the memorial service before the graveside.

I took one of the priests from my church with me for support at the church and I felt quite strong. I sat in a convenient place, neither front row or in the back where my sister wanted me. The priest at that church came back to me to shake my hand, very pointedly including me. I can thank my minister for speaking to him ahead and making sure he knew of the strained and strange circumstances. There was a eulogy read by My brother’s wife Diane which included the many, many things in her life from honey to rummage sales. Mom had asked for Eucharist, (holy communion) too, which was very nice. Funerals are really a time of celebration of the soul returning to God, so the coffin was draped in a sumptuous cream-colored cover. Everything was very beautiful.

The priest wore a capa negra or black cape made especially to go over vestments at a funeral in cold weather. It was a very dramatic touch at the graveside. A friend of the family handed me a yellow long-stemmed rose to put on the coffin as I left. The prayers were very comforting and beautiful. It snowed. It was a beautiful soft blanket in the sky for the day – something she would have loved and even photographed. I know I will get in touch with some people and write some thank-you notes, as well I should.

Handcuffs

I am like a person who was sent to prison for something I did not do, and after release wears a handcuff and chain dangling from one wrist. I wear the handcuff as some insane solution to the damage I have suffered. My reasoning is that the handcuff resolves the disappointment and betrayal and loss. It gives a shape to my faulty thinking, guilt, anger and helplessness. It dangles from my wrist and shows the world that I am permanently harmed.

Somehow in my mind it follows that what happened to me is so bad that I cannot think in such a way as to make good decisions for myself. I tell myself that irreparable harm and permanent weakness come from tragedy when the heavens are filled with twinkling stars of human transcendence. I lie to myself and wear the handcuff as some sort of protection that is no protection at all.

I know what the faulty thinking is. I know how a person is when they are unharmed and strong and no victim. I know I have only to accept a different reality full of strength and faith and good, self-loving decisions to be unhandcuffed and unhindered forever