Riding the bus to work

On my left hand rests my watch,
Ticking entropically toward oblivion

On my right rests my prayer rope,
Repentant rhythm revealing rest

Odd pairings

I combine here silence with appetite. I'm quite unsure whether it works.

May your words be charged with the hunger, hope and longing of your Silences
May your deeds overflow with the urgency of what remains undone

If you have no Silence within you, no sense of your work’s incompleteness
Then you must Stop speaking, Stop doing

Until there be “Fire shut up in your bones”
That you not become incessant busyness, a clanging cymbal

On Writing

O Merciful and man loving Creator of all

All things are in Your hand and the truth of all things is written by You.
My hand of flesh trembles, then, as I take up the pen.
How can I, foul and corrupt through my many sins, ephemeral and dead by birth, write of things unseen?
How dare I write Of Your Divine Majesty, of Your Incarnation, of Your Life-creating death and most Holy Resurrection?

What can I do of myself but compound old errors and make new ones?
Yet You command and so I obey.

I obey with the hope that Your Mercy may yet lead me in the way of repentance.

I obey with the hope that because You are Just, none might be lost through my many sins, my errors and the weakness of my explanations.

I pray You, Divine Master that my hardened heart which cries out against You as “a hard master, reaping where you did not sow”, might at least relinquish my hand to You that somehow repentance might work in me.

That by Your grace my fist be unclenched and my hand begin to write.
That by writing the truths I do not yet believe, I might begin to believe,
to repent and to be saved.

Cold

Bright autumn light
Sparkling frost
Skittering brown leaves
Whispering of summer lost
In a voice from Bradbury’s Mars

Pentecost

O sweet eternal Light

Your descent has raised us up to heaven

O Flame which cools the passions, Sword which heals all wounds

O Most Holy Spirit

In Your Silence begins all true speech

In Your Stillness is the root of all life

O Spirit of the Living God
Descend upon us
as you did upon the Apostles

That our deeds might bring your living stillness
That our words might carry your healing silence

Just enough...

There is just enough light
The stars glimmer and fade
The sun rises and sets
The moon waxes and wanes
All in season and rhythm

Not enough truth?
Not enough answers?
As well complain the moon wanes too soon,
the sun sets too early and the stars are lost in cloud.
Why complain when you can trust?

Where does the pain go?

Pain is sometimes a very lonely thing. We've all encountered the fresh pain that comes from clumsy comforters who say things like "It could be worse!"and "Look at the bright side!" as they hastily retreat from our presence. Then there are the "rescuers", just as damaging in their own way. They have such a hatred of pain that they compulsively try to "do something" to erase it.
Sometimes it's possible to fix things, just as sometimes we need to 'buck up' etc. But sometimes we are simply in terrible pain and no one can "fix" it. In periods like these when the problems are not yet soluble "seeing the bright side" is more anesthetic than curative and "fixing the problem" would require either a time machine or full-blown psychosis. So where can we put our pain to keep it from overwhelming us?

In Fr. Lev Gilet's book "In Thy Presence" he writes about God's entry into every intimate detail of our condition in the Incarnation, especially all our sufferings. He mentions the story of the three Hebrew children who survived the fiery furnace they were thrown into when they would not commit idolatry. There appears a fourth figure, a "Son of Man" who is with them in the furnace. He does not take them out of the furnace, nor does He turn off the heat. Until reading this I always thought of it as God keeping them from experiencing the heat by simple fiat. After all, we believe that "When God wills the order of nature is overruled." But what if God did not apply invisible asbestos to them? What if they experienced the suffering and He suffered with them and their intimacy with Him preserved them in the suffering?

What if the One Who "changed the fiery flames into dew" did so by taking on the suffering of His servants, entering into their pain rather than erasing it? Don't we see this in Lazarus' death where Christ sorrows with Lazarus' family? Jesus says to His disciples that part of the reason for Lazarus' death is that they might believe. John spends a good deal of time recording the grief of Lazarus' family and friends as well as Jesus' reaction to all this pain. He suffers with them and then resurrects Lazarus. What are the disciples learning to believe? Not only that Jesus has power to resurrect but that he is willing to taste of death, His own, but also that of His loved ones.

By the time Gethsemane arrives, He has already drunk deeply from the cup of human suffering. And in that place of dreadful glory what is revealed to us? His immediate knowledge of suffering alone. After entreating His followers to stay, to watch and to pray with Him, He is abandoned by all.

What if the answer to our suffering is His suffering with us? What if the answer to my question is "Straight into the Heart of our Maker?"...

April Snow

Snow falls thick, fast, and urgent
blanketing the world one last time

A boy on the beach finding just one more perfect stone
just one more bucket of sand on the castle

How blame the season for a child's exuberance?
especially when his Father has permitted....

Twisted wreck of self-love

This last Sunday my priest spoke of how the Church has constructed Lent with a view to healing us of self-love. It is such an insidious and commonplace disorder. How many things do our passions present to us as needs? And why do we fall for it so easily? One answer is that the passions actually do need these things and without them they (the passions) will die. In a culture where we're taught to identify with the passions, rather than control the normal ones and destroy the evil ones, it's easy to see how we can develop the habit of resisting the discomforts of Lent.
An interesting side effect of dealing with one 'need' presented to us by the passions is that a new one usually pops up immediately. This reveals the wisdom of the Church in prescribing a common fast, rather than an a la carte approach to Lent. Our true illness is the habit of self-indulgence or self-love. Denying ourselves one thing only for the period of the fast may in fact lead us to simply overindulge in something else. The breadth and length of the prescribed fast are calculated to afford us the best possible chance to gain mastery over the passions. It is of course possible to pervert the fast into an exercise in pride or an excuse for enormities of self-indulgence later. Lent will not do its work if we are prayerless and unrepentant.

May the work of this Holy season pervade our hearts and minds with the Goodness of God which leads us all to repentance.

Questions of lent

O Merciful Lord
I know that with each breath I draw
I am your servant

Yet why do I seek to be the servant who enters Your labours at the 11th hour?
Why abuse the knowledge of your kindness?
Why eat again from the bitter tree?

What disordered appetites drive me to this frenzy of self-love-loathing?
I do not know, but I would begin to know how lost I am without you.
Find me out, my Lord and save me.

Amen

Against all this

The whimpering advent of Eliot's Hollow Men:

"Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;"

Against all this, as ever, are clear words spoken in sunlight that feed the heart of one man from another. Against all this, as ever, are those prophetic voices which cut through chains and drag us, blinking, into daylight. Against all this, as ever, are the midwives of souls, the begetters in Christ, the infinite litany of intimacy which is the true and natural order of all things.

The obedient treading of stars

When the sun rises slowly some mornings, I wonder if he has a hangover?
Hiding miserably behind dark clouds whilst groping for coffee and orange juice.
Sorry folks, no Psalm 19:5 today, just a pale, wan disc, peering bleary-eyed through hazy skies.

The Hebrews could understand the world mechanically.
They had machines, after all. But they did not choose this.
Instead; a world where mountains skip, rivers flee and trees clap.
He speaks, Creation responds!
How much now lost in our hunger for control?
How corrupted the very nature of nature by our persistence in sin?
What restored in His earthly sojourn? What remains incomplete?
From this groaning of all creation, what fruit?

Where is yes?

This past Sunday was the story of the two demoniacs. Their wills so bound they could not exercise them. My priest talked about how we must use our wills each day.

Reflecting on it I see my grand commitments and my million inner vows all tethering me to the false triumph of intention. Pretence of accomplishment, rooted in vain fantasy.

Instead, right now, in this moment, I want to know how to to say yes to God. I want to exercise my will instead of my imagination. That I not be a prey to the passions.
Have mercy upon me O Lord and help me.

Media

Words, so damn many words
cheapened like watered scotch
that was cheap already

Numbers, bloody stupid numbers on paper
Some damn fool somewhere
got it into his head that
a few marks on a piece of paper
were enough to count for the firm handshake and plain dealing of men

Pictures, don't get me started
Used to be, people thought maybe what we could see came from someplace so fine it was invisible
This world a shadow or a copy of that one
Then we got to taking pictures of everything
Nowadays almost no one believes in the invisible places anymore
Hell (and I mean that literally) we don't even think we need this world anymore,
let alone a place for it to come from

Father's Day

Wrote this almost two years ago on Father's Day........

I am a fool

While my son plays
(on the kitchen floor of my apartment)
I sit here trying to speak fire

While my son plays
(with pokemon cards we got today)
I try to coax flame from the embers of my soul

While my son plays
(fiddling with the tv screen after his cartoon is over)
I bombard my heart with demands for water of life
_______________________________________

While Daddy plays
(sitting at his computer)
I am a firedragon

While Daddy plays
(sitting at his computer)
I breathe fire

While Daddy plays
(sitting at his computer)
I am a fish in the ocean

Hmmmm.....

This is disturbing. I'm thinking "Can't look away horrified fascination", like a train wreck.

vic -- [adjective]: Visually addictive 'How will you be defined in the dictionary?' at QuizGalaxy.com

Grant me your salvation on my bed

I never understood this phrase in prayers before falling asleep. Why say such a thing?
Recently I had an experience that gave me a meaningful personal sense of this prayer.
I was lying in bed, trying to sleep and I had so many worries, cares, fears and temptations scurrying through my head that I could not rest. My heart was wearied and troubled by many, many things.

In the middle of this mess the phrase came to me. "Grant me your salvation upon my bed."

Bed, that place where we fall asleep and wake up. Where we entertain our dreams and wrestle with our fears, uninterrupted by the distractions of life. Alone with our thoughts.

Bed, where we wrestle with our fears and thoughts. Where we rest from the difficulties and sorrows of life. A place of fear, hope, possibility and so much more. Where we make love, where we know and are known, body and soul.

How natural to ask God to be with us in this place.

Naked

Ashamed - I pillage the garden,
grabbing at straws and leaves of circumstance
Anything will do.

Stitching them into
A wretched rag
Which draws focus, saps strength
and begets new shame

Anthropos Thanatos or Anthropos Athanatos

Thanatos
Unshaped by life
For I have refused to live
Controlled by death
For I refuse to die

Athanatos
Giving shape to life
For you have lived
Unconstrained by death
For you have embraced death

Nerdo

Thanks Stacy I'm nerdier than you are!!!