Hold Close the Darkening Moment; Touch Eternal

 Hold Close the Darkening Moment

 

So precious, gifts of God.

So shocking, lessons of God.

So denied, those lessons.

Daily I marvel at how wrong I was.

How right have been shown my understandings of God.

How pathetically wrong my estimation of humanity.

It all compounds of course,

a mother's abuse,

well justified guilt,

overwhelming opportunities,

irresistible opportunities,

unbidden opportunities.

 

I await the sudden sunrise,

and hold close the darkening moment.

 

 Touch Eternal 

So precious, so precious.

Warm, soft, fuzzy, miraculous gift of God, watching the screen in the dark as I type.

Intense, this awareness of touch.

Peace, calm peace,

before another day in the world.

A cord connecting that moment past,

A song connecting to that moment past,

All focused, all coalescing, in this moment.

Always surprising, the revelations of presence.

Never bidden, pure gift, a precursor to timelessness

when all will be gift, pure gift,

finally, finally aware that

nothing is of our own.

 

Rippling breath,

abiding touch,

touch of the angels,

when all will be touch,

enduring touch,

connecting the then 

to a timeless now,

connection 

across a no longer extant space,

separation no longer possible.

 

The briefest of eternal previews

enters even here,

even in this world,

in defiance of the illusion of time,

a deep and penetrating glimpse,

a gift, unbidden, unsought,

for you cannot seek 

what you cannot imagine.

Touch - warm, soft, all encompassing,

teaching its gentle lesson

of what will be and is,

when touch will no longer 

be localized and momentary,

but enduring, unending,

never again to seemingly end,

but always building, ever growing,

life finally come even to us.

 

There is no sharing of this experience,

no words can convey 

the meaning of touch

that fills and fulfills.

"Touch" seems 

so physical, so carnal, so temporal.

How can it possibly convey anything eternal?

Yet in that moment of warmth and softness,

in a tiny contact,

all meaning and Purpose abide,

for a moment,

the eternal moment

Almost Forgotten Words

 

Almost Forgotten Words 

We all long for peace.  But with the slightest miscommunication wars erupt, within the household or between nations.

The great conflicts and the domestic disputes coalesce out of the swirling storm of disconnection and distance.  Each of these inner worlds, each ensemble of beliefs and expectations and desires, i.e. each individual human being, churns within the prison cell of its worldly experience.  Words form feeble and distorted connections among the individual cells, but the almost universal aversion to really listening renders the words impotent and their effects unpredictable.  

So arguments ensue and wars erupt.  

It is tragedy unnecessary and horror avoidable, but our trenchant resistance to learning ensures the tragedies and horrors will compound.

Ludicrous sound the admonitions to turn the other cheek and give away your coat as well as cloak.  Such progressive ideas were and are resoundingly ignored.  But imagine the world in the absence of those admonitions.  Indeed, look at parts of the world untouched by those impractical admonitions.  

Against all odds those words and their source have and do make a difference.  They at least sufficiently prick our conscience that we give lip-service to the premise that war and divorce are not to be celebrated.  

We may not turn the other cheek, but at least we ever so slightly uncomfortably squirm upon hearing the phrase.  Maybe our retributive blows are in turn ever so slightly tempered by some nagging sub-conscious awareness that some unrealistic itinerant progressive long ago pointed out a better way.  

Do not listen.  Do not learn.  Continue as always, pragmatic and patriotic, resolute and righteous.  Try to deny that irritating tiny grain of sand in your well shined marching shoes,.... "turn the other cheek…..turn…...turn and repent."

Candles

 Candles

What fragments will survive, what remnant of touch.

Blessed, blessed,

immersion in Source and holiness,

those first safe moments of the day.

None can share, 

not yet,

blessed, blessed ritual,

not hollow ritual of things and mumbled words and smoke that promptly disappears,

but ritual of soul for the moment embraced.

The world, the world, 

terrible and terrifying,

potential unrealized.

But in the still of pre-dawn

the madness abates,

and blessed, blessed Communion

is enabled.

A touch,

reminding touch,

safe touch,

and the soul remembers

what was and

what will be.

Time finally slows.

The torrent of needs and hungers and demands is set aside.

Finally, finally,

miracle returns,

or better said,

eyes are opened to perceive the miracles always present.

None will wonder at such words.

They will prompt only momentary curiosity.

But surely there is more.

Surely those hints are of meaning.

Celebrate them,

though the soul longs to celebrate so much more.

While waiting for sunrise even a flickering candle is comfort in the cold and dark.

Yes, it is cold and dark.

Yes, those are beautiful candles, those imperfect children struggling to immerge from the spiritual womb of this carnal existence.  

Do not look to them for sunrise.  But in the midst of the isolation in the cold dark, do not miss the beauty of their tiny candle flames, though they cast even darker shadows.

Grim the moment, but bright the promise.

The sun will rise,

all will rise.

Do not pretend it is not dark and cold.

But do not miss the beauty of the candles,

do not miss the essential, though for now meager, light and warmth they cast.

See the Wholeness in all its darkness,

this birth of individual children of One loving Source

Foolish Faith

 

FOOLISH FAITH

 

Run, run away!  Flee, flee from the horrors of the human world,

the willing cruelty, the chosen stupidity.

It is, all in all,

compared to the Source Garden and Destiny Home,

a horrible place.

Demons and devils have been loosed,

and they are in human form,

intent on inflicting suffering on the children of God,

intent on deceiving the children of God,

intent on convincing us we are not children of the non-existent God and we should and will succumb to the cold reality of this world and will become like them.

The demons and devils, the creatures of this world, have a most convincing argument.  Their taunts and cruelties are tangible and demanding, inescapable and tactile.  In contrast, the call to have faith in some well hidden Light is nebulous and tremulous, lacking any convincing argument or rational justification.

Can any faith possibly survive?....real faith, sacrificial faith, questioning and doubting faith that is, as opposed to the blind, unquestioning,  and fundamentalist "faith" that serves the purposes of the worldly demons and devils.  

Simple fact: sacrificial faith has survived so far.  It has survived in the face of these very demons and devils.  It has survived times just as bad and worse.  If there is to be proof of miracles, it is in the survival of this faith, this irrational and unprofitable kindness and compassion.

Demons and devils are loosed, evangelists and terrorists, marketers and politicians, media personalities and drug dealers, ayatollahs and sports heroes, all proclaiming the gospel of profits, entertainment, vengeance, consumption, and worldly victory.

Faith, real faith, compassionate faith, best give up, or at least hide.  But it doesn't.  It can't.  That indiscernible whisper still drowns out the amplified cacophony of the world and its loudly yelling demons.  That soft and subtle Light still overwhelms the flashing glare of the burning world.  

Faith abides, in sorrowing and grieving hearts, hearts waiting, hearts knowing.

Touch

 

Touch 

So precious, so precious.

Warm, soft, fuzzy, miraculous gift of God, watching the screen in the dark as I type.

Intense, this awareness of touch.

Peace, calm peace,

before another day in the world.

A cord connecting that moment past,

a song connecting to that moment past,

all focused, all coalescing, in this moment.

Always surprising, the revelations of presence.

Never bidden, pure gift, a precursor to timelessness

when all will be gift, pure gift,

finally, finally aware that

nothing is of our own.

 

Rippling breath,

abiding touch,

touch of the angels,

when all will be touch,

enduring touch,

connecting the then 

to a timeless now,

connection 

across a no longer extant space,

separation no longer possible.

 

The briefest of eternal previews

enters even here,

even in this world,

in defiance of the illusion of time,

a deep and penetrating glimpse,

a gift, unbidden, unsought,

for you cannot seek 

what you cannot imagine.

Touch - warm, soft, all encompassing,

teaching its gentle lesson

of what will be and is,

when touch will no longer 

be localized and momentary,

but enduring, unending,

never again to seemingly end,

but always building, ever growing,

life finally come even to us.

 

There is no sharing of this experience,

no words can convey 

the meaning of touch

that fills and fulfills.

"Touch" seems 

so physical, so carnal, so temporal.

How can it possibly convey anything eternal?

Yet in that moment of warmth and softness,

in a tiny area of contact,

all meaning and Purpose abide,

for a moment,

the eternal moment.

One Constant

 

ONE CONSTANT 

Last night I watched the spectacular and heavily favored Mikella Shiffrin ski out and disqualify for the second race in a row.  In shock she sat at the edge of the run for twenty-five minutes.

For the vast majority of us, plans and expectations are a momentary solace, an illusion of predictability, a delusion of our own empowerment.  Of course we hear of the Bezos's and Musks who plan, predict,  and control each detail of their obscenely successful lives.  That makes us feel either inadequate about our intelligence and discipline or bitter about our personal persecution by fate.  But the successful planners of their own lives did not raise their grandkids or have the stroke or get trapped in the car wreck or watch incoming artillery fire set their children ablaze.

Consequently rules of sports, Masonic rituals, and religion belief are our desperate attempt to erect some momentary facade of predictability.  Of course fundamentalisms flourish in times of rampant change.  We are frantic for something, anything, to grab onto to stay afloat in the white-water chaos of perfectly normal life.  Political flags or convenient scripture will do as long as it resists personal or societal  changes out of our control.

Death of course is the penultimate insult to our plans.  We are ultimately revealed as powerless.  The future beyond that event is utterly unknowable.  So we avoid thinking about it.  But if we accepted that the maelstrom of unpredictability that is our daily lives was merely a preview of and practice for that ultimate waiting unpredictability so utterly out of our control, to what might we turn for consolation?  When no worldly plan or expectation is reliable, what still abides as real?  Whether experienced or only wished for, what was it that felt real and substantive once every plan and expectation was crushed to dust and burned to ashes? 

Look back, look forward, see the world that so resolutely refused to be predicted or controlled, and sense the one constant that was all you really wanted all along.  All the plans were illusory, deceptions by self and the world.  Only the one hunger, only one essence, one joy, remained constant, then and in this moment.  Accept the chaos and unpredictability and uncertainty.  Accept the one constant hunger.  Discover that through it all, Love was the lesson, Love was the constant, Love was the plan fulfilled through the dissolution, even the penultimate insult,  of our insistent plans.

Manipulation

 Manipulation 

In recent decades as society has careened through ever faster and more radical changes, people have fled toward fundamentalism, demanding that there be one thing in their lives that does not change because they won't allow it to change, the one thing in their lives in their absolute control to prevent from changing, i.e. their beliefs.  Combine that with the introduction of powerful entertainment technology into church services.  Combine those with, ironically, a severing of bonds with and trust of traditional centralized church authority.  Combine that with a thermonuclear explosion of media technology best suited to manipulating malleable, unaware minds.  Put all those factors in an economic and political system structured so as to the greatest degree possible empower psychological-marketing as the primary influencer of belief and action.  Season this wicked cauldron with innate human nature of greed and lust for power.

Of course fundamentalist mega-churches sprung up like poisonous mushrooms, all  bright and enticing!  Of course a Rupert Murdoch would seize the opportunity for profit in peddling fear, hatred, and inevitable violence.  Of course a Trump would arise out of the fetid moral wastelands of the obscenely rich.  

Too rapid change and progress do not open doors to enlightenment and renaissance.  They drive frightened minds back to the familiar comforts of witch-doctors and evangelists.  It is instead the traumatic collapse of convenient faith, the sacking of temples and the spread of plagues, that finally reveal the impotence of those wearing the robes and the hollowness of the idols.  Then the scales are removed from the eyes of a few, then a few precious scattered seeds can sprout, and renaissance and enlightenment and revival can momentarily again flourish.

I am Right, You are Wrong

 

Human conflict is utterly inevitable. 

·        We each live in our personal world of imagined values. 

·        Our individual imaginations are sufficiently independent and creative to conjure beliefs and opinions that conflict with the other guy’s beliefs and opinions. 

·        We are too self-absorbed to compromise and incorporate aspects of the other guy's opinion.

So, the Bolsheviks create a civil war amongst themselves, the Christians schism, Muslims wage war among competing caliphates, political parties splinter, Masons concoct different orders, spouses divorce, empires divide, and congregations split.  

In the newly minted age of digitally spawned social media, our natural proclivity for conflict over arbitrary differences of belief and opinion has accelerated overnight from the equivalent of tossing sticks and stones to launching thermonuclear weapons.  This is an unforeseen and existential shock to civilization and society.  

Such shocks used to transpire over centuries or at least decades.  Empires in east and west and their associated belief systems would eventually grow large enough that their borders would begin to irritate each other.    

Sooner or later, at the behest of our overactive imaginations combined with our stubborn rejection of anything differing from the product of those imaginations, conflict will inevitably arise.  Shia and Sunni proclaimed their analysis of inheritance was worth dying for. Calvinists and Popes proclaimed their version of God was worth killing for.  

But never have arbitrary differences of opinion over contrived topics had the power to spread worldwide in milliseconds.  Never have individuals been so utterly isolated and malleable  as their fears and ignorance are deftly manipulated by rants and screeds delivered through their screens.  

Civilization will soon face the unprecedented stressor of three billion of its kind fleeing as refugees from coastal and arid locales rendered uninhabitable in the coming decades.  This hammer-blow will strike a human society already fractured down to the local level by digital amplification of our tendency to elevate disagreements over imagined beliefs, elevate them to life and death causes.  

The contrived political and religious conflicts that have always been so, are now more so. 

This century will likely see exponentially growing physical hunger.  Will it suffice to ameliorate our perennial hunger to prove ourselves right?

A Secretive God

 

The obvious problem in trying to follow God's will for our lives is God's recalcitrance about unambiguously communicating that will.  Oh, we will promptly think we know what it is.  We will plan our lives accordingly.  Then when life unceremoniously tosses our holy plans into the dumpster we will stubbornly hold onto those plans because after all they are not our plans but God's plans.  

Our will and God's will quickly become convoluted because God is so danged secretive about whatever plan there is.  Our "willing" morphs into "willful" without our noticing.  

So for the umpteenth time it's back to the drawing board to resketch the priorities God seems to have given us, maybe, unless it's just our wishful thinking.

One is left to keep guessing, and adapt, and incorporate, and compromise.  Somewhere under all the practical considerations still resides that desire to do God's will, were it only clearly expressed.  Somewhere in the passing years, advancing age, and compounding shocks we of course may not "do" God's will, but we may live it.  Out of our control, unforeseen by our eyes, unanticipated in our plans, we somehow live God's will.  In that we can find some solace, some salve for our tattered faith.  

Commit your life to God's path, and promptly get abjectly lost, gloriously lost, in the dense fog of unfolding healing and redemption.