Ghosts

I can't decide if I'm living or I'm dying.

So I test your love.

And I test your love.

And I test your love.



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For the Love of Heaven

Elie Wiesel once witnessed Martin Buber speak with great interpretive wit in a conversation with some Christian clergy who had dropped what was potentially a conversational bomb. Why don't Jews, they wanted to know, accept Jesus as Messiah? Buber offered an imaginative word:

"What is the difference between Jews and Christians? We all await the Messiah. You believe He has already come and gone, while we do not. I therefore propose that we await Him together. And when He appears, we can ask Him: "Were you here before?" ... And I hope that at that moment I will be close enough to whisper in his ear, "For the love of heaven, don't answer."

~ David Dark, The Sacredness of Questioning Everything

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God of Wine

There's a memory of a window
Looking through I see you
Searching for something
I could never give you

There's someone who understands you
More than I do
A sadness I can't erase
All alone on your face

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Selective Fundamentalism

The feeling of offendedness is invigorating. It might even be an effective way to bend a population toward a tyrant's will. But we must never settle for it. We must not confuse an accelerated pulse rate for the presence of the Holy Spirit in our hearts. We must interrogate our offendedness, hold it open for question. Complaining about Harry Potter or getting worked up over The Golden Compass (Philip Pullman's literary response to the damage done to people's imaginations in the name of religion) or pitting ticket sales of the Narnia films against Brokeback Mountain is a much less complicated call than that whole business about loving neighbors, to say nothing about loving enemies. If we're more opposed, for instance, to what we take to be "bad language" and nude scenes and films about gay people than we are to people being blown up, starved to death, deprived of life-saving medicine, or tortured, our offendedness is out of whack. We have yet to understand the nature of real perversion. We aren't as deeply acquainted with our religion we might think.

To keep it all simple and safe, we often become selective fundamentalists. We know where to go to have our prejudices explained as just and sensible, our convictions strengthened, our group or political party reaffirmed. We process whatever already fits the grid that is hardwired (or re-hardwired) in our heads. It's difficult for anything else to get through. We're easily offended. Maybe we're looking to feel offended, which can make us feel better about ourselves. Feeling offended summons a sense of being in the right, a certain strength, a kind of power, an espresso shot of righteous indignation. And if the image of God hardwired into our nervous system is easily offended and put off by certain people and their offensive behavior, there's a feeling of being that much closer to the winning side, that much more likely to be numbered among the elect, the saved, the documented.

We can live, if we choose to, with a kind of Styrofoam casing around our imaginations, an informational echo chamber. We can and do surround ourselves with people who think the same thing we think, people who won't challenge us, and people who've learned to avoid certain topics while in our presence. It's a natural, understandable, deeply human need to have our thoughts and opinions mirrored to us in verbal exchanges. We all need positive reinforcement.

But if we feel deep affection only for people who tell us we're right and only give high fives to the like-minded, all we've done is joined a club. We risk becoming incapable of the give-and-take of genuine conversation. If all our friends and news sources require of us is a "Ditto" and "I think what you think," we might be in danger of becoming impenetrable to wisdom, immunized against the sensation of sympathy, resistant to the pleasure of being amused by our own ignorance, and closed to the joy of being wrong.

We seek out and even pay for our own hypnosis. Via television, radio, the Internet, and print, we receive our news product, fashioned and delivered by people who tidy up reality for us. If it isn't sufficiently tidied up, prepackaged and shrink-wrapped to fit our fearfulness, if our minds don't click into place quickly enough to satisfy our stunted attention spans, we change the channel or move to another site. We move swiftly from scenes that might call into question our exclusively saved, right-thinking status.

Jesus' gospel is never at our command, under our copyright, or contained within an -ism, an ideology, or any well-intentioned human construct. The question is always whether Jesus' rare ethos has gotten hold of us in any discernible way. To answer the question we must stop defining ourselves by all the things we're against. We might also ask what, other than getting saved in the shallowest sense, we actually stand for.

~ David Dark, The Sacredness of Questioning Everything

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Falling Slowly

You have suffered enough
And warred with yourself
It's time that you won.

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Tweeting William Gibson

I follow William Gibson on Twitter. I know, I am that cool. Tonight, he was "tweeting" (I know, I REALLY am that cool) about politics and had this to say... These are comprised of three separate "tweets" for those of you who are counting the 140 character mark, which I know some of you exist...

"What if Obama is deeply conventional, and profoundly centrist, but many haven't seen this because we've grown used to such hideous grotesques? Not that I necessarily think that would be a bad thing, under the circumstances. The left-right spectrum is not a straight line but a circle, the far side of which, either way you go, is the same murderous batshit."

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Night Life

You know the night life is just not for me
Cause all you really need are a few good friends
I don't want to go out and be on my own
You know they started something I can't stand

You leave for the city, well count me out
Cause all this time is wasted on
Well, everything I've done

~ the format

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Schmolitics

Conservative assume I'm liberal. Liberals assume I'm conservative. Re-encountering Jesus on a daily basis has led me to one definitive answer to the question of whether or not I am a Liberal or a Conservative. That answer? "Non-applicable."

"A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward." ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

"A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel." ~ Robert Frost

Everything in this world is fleeting. Even our political ideologies.

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Her Beautiful Ideas

She used to say about love
That it should come from above
And it should come from below

She used to say "my love,
Wear the lips of a saint
And the hips of a whore"

And when we'd walk along the street she'd say
"If it rains now I hope to God it pours"
And with her beautiful ideas
She'd cut me in half clean as a broad sword

She used to say that magic was the edge
And science and God
They were the sides of a copper penny piece

And it's far better to keep it
Spinning and spinning and spinning
Than for one side to fall and to freeze

And then we'd walk along the pier
She'd point at the waves and say "Under there
That's where we go when we're asleep"

You know once she let is slip
That I was the best
Of her beautiful ideas

~ the guggenheim grotto

*I know, I keep posting song lyrics. Get over it. I'm going through a phase.

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Told You So

When the world is wide
Wicked and wild
And watching my every move
I gather thoughts of you
And that's what lovers do.

You've said before
When every act is a war
And every shade
Just another shade of blue
You'd have me walk with you
And that's what lovers do.

Told you so...
I'm in love with you
Told you so...
And I think you love me too.

When you go walking away
With the wind and the waves
And flirting with your feet
You take a part of me
And that's what lovers feel.

And when you come upon a time
And a place sublime
And it shows you something real
You wish me there to see
And that's what lovers feel.

Told you so...
I'm in love with you
Told you so...
And I think you love me too.

At a party I've thrown
The morning has grown
And someone's going your way
You tell them you'd rather stay
And that's what lovers say.

So to the garden we go
Quiet and slow
And we watch the world awake
You know I love you for love's sake
Isn't that what lovers say?

Told you so...
I'm in love with you
Told you so...
And I know you love me too.

~ the guggenheim grotto

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