Will it do you any hurt to leave your beastly, sensual lives, and to “live soberly, righteously, and godly, in the world, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, and looking for the blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God, and our Saviour Jesus Christ?” This is the doctrine of saving grace. Would it do you any harm to be assured of salvation, and ready to die, and to know that angels shall conduct your departing souls to Christ, and that you shall live in joy with him for ever? Or to be employed in those holy works that must prepare you for this day, and help you to this assurance? If God be naught for you, if holiness, and righteousness, and temperance be naught for you, then you may as well say, heaven is naught for you.

find me, though i am not lost
what beauty is in my eyes is only seen when they are closed
when my spirit is alone with the darkness
the imagination of a single candle
the light of which casts shadows in forever by a slow glimmer
to let myself go where all light must reach
i am lost, though do not find me
i have breathed the essence that rose from that flickerflame of love
i have been adrift in the secret of dreaming
an otherworldly hour of stillness, nothing more real
where i believed in impossible things
the world was so small…
lose me: here i am found; find me: here i am lost

hope

hope is that bird, balanced upon its delicate perch
at any moment to take flight
or to vanish like nothing were ever there at all
hope, mixed with dreams, a strong concoction
one never can get one’s fill of
and drunk on the possibility, the anticipation
we may forget many things
even to live in the paths we should go
for in many things, we must drive beyond the day
beyond where the stresses strain
lest the little bird on our shoulder
decide there are better nests for its wings

Anselm Kiefer: Nuremberg (1982)

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There has to be an invisible sun
It gives its heat to everyone
There has to be an invisible sun
That gives us hope when the whole day’s done

And they’re only going to change this place by
Killing everybody in the human race
And they would kill me for a cigarette
But I don’t even wanna die just yet

– The Police

I have the problem opposite to most people: I have too many signs. At times, I think that this is what madness must be like. The basic idea of a sign is that, apparently, improbable things will happen in conjunction with other improbable things. That is a sign: an improbable thing that makes way for something significant (see the root of that word there?) then to happen following. If not a miracle. What happens, though, if improbable things keep happening? What happens when the uncommon becomes common? It’s an embarrassment of riches, n’est-ce pas? I must say, I will not be one to say they’d rather have it the other way around. Too much is better than not enough. And who knows? This improbable life that I live, maybe it is for me, having so much, to be able to share them somehow with people who have not so much. If one looks for purpose, one should not be amazed when one finds it…

given

the world was never made
as given to us, in the design of our eyes
to reframe this rough charcoal world
to leave to our children’s coloring
to each our own aesthetic of preconceptions
indeed, what is enough?
in the architectures brick upon brick
each generation’s forthcoming sensibility
sees the gaps in the wall
greater to presume the heroics yet to prove
for the world that tantalizing yet could be
for the adept of vision
which sees poverty smuggled in the riches
blessedly never satisfied
as dawn will not have ceased to invent the day
nor does sight unsee the future perfect

When does that realization come, that not everything is something to play with? That things have uses outside of their capacity for our enjoyment? Only recently have I realized it, though it must have happened years ago: I look around, and very few things are toys any more. And the most toy-like things, like my computer — even these have their main uses other than as playthings. When do these purposes occur to us, when a box is merely something to hold other things, to be stored or shipped, and no longer a piece of a fortress of solitude? I guess it comes down to it that childhood really does end, however we may feel that we have never really grown up. But it is not a sad thing, because so much more can be done with a world that is no longer filled merely with toys. With a world where things have function other than just to amuse us for a little while, and then be forgotten.

Mordecai Ardon: Ein Karem

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as the years breathe down my neck
i inch up the calloused rope
and i am not deep in the heights, i find
though my eyes are dizzy
though all my muscles cry foul
and i cannot see the end of the up
always to believe it is with the next breath
even when the breath blows away
and i am left with only distance
again to inch up the calloused rope
knowing that every dream demands it

Our prayers are not so that some hour on some day, we receive what we ask for. In fact, what prayer does, by putting us in the position to ask for such things as we do, those things become secondary to the prayer itself. This is in itself a small miracle.

To me, to whom God hath revealed his Son, in a Gospel, by a Church, there can be no way of salvation, but by applying that Son of God, by that Gospel, in that Church. Nor is there any other foundation for any, nor other name by which any can be saved, but the name of Jesus. But how this foundation is presented, and how this name of Jesus is notified unto them, amongst whom there is no Gospel preached, no Church established, I am not curious in inquiring. I know that God can be as merciful as those tender Fathers present him to be; and I would be as charitable as they are. And therefore, humbly embracing that manifestation of his Son, which he hath afforded me, I leave God, to his unsearchable waies of working upon others, without further inquisition.

What shall we take for a sign? For we wait in existential agony for the numbers to turn over. For the shape of the clouds to resemble… anything. Why is it that we expect one unlikely event to happen in conjunction with another unlikely event? For is that not what we look for? Science tries to tell us what is wisdom, at times, or at least what does not follow, one from the other. One doubts we will ever listen, at least, not all the way. For even science is based on a form of luck, even the purest mathematics as reliant on the happenstance of digging as the dirtiest archeology. And sometimes the signs are right. Amazingly. But even the prophet cannot say with surety on which things we may be absolutely certain. Anyone who says they can tell, they deceive someone, you or him, depending on his sincerity. What shall we take for a sign? Nothing. Everything. What price for the hope?