Imbued

When there is a God,
He imbues our faintest deed
with the infinite, for we
speak of Heaven and Hell,
of endlessness: each step
is one fraction closer
to the precipice of eternity.
Death is merely a separation
between you and the
finite possibilities of this world.

In each of us all is
a candle to hold against
the wind of creation:
for some it is merely a
fragile light, but for a few
it speaks more profoundly
than a thousand voices.
Some understand
that we are to be a part
of the light that is a part of us.

How we waste everything,
yet nothing is wasted:
when you love,
the whole world loves,
and when you hate,
the whole world hates:
let us never forget
that there is naught
to all humanity
if you count yourself out.

“Can God make a rock He can’t lift?” — this was never meant to be answered, not in any meaningful way, a flippant questioning, making fun of belief in something so preposterous as an omnipotence. I have an answer, though….

There was a Zen master who was sitting quietly, when a student came and asked him what he was doing. He answered, “Thinking the impossible.”

When he was asked by that student how it was he was doing that, he answered, “By not thinking.”

So, here is the answer that the question, “Can God make a rock He can’t lift?” deserves. For I think God is capable at least of a Zen master’s skill. Can God lift the impossible? Yes. By not lifting.

Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks. Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle, but you yourself shall be the miracle.

O Lord, let me not have dreamed in vain. Amen.

O God, may I know enough to shut up. Amen.

O Lord, let me mean something. Amen.

O God, sometimes, just make me do it. Amen.

O Lord, may I miss the light if it goes. Amen.

O God, if I puff up too much, pop me. Amen.

O Lord, help me so much I need nothing. Amen.

There are times when your planets converge, line up in a beneficent gravity. Pain, for a moment… there is a certain forgetting of such things, for in that moment, all there is is the certainty of now. Life is pure being, not too say it is bliss, or even delight… it is the peace of having gotten this far without having crawled out of your skin (for there were times you wanted to — though exactly when that was, you can’t quite place). It is to say that none of it matters, though it is not meaningless, for a hovering of one’s responsibilities is not their elimination: it is merely “what may be, let it”. And then… Your planets are still in motion, however, and the gravity turns ever so slowly askew, the alignment splays from its place. The sanity, however, as if it remembers itself — it was a breath of clear, the eye in a hurricane of smoke.

Knowledge goes only as far as trust.

There’s a way of looking at the world I have noticed myself succumbing to, that when I realized it was starting to happen, I fought it. I still fight it. It’s a form of utilitarianism, I think, how useful anything is, what it means to the bottom line. Not just money, either, but for instance, when I’m nice to someone, the thought creeps up of a little gauge whose needle moves in the positive of what I can expect back from them, how much credit I have in their consideration. It’s happening to me everywhere, thinking of things what cash value they have instead of their own intrinsic worth, “cash value” not necessarily being monetary, but rather a philosophy (for example, sex would have a high cash value for most people, even if they never pay money for it). I don’t like it.

Jesus said that we must enter Heaven as children, and I think that’s what that dislike in me is coming from. Facing facts, facing realities: growing up: in the name of practicality, we sometimes compromise more than we should. And it is not as I would, for it is too much an accommodation to the cynicism of experience. When we were children we liked things simply, did not have some sort of ulterior barometer. We learn, as we get older, about what things are of value and what things do not; we learn about things like money. And some of us are eaten away by the compromises we make — this is what I’m fighting against. It is the first and last line of defense, to make a stand within yourself.

Too, Jesus told us, “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” [Matthew 16:26] Each compromise we make, we are doing just that — exchanging pieces of our soul for their cash value. Sometimes the bits are so small we don’t even notice. And sometimes, we don’t realize how much of our soul we traded away until we look in the mirror, and don’t recognize who it is that is looking back. This is where I must stand, for there is an accepted dollar value for every piece of our integrity if we surrender it; but if we do not, it stays as it was given us: of infinite worth.

I, Poem

I am a poem writing itself,
ink spilling out of imagination.
Unfinished, some days I go hanging
upon half a phrase, sometimes
to go without meaning for a while.
I dream to be of epic things, teeming
with angels and devils and heroes,
but I do not know more than the words
that are written here. I think it must
be nice in the stories outside my
little window into being, but
I am satisfied merely to have begun,
and to know I have an ending
that gives me a reason to be.

Desire, you never knew what you wanted. Whenever you got whatever you got, you wanted something else. And it always seemed so important, everything you ever whispered in my ear, as if the whole world were going to halt just for you. How many times have you made me sin? How many compromises have I made for your sake, how many times betraying my own self? There are a million pinpricks of darkness on my soul where I gave in each of those little times when I told myself it was meaningless. But now, what is the sum total of their weight upon my judgment? I am weighed down by my being less…. I fear you will never learn. There will always be things I do not understand, but I understand you, o my desire: you always wanted the impossible, and no one could tell you it was just a fantasy: you always thought the end of the rainbow was right behind you, and you went in circles to get there.

He drew on himself, every day: strange symbols, lines leading nowhere, circles with no particular inclination. His pens were continually running dry of ink, and if he took a bath, the water stained a blackish tint, as if he were washing away sins. The patterns he drew were a mystery of asymmetry, an ode to chaos; these markings were a war paint to a battle long over, and he had been on the side of the the defeated. No one ever asked him why he did this — there was a certain unknowable poetry to it, and people… people don’t ask questions when they think they already know the answer: he was a sign that the universe was as odd as they imagined. But if they had asked him, “Why?”, he would have answered, “This is what the whole of the world means — this is the way I see it. Each day the pattern changes, and when the old one washes away, I draw on myself what is new… like a reflection of it all that knows what it reflects, a world rewritten in abbreviations.”

Lord Jesus Christ! A whole life long didst thou suffer that I too might be saved; and yet thy suffering is not yet at an end; but this too wilt thou endure, saving and redeeming me, this patient suffering of having to do with me, I who so often go astray from the right path, or even when I remained on the straight path stumbled along it or crept so slowly along the right path. Infinite patience, suffering of infinite patience. How many times have I not been impatient, wished to give up and forsake everything; wished to take the terribly easy way out, despair: but thou didst not lose patience. Oh, I cannot say what thy chosen servant says: that he filled up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in his flesh; no, I can only say that I increased thy sufferings, added new ones to those which thou didst once suffer in order to save me.

Sometimes, pain is the only way you can be sure you’re real.
No philosopher wondered at his own existence while in tears.
As if a broken heart contained more truth than a thousand dreams.

When did I ever know who I was? Something in me is sure that once I had some sense of it, that I belonged at least to myself, but the memory is more elusive than a dream I have just woken up from. Or is it only the vapor of childhood, dissipated, when I merely did not know how much I did not know? Am I even aware of how lost I am, or is that dread realization waiting to corner me, on the eve of some small happiness, crush me with its existentialism? I have no answers, or too many, all of them contradicting one another, and all just as plausible as the next. And I know that love is the answer, the ultimate meaning to it all, but the more it can save me, the farther away it is. I guess I’ll just keep on, keep on. Fate has a tendency to more squarely hit a moving target. There’s more to life, yet. And love… love, I swear revenge on you for giving me the strength!

In the dreaming, time was a wheel that never turned the whole way, always forgetting its place and starting over.

In the dreaming, I caught the liquid sky poured down from the moon, and drank the coolness of night.

In the dreaming, I moved not at all, and instead, the whole world passed by me as if it were in a terrible rush.

In the dreaming, I saw so far I could spy the beginning of the universe, where there was not but infinite potential.

In the dreaming, I thought I heard death calling me, drawing me to the edge of something I couldn’t let go of.

In the dreaming, I journeyed to the end of thought, and poked my hand into oblivion, the blank of nothing.

In the dreaming, death was a ferryman who oared into the mists, mists deeper and older than dreaming’s dreaming.

Destiny

What is this destiny
that allows us to be free?
These decisions all our own intent,
yet to fate we are
an easy capture.

(I do not comprehend
how the tiniest of fluctuations
in the borders
of the barest occurrence
can bring the downfall
of an empire;
I cannot fathom
how these choices we make
fabricate a civilization.
It is always to me
some sort of alchemy.)

Such is transcendence:
we, without limit to our freedom
create that which was
meant to be.
The mystery is that
it is all plain,
the workings of destiny, yet
stare as we might
at all that transpires, and why,
we cannot grasp
the infinite detail
of how this moment became.

(Like it or not,
destiny depends on
what you do,
not what you understand.)

Let death die.

Doré: Jesus

Click the pic for a larger version.

Does it amaze you what the human soul is capable of withstanding? Of overcoming? We are each of us built with a certain capacity to endure suffering, and I think it speaks well enough of mercy that most of us never come to experience half as much as that limit could bear. Somewhere I understand that things could usually be much worse than what we go through. Yes, I know: none of us leads an easy life, and we all feel pain. But I think very few of us (as we have heard in the news) will have to go as drastic as cutting off a limb by our own hand to survive the day. The human being: after creating the sun and moon, God said it was good, but after man and woman, He said it was very good. It is that perhaps He made us not only to survive, but to others who have ears to ear, inspire. It is in our blood to challenge challenge.

Now, I do not know what the grand plan is, why so many of us have to suffer as much as we do. But I believe in a God that will make good for all of it, and then some. Some might think me an idiot for thinking that an all-benevolent deity would allow for such pain, on such a worldwide scale, to happen, but occasionally I get glimpses of why. When I hear of such stories where ordinary people overcome extraordinary difficulties, it awakens something noble in me. That there is so much promise in humankind. It would be easy to lose heart, with all the woes of the world, to lose faith, but we are made better than that. We can believe when there is every reason to doubt. For my part, it is a hope within my heart of hearts that I never let it go, that I will hold the idea in the core of my being: God is love. Let me always confess such a One. This is the God in whose image we are made.