Bells and Whistles

I would much rather talk.  It’s safer.  Much safer than the poem I am reading; Mary Oliver, the Leaf and the Cloud.  I haven’t eaten, so it may be hunger, or too much coffee on an empty stomach and the smell of a needed cigarette from across the park; or it may be how today, sacred of days, rose like a god, lighting the trees and grass from within their veins of chlorophyll, luminescent, and vital, and pale, tinging the visible with a holy writ to act.  Regardless, something has seized me.  I, trembling, set down my book.  I can’t read more.  It is too real, too urgent.  And despite these twenty one years my tolerance for the real is still low.

So let’s talk.

What should we talk about?  Something safe?

Some topic universal, something like the weather.  But weather certainly isn’t safe, and if you ask me about it I may end up flat on my back, comatose, trailed like smoke through the azure sky.  Business would be a better subject.  Gossip may be best.

Reflections on the Priesthood

Priests consecrate things. They speak and sacrifice, and so cover the world’s impurities before a pure God. Bartering with the God for its salvation.  The trick is that the priests, as wicked and faithless as the rest, must speak for the rest. 

And here Christians are, supposedly the new priesthood. Sanctified, they are spiritual Levites, having no inheritance with the rest of Israel.  Still, they speak for what?  Do they consecrate or condemn?  Do they barter for the world, for us? Do they, like merchants in the streets toting their wares, relentlessly drive the deal, begging, imploring – cheating and grasping till the good God takes the wretched world they shove in His face? Or do they leave their blanket of baubles on the street corner to pursue their Jesus?  Do they leave the world for their salvation?

They say their God doesn’t even want to be bargained with.  He just wants His people to approach Him with their cheap pitch, knowing He will buy regardless of their skill.  The key, so they say, is in the asking.  And the question is what should we ask for.

Ask for the nations, and they will be given to you.  But we don’t want the nations.  And we, sure as shit, don’t know what we do want. Since we know so very much, what we really want must be something we don’t know. 

What don’t we know? We don’t know Him. 

What else don’t we know?

We don’t know each other.  We don’t know our neighbors.  We don’t know the world.  Why not ask for that?  Instead of looking for our own salvation, why don’t we forget our souls and beg, cheat, and grasp for the salvation of the world. Whoever seeks to save his life will lose it.  Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. 

Who would forego their salvation for the world’s?  Who would go to hell for his neighbor, unknown and unknowable?  Who would forsake their God, their Savior, their life, for a heartless, foreign heathen?

What it amounts to is that I am sick of religious posing.

What I Realized Yesterday

Yesterday I had an epiphany.  It was clear, it was certain.  It has been apparent for years, though I never acknowledged it before.  I hate my major.  The hatred isn’t even active, so I don’t have the satisfaction of an impassioned outrage.  My hatred of it is passive; business simply does not interest me.  It does not spark anything in my soul.  It does nothing for me.  And I want life.  I want everything.  I want to wake each morning knowing that I love what I am about to do.  But for now, I wake each morning planning my day around classes that I take no interest in filled with people I do not want to get to know.

Would that this self-disclosure had waited until post-graduation!  Then I wouldn’t have to deal with it, I could just cope with the after-effects.  But awareness compels me to act.  So I wonder: What the hell do I do now?

Something I Was Told

I was told that there would be a well and that I could drink from it.  I relied on that.  And so I followed the riven fissures through the earth.  Traced the entwining ghosts of streams through the grasping desert.  But all I found was sand, and salt, and wind.  Grains of sand.  Grains of salt.  Grains of truth.  Dessicated and lifeless, like all sand and salt.  There was water, once.  Who would have dug otherwise?

But there is nothing now.  Or nothing for me.  Either way, tough luck kiddo.  So questions arise.  To dig deeper in arid soil?  To try my hand at tracking, tracing the ancient water table beneath the world to it’s source?  To give up and wander towards where I hope the nearest town might be, banking on a cattle trough?  Do I even have enough water in my veins and cells to get there?  But the gig is up.  I know the answer, and I know I’ll try to track the dry rivulets back.  Few things are more motivating than a lost cause or a hopeless endeavor.  Especially when the endeavoree has no background or experience with that particular lost cause.

Peach, Plum, Pear

Summer is ending.  And that means school starts tomorrow.  That also means the end of summer fruit.  And I can’t stop listening to Joanna Newsom’s song Peach, Plum, Pear.  You should listen to it too.

Morning Thoughts II

Abbé Paul Grenet said about God, “His name is holy, but it is up to us to sanctify it; his reign is universal, but it is up to us to make him reign; his will is done, but it up to us to accomplish it.” Tell me what must be done and I will accomplish it. “Here I am, teach me thy ways.” If I could hear that will, I would do it.  Wouldn’t I?  Would I?

I have twenty-one summers.  Soon to be twenty-one years.  And I am so sick of goodbyes that I could go scream into a pillow for an hour and a half and it would not do any good.

Kurt Vonnegut is a bit extreme, but I like him

The following is an excerpt from an essay, article, or something like that by Kurt Vonnegut.  The rest of it was pretty good too, so I’ll put the link to that in, but this is the part that stood out the most to me. The end is particularly good, so if you don’t want to read the whole thing I’d recommend skipping ahead to the last two paragraphs.  Or if you’re really pressed for time, the last three sentences will get the idea across.

When you get to my age, if you get to my age, which is 81, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged, what life is all about. I have seven kids, four of them adopted.

Many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.

I put my big question about life to my biological son Mark. Mark is a pediatrician, and author of a memoir, The Eden Express. It is about his crackup, straightjacket and padded cell stuff, from which he recovered sufficiently to graduate from Harvard Medical School.

Office Clean-Up

This is my boss’ office. After two days of cleaning. That’s one of my current projects, and I have a feeling that it’s gonna take a while. This really is much neater than it was.

The scary thing is that according to some people I have the same personality type as him. Are my workspaces doomed to look like this? Oh wait, they already do.

Morning Thoughts

I like writing small paragraphs in the morning.  As the day begins in earnest I raise a guard around my thoughts and feelings.  I’ve gotten pretty good at guarding the important ones, the vulnerable ones.  So good in fact, that I can hide them from myself most of the time.  But in the mornings that guard is down, and I can write vulnerably.  I like that.  And I like what comes from it.  The following are a collection of thoughts I’ve written down recently.

This too, I know: That I live and that God lives, and that not apart from me. If, as it is with everyone, a piece of Him dies with every beloved that perishes (for I have heard it said, and I readily believe, that hell is not sulfur and flame but the nothingness the Easterns wish for), then how can He be immortal – that which He is? Or is that the richness of the love of God? That He turns away from Himself, denying Himself, embracing Abaddon, in grief.

Oversalting, Or the Toxicity of Holiness

The Dead Sea is the second saltiest body of water in the world. With a 31.5% saline concentration, it is 9 times saltier than the Mediterranean Sea. The Dead Sea is so salty that no plants or animals can live in it. There haven’t been measurable amounts of life in the Dead Sea since 1980, when an exceptionally rainy winter caused an algae and bacteria bloom. Shortly thereafter everything died again. There is such a high concentration of salt that beneath a certain depth, about 35 meters, the salt in the water precipitates into a solid and piles up in lifeless mounds on the seafloor.

Too much salt kills all life.

In Matthew 5:13 Jesus calls believers the salt of the earth.