what we are

we are

what we are

star dust motes in

other-worldly beams of light

we are fragile and invincible

fearfully and wonderfully

made, we are god’s,

perfected flaws and flukes,

freaks and forces of nature,

broken and bruised

bone and muscle

and spittle and blood

foam on the wave

in an ocean of love

a faint trace of timeless grace

in an otherwise uninhabitable

dark uncharted space

we are brief and

sudden reminders of mortality

encased in unimaginable glory

a paradoxology

of pain and joy

on the lips of One

who sings over us

and kisses the void

in each of us

with reckless abandon.

~~~mb~~~

the blessings of the threshold

I finished reading a fascinating little book this week, and i want to share ideas from it with you. I cannot quote excerpts from it, because i have not yet gotten permission from the author. It has prompted me to rejoice in my own sense of playfulness, nonconformity, marginality, political incorrectness, betwixt-and-between-ness, and abnormality. As a follower of Jesus and as a stranger and a pilgrim on this Earth (our wondrous and wretched, evolving and revolving,  home away from home), i find this feeling of being marginalized and out of place, and “abnormal”, to be the norm! The historical record and sacred text of the Christian Church, the Bible, records Jesus as having said about himself, “Foxes have holes, birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no where to lay his head.” He, the soon-to-be risen Lord of the Universe, was homeless, nomadic and out of place, too, it seems.  He was a refugee as a young child in Egypt, then grew up  in an occupied territory under a series of corrupt political leaders, and eventually chose the life of an itinerant rabbi, healer and mystical revolutionary; he grew up poor, displaced, politically incorrect, out of sync with popular culture, misunderstood and maligned by most. He never owned his own home, donkey, or business, never ran for political office, and he never stayed in any one place for long. Even his grave was borrowed, and he only stayed in it for three days.

I contrast his life with the current and historical life of the Church. The Church, ever since it was co-opted by the Emperor Constantine, has sought to find and keep positions of power, prestige, and persuasion. It has sought to be relevant, engaged, and appealing to outsiders and to the other powers-that-be. It has amassed lands, resources, and all forms of equity and influence in its global outreach. It has sought to be everywhere, and anywhere But the margins.  It seeks ownership, and rulership, in this weary, war torn world. And when push comes to shove, it often shoves back, with texts and tools of terror.  The church is not usually content to be salt and light, as Jesus told it to be. It has been more like pesticides and flash bombs.

The Apostle Paul wrote, in his letter to the Christians at Corinth, that he and his colleagues were looked upon as dung, the refuse of society, and the church was seen as the outhouse at the end of the road, and that God had set it up that way! He wrote that God had chosen, by and large, the weak things of the world, and the foolish things, and the despised, ignorant and poor to lead God’s loving  “invasion” into the strongholds of evil in the world, where the learned, rich and powerful called the shots. “God chose the things that are naught to nullify the things that are.”

Well, the book i read is called “The Missionary Congregation, Leadership, and Liminality” by Alan J. Roxburgh, copywrite  1997! It is a booklet, really, not very big in length, but omygod, it is huge in its prophetic and insightful message. In it, the author talks about this very shift that has been forced upon the western world’s church, from its pre-industrial and modern places of centrality to a post-modern world of liminality. In it, he talks about how the church has been once again rendered peripheral, and is going through a  new period of liminality, a paradoxical state that is both worse and better than just marginalization.

He goes on to make the point that the church must stop trying to return to the past, to a pre-industrialized world to create a decontextualized community, nor can it find its identity through techniques learned at a workshop. It must move from emphasizing and prioritizing the privatized individual’s inner piety to the witness of the community. And he stresses that the pastors are still the ones who bear the greatest role in shaping missionary congregations, as leaders who possess the theological, political and social skills to elicit the new “communitas”.  He says we as pastors must be poets, prophets, apostles, moving away from the current views of pastors as simply enculturated professionals hired by congregations to provide religious services.  Rather than  the  overly competent religious expert jack-of-all-trades Superclergy running the congregation’s inner life,  there is a team of multiple leadership at the heart of the congregation, not of professional staff, but of everyone. This idea of religious professionals, a hierarchical limited group called “the ordained”, will have to be removed.

It is a stirring book for me to read, as i end my second year at Iliff, and this class on evangelism and mission. There is so much in it that i cannot put in this blog. But it gives me a kind of blueprint of what i want the church to look like connected to my leadership. I want to belong to a community of people who belong to this anointed astonishing Jesus. I rejoice in the idea that the people of God might grow up into mature disciples of Christ.  WE must, if we are to really follow this holy madman Jesus on his ridiculous mission, to speak truth to power, and embrace the excluded,  and be the excluded, and even embrace Golgotha, in a community known for His radical redeeming Love… to the Other Side of  this transitory threshold world.   It isn’t a “needs-based evangelism”, or a “radical welcome” kind of church that i envision.  It is maybe more of a radical goodbye kind of church. I want to say goodbye to competition, marketing, over-consumption, status, power, fear tactics, shame and blame games, religiously sanctioned violence, coercion, cultural relevance, popularity, going viral, fame, comfort, ease in Babylon kind of churchianity. My idea is a threshold church, a  sacred dance on the waters of Life, a stepping up to the edge of the world’s pain and passion as if it were the plane’s door, and feeling myself strapped to a Risen Man who loves to tandem skydive with me into the liminal space of amazing Grace,  spread my arms wide and Jump.

Because see, he and I are on a mission. A different kind of mission impossible. WE are not going to have any car chases or motorcycle stunts or blow up any buildings.  He and I are going to love the whole wide world… to pieces.

Wanna come? many are called, but few, it seems, really choose it….

post mother’s day Post

I learned this month, just days before the much anticipated and much dreaded mother’s day Sunday, that the oldest sign in the Chinese language for our words ‘Love’ and ‘Good’  is the picture-symbol of a woman holding a baby.  That blessed me so much.  One of my former hospice patients, who died way too soon by all our estimations, on Christmas Day, no less, loved children, especially babies. She had three barely grown children of her own when cancer took her life in the body. She grieved the hardest for her children, and her future grandchildren; especially the babies her daughter would have some day that she would never get to hold, and love. She made us promise that we would always hold every baby we could, after her death, in her memory. And i do, now. I remember her anguished soul’s grief about dying so soon in the life cycles of her family. She and her husband were educators, and had dedicated their lives to teaching children, and raising a family. She was a great mother, too.  She had a “good death” (as we say in hospice), in her home that Christmas morning, with her family all there with her. She had done her Work, and she was able to let go, and leave her body without resistance. But it was so sad for those of us she left behind. She is not forgotten, however. Her love is a legacy that shines out from the lives of so many, not just her beautiful husband and children. It shines even from me,  to the 3-week old baby I asked to hold in church last month, and tell his parents about the woman I remember and in whose name I was now cuddling their son. As it turns out, the dad is a nurse, and he got where I was coming from.

I also learned this month about a particular group of lions in Africa who specialize in hunting and eating the water buffalo that share their swampy territory. The pride is made up of 9 females and two males, and every year for the last 13 years, the pride has failed to produce cubs that survived to adulthood.  The pride is in serious danger of extinction, as the lions began to get older, because they have failed to bring any new, younger blood into the pride. The herd of water buffalo was getting bigger and stronger, and less and less afraid of the lions as they in turn get older, weaker, and the kills get harder to make. The scientists who did the documentary had many theories about why the cubs were not surviving. Some surmised the cause of death was due to disease from the swamps, or the stampeding buffalo had killed them, or other lions from nearby competing prides.  They discovered during the course of their research and filming, finally, the reason why. The oldest matriarch of the pride, whom the other younger lionesses had been entrusting to stay behind and guard their cubs while they went on hunts, kept killing each litter, and eating them.  Over the 13 years, that meant 31 cubs in all, that the scientists had known of, were victims of her treacherous appetite.  When the pride discovered her betrayal, they turned on her.

There is nothing in my mind that is more the epitome of evil, the opposite of  ‘love’ and ‘good’, than a human mother who knowingly abuses and murders a child. That evil is one that keeps me in existential anguish about life here on this planet.  As a police chaplain, and a hospital chaplain, I have seen the aftermath of crimes against children inflicted upon them by others, sometimes by their mothers.  That still sometimes gives me nightmares.

We have primitive animal brains, and this hard-wiring for our souls is damaged to one degree or another by the time we reach the “age of reason”. We raise boys in the USA to have little self awareness or emotional intelligence, and we likewise raise girls to neglect the precious beauty of their inner selves, and instead to over-focus on the outer adornment of their bodies. The primitive biological forces of our physical evolution are emphasized, at the expense of our psychological and spiritual needs that, when met, drive our metaphysical evolution. This individual self-destructive tendency is played out in our larger systems as well. So humanity can now explore the bottom of our oceans, and the outer reaches of our solar system, but only to drill, baby, drill. We extract and do not safeguard; we cut down and we do not plant; we pillage, consume and plunder what we discover, and in the process, we threaten ourselves with extinction.  What it comes down to is not much different from that pride of lions– we either starve or eat our own young.    We have destroyed our futures by neglecting the eternal things of our souls.  We fail to recognize the enemy within.

The good news of Christ is that we have eternal things to safeguard. We have needs  that transcend our primitive lusts and short-sighted appetites. Nothing in this created dimension lasts forever. The best of mothers and the worst of mothers die. Everything dies. Even stars die. But there are other things that never die, according to the Christian message. This is the disconcerting good news to the fatalist and the nihilist, the hedonist and the scientist. There is a dimension of existence that is eternal. Some of the sacred texts read  this way: the one who does the will of God lives forever. I am the resurrection and the life.  The one who believes in Me, though he or she dies, will never die.

If this realm is a Way and a Door to all there really is, then that changes everything. That would be quite a conversion… and one worth exploring.

Suffering Good & Evil Post

I have been thinking again, about the paradoxical relationship between  good and evil, and the way suffering gets moved from the latter category to the former in Christ.

The Hebrew Bible has a fantastic hero story about the patriarch Jacob’s favored child, Joseph, one of 12 sons. He is betrayed by some of his jealous brothers and sold to the Egyptians as a slave. He is falsely accused by his master’s wife of attempted rape, and thrown in an Egyptian jail to die. By a serendipitous prison relationship and later turn of events, he interprets the Pharaoh’s dreams accurately, and in gratitude, the Pharaoh made him viceroy of Egypt, second in command to the Pharaoh himself. He is resurrected, liberated, if you will, from a living death, rotting in jail, to a position of power and honor. He then lives with a dual consciousness, as a Hebrew and an Egyptian. This position of privilege later gives him the chance to be reconciled to his brothers, and restored to his father, and to save his Hebrew people and the Egyptians from worldwide catastrophic famine…. And in the story, an astonishing statement is made about suffering, good and evil, with implications for theodicy.

Then consider the New Testament’s story of Jesus. He is the favored son of Joseph and Mary. He is betrayed by one of his twelve disciples, and his jealous Jewish “brothers”,  who are the religious elite of his day. Jesus is turned over to the Romans, after having been falsely accused, and after remaining in their custody for torture, interrogation and humiliation, he is forthwith executed by the Empire. No jail time to speak of, unlike Joseph, his distant relative. The story about Jesus takes an unlikely turn of events when Jesus is resurrected, liberated from death’s tomb, and “exalted to the right hand of God the Father”. His position of power, after one of weakness, suffering,  abasement and torment, makes possible the reconciliation of Jesus to the ones who abandoned him and betrayed him, and saves the world from spiritual death. He gathers his family and his disciples together, and they are empowered by him to henceforth go into all the world, and turn the world upside down, with a ministry of reconciling all peoples to God and to each other.

The statement made by Joseph to his brothers in the Hebrew story of redemption and reconciliation is this: what you meant for evil, God meant for good.   Joseph’s words were said just to a few poor, hungry and fearful men, his brothers. They were clearly guilty of having done evil. They were the perpetrators of cruelty, suffering, pettiness and selfishness, racked by their father’s grief and too ashamed to tell the truth. Joseph said those words to them in private, in confidence, perhaps not wanting to further humiliate them.

This is amazing. The good news Joseph told his brothers is similar to the good news of Jesus, said now to all the world. Evil does not have to rule over us. Evil will not have the final word on our destiny.  The evil we do, intended or not, God forgives, and God nevertheless meant for good. There is a transformational transcendent Path out of evil’s devastation,  by the grace and peace and power of God’s love, to a greater Good. It takes human beings to live into that Good, with courageous love, hope and faith. Had Joseph given up, the Good that God intended to do through him would have been thwarted. The process of reconciliation, of changing the world one disciple at a time, works through us. That door to “Peace On Earth, Good Will To Humankind” hinges on us taking to Heart the manifold grace of God. We must claim the power we each have been given to be an instrument for Good in the face of evil, in the midst of suffering, in our steadfast resistance to despair, fear, shame and hatred, in our steadfast claim on the love of God and the God of love in the name of God’s nail-scarred Christ.

When tragedy strikes, when unjustifiable evil surfaces through the foolish hands of God’s wayward children, we who claim to be Christians can do no less than He did. WE must take up our cross, and follow him to the Other side of those Crosses. The good news is that there is Good news. We are the ones we have been waiting for.  WE must be God’s Easter people. That is what it means to be disciples of Jesus.

this little light

When I was the pastor for a rural UM church, one year we were a host family for some of the children from the African Children’s Choir while they were touring and singing at some of the churches in our area. It was a wonderful visit for me and my four children, and those three kids and their adult chaperone from the other side of the world.  For a group project for school, i recently posted one of the video clips from YouTube on our class website of the choir singing ” Walking In The Light Of God”. It always brings tears of joy and happy memories for me to watch those kids singing. They are just beautiful. The whole thing also always leaves me with profound heartache at the whole endeavor, as well. It is extremely problematic for me, to watch these kids perform, and not feel the levels of exploitation and paternalism at work. Especially the particular clip that i posted from YouTube. There are video shots of all these grown-up white faces smiling and enjoying the performance as the camera pans the rows of brightly garbed children singing and dancing with exuberance and joy. The children travel the world, and their lives are totally changed when they get chosen to live, learn, and perform as part of the choir. They raise a lot of money for their communities, and the improvements and opportunities in their lives are a worthy cause. The needs and challenges they face as young people and as Africans are  complex, and seem overwhelming.

so what is my problem with all that improvement and happiness? none. but i do have a problem with our North American cultural values getting confused with the Good News, and forced onto Africans in the name of Christ. i remember how that African chaperone for the kids was uneasy about her kids spending too much time with mine. She didnt want her kids being corrupted by the American culture they were touring in. She would not let them watch television, movies, or play video games with my kids. And yet, they were funded in large part by American Christians who want to feel good about helping the “less fortunate”, and sharing their “blessings” with the “poor”.  So they continue to cater to and promote their feel-good, middle-class, entertainment-oriented, do-gooder versions of the Good News, by inviting the children to come here to the United States to sing and dance to Christian music and raise money for the mission projects back home in Africa.   When asked by their US sponsors what they want to be when they grow up, the children all say appropriate things like Engineer, or Doctor, or Pilot, and they smile into the  DVD’s cameras when they talk about why they are orphans, and when their parents died. They smile.

The culture here in the US  feels more and more sick and sad and lost, to me.  I agree with Mother Teresa’s assessment when she visited. This is a spiritually impoverished place.  The church, unfortunately, has by and large been infected with the same disease. We think our Horatio Algiers- individualistic, self-sufficient, comfort-seeking, self-indulgent, isolationist, pseudo-democratic way of life is superior. Yet we all too often have spent millions of dollars on widening our roads and paving our parking lots and at the same time  narrowing our minds… and hardening our hearts. We think very little of passing by beggars with their cardboard signs on the side of the road, because after all, they are clearly not the “deserving Poor”– they are all “unworthy”, drug addicts, criminals and con artists. (anybody read Hebrews 11, recently, and been impressed with the shining upright moral examples in that List of Heroes??) And we arm ourselves, not with humility and solidarity and compassion, but with the weak pathetic (il)logic that if we helped one, we would have to help them all, and since we cannot help them all, we dont dare help any.  I wish it were really true, that if we helped one, we would have to help them all. In that case, i could start a chain reaction with just one work of mercy, and all the problems would be solved.

so i dont have any easy solutions to my church’s tainted ways of reaching out to others.  i still love listening to my CD’s of the African Children’s Choir, singing their precious hearts out about the love of God. and i still ache when i think of all the justifications most people need before they are willing to give– and why we cant  just “give to anyone who asks, expecting nothing in return”.

ok, so changing our direction while running in place… gets us where?

i have been wrestling with this idea that  the good news and conversion are related. we have been asked when might “conversion” be legit…? if conversion is about change, then what exactly is it that changes? conversion-change is a bit more complicated than changing lanes on the highway was, as i was driving to school today. that was actually quite death-defying, as the highway became treacherous and impassible during the sudden fierce snow storm between Springs and Denver. the last thing i wanted to do was change lanes, once the snow plows came and cleared one lane for us, and we all got moving again. the other lanes were impossible for me to drive in. i watched the big pickup trucks  and smaller cars pass me on either side, as my minivan braved its way up Monument hill in the only lane that looked remotely possible for me to navigate.

what is normally a two hour trip took five hours today.  at one point, there was a car to my left, in that lane, whose driver decided he needed to try to change into the lane behind me. In the attempt, its wheels started spinning in that snow and ice packed strip between lanes, where tires and plows had not cleared a path. it was then quite stuck, and blocking two lanes of traffic, so the entire northbound interstate became impassible again behind me.

i have seen “conversions” like that. the person gets stuck, somehow, and becomes even more of an idiot and an obstacle to the rest of us trying to get Somewhere, than they were before they “accepted Jesus”. instead of just being an obnoxious arrogant boor, they are now an obnoxious, arrogant religious Bible toting St. Paul quoting boor.

i heard one pastor say “following Jesus” is not like adding STP to your engine, so the car of your life gets better gas mileage. Jesus is not an additive to YOUR life.  “Asking Jesus into your Heart” is not like taking an aspirin to get rid of your existential headache. Being Christian in a dangerous dying dirty lying world is not about our comfort or prosperity.  Nor is Jesus meant to be an accessory to your wardrobe. If it were, it would be as helpful to our race as changing the direction you face while only running in place. Conversion is supposed to be like what Mary did. It is about like getting really intimate with God, and then as a result, giving birth to Christ, in your life and into the world…. Think about it. Her whole life’s direction was outwardly changed,  and really just the same it was actually unfolding exactly in the way it had been moving all along, to be completely centered on that Love-Life.    Its like maybe changing from being a caterpillar soul to a butterfly soul. Being more of who you already were meant to be. Totally changed, and more fully you at the same time.

and i wonder when the whole world is gonna change…. i mean, more than just personal conversions, inner healing and individual self-actualization needs to happen to us. If  the spiritual life is only good for personal self-realization, and doesnt have a broader application, a deeper direction, a more cosmic view and an ecumenical irenic ecclesiology, that includes powers and principalities getting defeated, and communities and peoples, tribes and tongues, and everything in the sea and under the earth, and all of creation getting swallowed up by Life– then what Good is it?   The whole of world civilization needs to get more than “civilized”. It needs to get circumcised. Humanity need a new radical source of identity. Our systems need to change. The way we do things needs to  shift in orientation. we need to change our fundamental orientations to life… and move from a short-sighted search to being gratified and entertained by violence and lusts and other compulsions; to a deeper perspective, to being grateful, to seek to entertain angels, and enter into a sacred covenant with life, with ourselves… with the God of Life and the life of god.

what can create that kind of change?  earthquakes? volcanoes? the Ground of our Being getting rocked?   i am still wondering, and wrestling.

Conversion? Coercion? what about Returning to Christian Perfection

After doing the readings this week, and reading and taking other classes about the history of Christianity in the pre-Modern and Modern worlds, it is clear that we have confused the sword with the cross, and the flag with the cross, on many occasions and all continents.  WE have made conversion our work, instead of God’s work. But in my case, i was not converted. i was inverted. i was seized, captivated, i was stunned, i was apprehended and  adamantly fiercely interrupted, disrupted and turned inside out and upside down by amazing Grace and Love. And  in that encounter, It said Its name was Jesus.  The Heart of the Good News of Jesus Christ is, for me, just that: the Heart of Jesus Christ…. The Good News is for me that i am a child of God and i can be in relationship with Jesus now, because He lives…. and the Spirit makes it possible.  AS i wrote in a previous post, He aint dead anymore! I think my spiritual life as a “Christian” spiritual human, a Christian child of God, and not a Hindu child of God or an atheistic child of God or an Islamic child of God, means that i am in relationship with Jesus that is directed by my experience of him as the Love of my Life. This process of returning to “God” started in my conscious awareness when i experienced Jesus as alive, and experienced his unique Presence as an infilling, infiltrating,  indwelling, infusing, and an indelible life-changing, soul-claiming love , for the first time. I believe prevenient grace means i was never apart from God, nor was i ever not in God’s conscious awareness… and i have been growing spiritually and developing as a Soul and returning to God long before i was ever able to articulate it or describe it, much less had heard about God or the name of Jesus. AS a Christian, i choose to develop my spiritual life by “following hard after this Christ, Jesus”. I have committed to seek and serve and listen and obey Jesus, as my Center, my Guru, my Lover, my Example, my Teacher, my Healer, my Brother, my Guide, my Path, my Light, my Alpha and Omega,  my Lord, my Song… my Avatar, my Redeemer, my Savior, my Peace, my Truth, my God.  Jesus is decisive for me, and yet not exclusive. I am not a Christian supremacist. I am one of many of Jesus’ disciples, however. Not everyone is. Do I think everyone “should” be? Apparently God doesn’t think so, because everyone isn’t.  Do I think Jesus should go global? We could do a lot worse as a species… and we have.  Seeking to know and love and serve Jesus is an excellent starting point for many.  Seeking to know and love and serve Krishna is an excellent starting point for many others.  Seeking to know oneself is another. As Mother Teresa is paraphrased as saying, be the best child of God you can be, whatever that is!   And I would add, if your first choice isn’t working for you, then explore! test the waters! The point for me is the question about what John Wesley called Christian perfection:  Does “following” this Christ make me a better Lover?!? If so, how?

What do you do, that makes you better able to love, accept and forgive? what practices, or beliefs, or relationships, help you to love this Life, love God, love yourself, love your enemies, love your neighbors, love your co-inhabitants of this amazing wretched weary planet? One big one for me is my relationship with Jesus. The Spirit of Jesus gives that relationship its Life. To know me in any real way means to know that i am in the middle of a serious long-term committed relationship with this resurrected Man. I like Him. A lot. I want to spend a long long long time with Him, doing whatever He says! Cuz my experience tells me He brings out the best in me.  I do not think that Jesus is making my social location “better”. I am not following Jesus to become wealthy, or stay poor. I am not looking for the American dream. I am not trying to free Tibet, or  seek and save the lost. I am not trying to change the world. The world is changing all the time already. The people who were in power 500 years ago, or fifty years ago, are no longer around. The world remains, the same old amazing diverse evolving wretched place.

I am trying to grow up. Most days i am just trying to find that other sock, clean out the cat litter box, remember my daughter’s doctor appointments,  do my homework, and keep paying the mortgage. The world is big, and my brain is small. I am trying to love my life, and the living creatures, things, and people in it. And to be painfully honest, the world gets harder to love all the time. The suffering keeps growing. The lack of Love is staggering.  People are really really angry, and scared, broken and greedy.  And my mind is on the man i saw kneeling alone under the Pueblo I-25/Hwy 50 intersection  making his bed out of jackets and sheets and tucking himself into them, where he obviously lives, under the bridge overpass as i drove home from school today.  Do I want to make him a Christian like me?  Not necessarily, and i don’t think i can, anyway. God does that, and only sometimes. Now that i know he is there, I do want to figure out how to take him the extra sleeping bag i have. I wonder what his name is, and what his needs are… if he ate anything good today. I wonder how he got there… what’s his story? I wonder if he is a newly released ex-convict, court ordered to live under the bridge; or what makes the local homeless shelter not a viable option for him.  I wonder if he is as lonely as i am sometimes. I wonder what he wonders about. I wonder why i saw him today. I wonder if it was Jesus….

A credible reason

A credible reason to engage in mission might be the incredible transformational nature of God, the unreasonable length and breadth and height and width of the love of God, the wideness to that mercy and the depth of God’s hope for the created realms. The Mission, or Work of God, seems to be unfolding:  the future is uncharted, and the present is unbounded, not limited by the past, and yet informed by it and indebted to it, the way pine cones are indebted to the old growth forests that produced them.  Since the Work is unfinished, a reason to engage in the Mission is self-evident. If there is just one piece of the world wrong, or broken, or suffering, or in chains, then that is reason enough to seek shalom, to build and repair that piece of the world, to strive for liberating wholeness and inner and outer peace. The saved world would be one that is pictured in Romans 8, whereby the children of God are fully actualized, and revealed, and the entire created realm is transformed and reconciled in this liberated shalom, liberated from death and decay, from entropy and chaos.

Promise

what if
you are accidentally-
on-purposefully
unfolding in time,
at just the right imperfect time,
your precious precarious life
a godgiven forgiven sacred trust,
a paradoxology of Love…?

perhaps
you are the vagabond kind

who wanders limping and lurching

the mud and ice of these endless winter fields,
desperate and longing
for the wide green sunlit swathe of june,
unaware that this whole time
god gave you his faded gardener’s rucksack
that you mistook for
the weight of the world
on your weary broken
now  80 year old back
and it has had a hole in it —
you have been flinging wildflower seeds
everywhere you go for decades
they were silently carelessly softly escaping,
welling up spilling out behind you
trailing, streaming behind you,

a dark cloud
of unknowing,
your wake of
promise.

~MB~

Holy Cow! It’s Holy Week

I have noticed, since becoming one, that Christians make a big deal out of Easter, and the 8 days leading up to it. I read in the Bible, in one of St. Paul’s letters, to some of those earliest Christians, he thought that if there were no resurrection, then they were the most miserable deluded bunch of suckers that had ever been born. So much for being focused only in the Now… and living in the present moment. Apparently, the empty tomb was the clincher for Paul, that there really was something quite compelling and extraordinary about this Jesus and his resurrection Gig, and our future one. Christians for centuries have called themselves Easter People. Is that because we dress up like giant smiling bunnies for little kids, and old people in nursing homes, and hunt for colored eggs and candy?  I don’t think so. I think it is because we really do think that death is not the final state of existence for people. I think that Jesus is alive, really,  after being falsely accused of crimes he never did, and put to death in a horrific way by the Roman authorities. And that he is alive, not in a flimsy white Casper the friendly ghost kind of way, but in a new kind of bodily eternal, exalted, supernatural, powerful existence, and that is why we don’t have his bones carefully guarded somewhere, like in a special room in the Vatican. His burial tomb is really empty. I think Jesus is alive in ways i can’t even imagine yet, in dimensions of Realities that we are only just beginning to explore and suggest and conceive. And his subversive triumph over death, busting a move like that, dancing “with the devil on his back”, the way we sing it in one of my favorite old old songs, Lord of the Dance, is just God’s warm up number, the opening act.  One day, we are all going to be dancing on our graves. But I am not waiting for someday. I dance every day on mine already. Easter is the yearly reminder that I serve a living God, I am in love  and in cahoots with a resurrected Man, and my death is not the end of my existence, either.