“we have a lot of genuinely concerned people calling upon us to “save” a world which their language simultaneously reduces to an assemblage of perfectly featureless and dispirited “ecosystems,” organisms,” “environments,” “mechanisms,” and the like. it is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced.” — wendell berry life is a miracle
these trees tower, and drink the morning fog with their bark
mirrored symbols of reality and dense fog of fulfillment
on the other side of charity the paupers peddle flowers
folding hands open to the sky
the quaking dead silence
time still in motion
vaulted with air passing
no voice can come of this destitute
no sound of tilled ground
only the empty, exhausted breath of a bud opening to its world
as an altar opens to heaven
as the light fills the day
as time receives space
so we beggars enter the kingdom of god
We had spend the weekend thinking hard, being in the moment and reflecting on our Ennegram number. This ancient personality web was quite the talk with friends and its intrigue has not worn-out for me. I think it is sourced from good wisdom and describes well the inherent play I see in my life and that life acted out with others. Caila and I listened to a seven-disc teaching that Richard Rohr had done years ago, describing with deep awareness, how the nine-fold view of the person related to the origins of sin and how the concept is beyond new-age and inherently Christian—not that Christians have any hold on its wisdom, most don’t even know about the thing.
We got back from Sequoia, rested a bit, and then I walked into work the next morning. And Father Rohr just so happen to wonder in, the first one ing the bookstore that morning. I rushed over to describe the ironical nature of our meeting and thanked him for his teachings, but before I knew it we were talking Ennegram—like back in the day with my friends, but this, was the master. Often with friends it sounds like, “Yeah she is definitely a two,” or “So-in-so is a four because they hate being labeled a four.” Father Rohr lifted his hand calmly and said with deep jovial utterance, “Your a seven, its the light in your eyes.” I laughed instantly, thinking only about how cool it was that a hero of mine was hanging out in the bookstore and was sounding like a friend rather fast. I asked if he was teaching a doctoral class—as he was last year for Fuller—but it turned out that he was giving a talk on his book Falling Upward (one of my favs) at the Episcopal church across the street. As he left the bookstore he came over and said I was definitely a seven having watched me interact with customers for the past hour. “Your fear never shows bodily like a six would.” At that I found it necessary to say, “My armpits tell me I’m a six.” The core of a six is deeply anxious and I sweat like crazy out of my armpits—historically around a woman I am ensconced with. Father Rohr chuckled and wished us a good afternoon. That night over a thousand people flooded All Saints Church. Rohr’s message was simple: the way to the second half of life and the mature side of the spiritual journey is through suffering or a great, great love.
As he was concluding—addressing a question regarding fear— he began to quote the young man whom he had met at the bookstore that day. He prefaced saying that he did not mean to embarrass him. He said something brilliant about fear and then quoted me, “And then the young man said, ‘My armpits tell me I’m a six.’” The whole of the company errupted in an ol’timy laugh, with a few outbursts of laughter here and there—the guy behind me being one of the outbursts. I had just finished a masters degree the week before and now Richard Rohr is quoting me, I thought, I’m big-time now—maybe even famous. The “Young Man at the Bookstore” might even be what I go by from here on out, thinking further about what something like this does for ones writing career.
sequoia was snowy & redonkulous, not to mention, the trees & the snow balls
I finished a master’s degree today. I’ve learned a ton, been through a rough few years, but here I am, finished. I like to say that I have a bachelors and masters in B.S.
Which is true on so many levels.
When I walked out of my last exam there was a familiar feeling that came over me. It is a lightened feeling, your neck releases just a bit and you look up. But also, it is the feeling of normalcy. The sun hits your face, you look up and your still you and nothing is really different from one moment to the next—you’ve only been brought to the next moment. I remember being on Mt. Katadin in northern Maine—it’s the last mountain on the Appalachian Trail. I had walked 2100 miles, the trail was finished, I was done, the white blazes turned to blue and on down the side of the mountain I went, traversing the trail home. You see, the trail kept going—the walk continued, I was simply delivered over to the next moment. This has always been a helpful way for me to remember my journeys: the thing lasts. You carry the experience with you in time and space—new time and new space certainly—but ever new is the winding path. My studies have just begun, I have a ton to learn.
About half way through my walk on the trail I discovered a note that the manager of the sports store I was working at had thrown in my bible. It marked Psalm 18. I read thing over and over and came to know and pray the Psalter for the first time. About half way through my time at Fuller I took a class with John Goldingay on the Psalms, I’ve never seen God the same since. The last thing I translated, on my last exam, in my final class was Psalm 146. These words are rolling around in my mouth, a new prayer, a gift, they are sweet, they are true and good.
Praise YHWH!
Let all that I am praise the YHWH.
I will praise the YHWH as long as I live.
I will sing praises to my God with my dying breath.
Don’t put your confidence in powerful people;
there is no help for you there.
I feel as though I could add: or those who have masters degrees or think they have arrived, in them there is “no deliverance,” which is a better way to translate that last phrase. Only the path and way of God brings us to the next moment—delivers us from ourselves. It seems that the path is an exercise in trust, a prayer where you are relearning one thing all of your life.
father charles and shawn. caila and i met father charles after she hit his car with her’s. shawn and he are anglican friends now. click on shawn to piece together he and his family’s journey
Blessed be the bombs—
murders they are
the whores of industry and the saints of modern militarism
Be it irony which drives this phallic state through on its own totem
a puff exhausting the last will of vengeance
a teaming cry for its own rescue
Doubt the peacemakers make peace with themselves, neighbor and world
before we make ourselves the new brand of imperial peace.
the pax Americana condemned in its claim
And no peace at all can be sifted fully from the ruin of soul dyed red
the common color of humanity
the same burdened life in us all burning out
this is a preview of a talk i’m giving april 20 in G-Rap
I can never quite say enough about the whole enterprise. Its galloping cadence and offbeat sounds gather me into itself as I begin to think. With little filter, no observance of rules, the world flows freely into the next moment and the next, asking you to participate in that moment as mystics pointing to God.
It is colder in Southern California than it has been since I have been back. It even hailed yesterday, surely just cluttered clouds that couldn’t rise over the mountains, but it hails here—I know now. I watched as the dark midmorning clouds struggled, my hands in my pockets as I rode without them. Now I can’t help but think that the hail was a gift from the sky. A reminder that nature has a hot nose and we should not get to tame in the tranquility. So I woke up this morning from a restless sleep and started planning an adventure. This hankering for a sojourn might have something to do with me watching Ken Burns documentary on the National Parks. Also, I read a bunch of one of my favorite books recently that said something about how it is cultures have always understood that men are made, they don’t just happen. So deep down I am exploring some impulses that are caught up in me like I’m caught up in the world, freely bound.
You start entertaining questions, sending emails, asking about so-in-so and such-in-such, wondering if a path might open up for you to traverse—pealing down the tracks that lead to only God knows where. I finish graduate school in a week, I have the opportunity to deliver a lecture on intertextuality and pacifistic readings of the bible in G-Rap, I’m in love, just figured my desk outside so I could attune myself to the Muses, I drink tea now, someone gave me a job, my beard is two month old, I’m flying into Chicago in a week—and so surely—there must be something in all this clutter to get me trotting a trail I have not yet known. I imagine some kind of passage where the world opens to me and I fall fast into the misty fog of forever, or the teaming time of this moment. I’m holding fast to the idea that it is okay to just be a lighthearted ecological mystic, as Jesus seems to point out in one of his best teachings (Matt 5-7).
“this writing that you do, that so thrills you, that so rocks and exhilarates you, as if you were dancing next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else. the reader’s ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word.” — annie dillard, the writing life
pasadena—the view from the bike
Life is far more spacious than we seem to see. Reality is open and full and ripe with grace that is constantly wooing us into a more honest more loving more true relationship with everything. Life is so spacious that this deeply connected reality that we wade through can even include death. In fact death is central to the pattern of the crucified God. God carves this pattern into the very fabic of reality as Jesus dies and rises. Someone who trusts Jesus carries a cross like the One who has gone before them, it often ends up being the price of social non-conformity. It is a descent rather than an upward path. Richard Rohr talks about it as a river that we can’t, or dare, push. We are already in it and it is deep, rushing with love and truth. We lift our feet and allow ourselves to be taken by this “Big Juicy Goodness,” as I have heard Anne Lamott say. We have no ladder to climb and no place to be, but here, collected and connected in every moment that flows to us and through us. Annie Dillard once wrote:
i can not cause light; the most i can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. it is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. light, be it particle or wave, has force; you rig a giant sail and go. the secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.
Jesus invites people to open themselves to the possibility that God might reign through them, that the reality of God might flow through their very being and fundamental existence, how they relate to everything—how they see everything. Often what we understand or see in our small little worlds feeds back to us what we have already determined about a situation or that person or groups that think that way. I find myself doing this every time I talk about war and think about Christian traditions that support state military action. It is like they are trying, passively, to relive the Crusades. I label, I dismiss, I get angry and defensive and the feedback loop tells me more about myself than them, whoever them might be. There is a solidarity that is planted in us when we open ourselves to God, when we lift our feet and float. Rivers flow and move in ways we can predict if we are in a boat, but when you are in the thing—it moves you. And maybe that’s the point—we are restless people—fighting all sorts of things, giving ourselves to a mistaken oasis, trying to land and conquer for ourselves the places we make sacred. When it is all sacred, even the pain, we settle not on some secure land mass but in our very being trusting the flow of God’s spirit giving every breath, every puff of solar wind.
thanks friends
the weary darkness of my soul
my eyes turned to light
teaming moments of trauma
like teeth dug in my side
i would run but that is all i’ve done
i would sit so long as to bring an early death
but this all a moot point at the end of the day
so i wonder in my thought as i survey