I read some old poems and then a few journal entries the other day. First, the poems I felt as if I could say and still know to be true except for just a few lines in each of the three I read right near the end where they would resolve. I think when I wrote them a girl had just broken up with me and so they were reaching poems that found comfort outside real life, it was like they were looking around for wholeness struggling to find it then assumed it was not found presently so they reach outside of time and space to a distant land and make their home. I am finding though more and more as Jesus shakes me in this daily gig called life home wants to break in. I am afraid to say some lines in these poems because I fear God is trying to get to where I am and I may just pass him as I head off on these words like a magic carpet ride to lofty abodes that don’t exist, or weren’t meant for me. The party is here with God and dancing it out in community is where my prayers are leading these days. Old poems can live again with new language. They can still reach and long and desire more than ever but their end, where they resolve, needs to be reconfigured. The end doesn’t justify a means but the end justifies the now ever present reality where the end, the resolve of all history, has rushed to meet us here in the past.
Second when I journal and don’t post it on this blog it is probably about a girl. And so as I write here I write in broad strokes so that the content might not be so specific as to limit the potential for future interaction. I want to write in a more timeless fashion while at the same time honoring the fact that certain concerns and language resound well only at certain times. So when I go back and read this journal I keep it is always jarring and more honest than I am use to. It cuts straight to exactly what was going on in certain movements that perhaps good friends know well but to hear them played back in my own muddled words is refreshing. Each entry says about the same thing too because like I said they end up being about girls and I think there are patterns to the way I interact with girls. Those reading this that know this part about me may assume it has something to do with burning out or over romanticising things but these are not the patterns of which I speak. Like the old poems these patterns are more ideological. But the entries find themselves lost in confusion and struggling to control then in the consistent climactic end they say something like, ‘God give me eyes to see her heart and trust again-its just really hard.’
In conclusion when it comes to relating to God there is this impulse to relate in other worldly term because the relation is not always tangible. And when it comes to a person, because they are very much a physical reality, the thing can over take you to the point where you can’t escape. But both God and people, as least in my life at this point, have begun to situate themselves around a table or a bike ride sometimes around making a meal or even a place where the church gathers.
