"painful, beautiful, aching madness..."

I have noticed a new trend in prayer requests. A hand goes up and information on yet another earthquake is dispensed with the tone of satisfaction that comes from being the first to proclaim ill news. I don’t know that I have ever had the privilege of knowing a more disaster-conscious group of individuals. I suppose that it stems from a quiet fear, a disquieting of soul and that nagging question that preys on us like a hound—is the end near?

I think first of all that we have a deficiency in the qualification of the terms. “Is the beginning near?” would be more accurate. We are not the reality, but the reality’s manifestation. Much the same as the Tabernacle was not a picture of a worship to come, but a system that always was and had as yet not been revealed. It is the picture Milton gave of God looking at Adam and Eve across the chasm of space and asking, “Who will redeem them?

I try to take each of these questions, these unspoken questions masked in a news bulletin with a sense of calm and lightly remark on the relative normalcy of quakes and their little known frequency. I don’t do this to give a false sense of comfort, or of time stretching infinitely towards that invisible line of the horizon; nor is it a pretense of bravado on my part. I personally feel that the end or beginning is near. I know I join centuries of Christians who say this and yet, Creation seems so restless, so full of violent wonder and trembling anticipation. Perhaps it IS a sense of false or pretentious bravado. I must confess, I do fear it, I fear it the way anyone fears the Unknown.

It is like standing at the entrance to a darkened doorway. There is a tension to that darkness that you cannot shake which is further exacerbated by a friend waiting in the shadows. You know the friend is there; you do not fear them, they are, after all, your friend. What you fear is that brief moment in Time when they leap from the shadows with a shout and all the collective tension collides in one instant of terror and then…quiet—the tension is instantly resolved. It is in every story, as in life, that the tension, much like the shape in a drop of water, keeps us in check in a sort of painful, beautiful, aching madness—longing for and fearing that last and final resolution to life’s shadows.

I am afraid I may fit into both categories of those waiting for Christ’s coming: I will be awake when he comes but fall sleep from cardiac arrest at the trumpet blast and therefore rise first after all.

idea-hating squirrels...

I know I haven't posted in awhile, but the good news is that I am rapidly breaking free from a naive assumption that is perfectly mirrored in this quote from "Finding Neverland" by Marie Ansell Barrie...or rather the script writer:

"I imagined that brilliant people disappeared to some secret place where good ideas floated around like leaves in autumn..."

If such a mythical Eden of verbiage and syntax exists then I am the poor sap who is repeatedly pelted with acorns by devious, idea-hating squirrels hidden high in the trees.

Until then, here is one more quote by that venerable Bard, a one, Edwin Arlington Robinson. Food for thought on the post-modernist's menu and perhaps I'll write more on it later:

“[the world is] a kind of spiritual kindergarten where bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.”

So long. A post on the end (or the beginning) of the world coming soon.

Emily Dickinson madlibs...

During the Regionalists Unit in English 11, I decided, while studying Emily Dickinson, that it might be fun to play a little madlibs with some of her poems. They are mad, strange and incoherent. Enjoy.

Happy is the thing with feathers-
That perches in the steamboat-
And stretches the tune without the books-
And never stops-at all-

And grotesquest-in the scarecrow-is heard-
And excited must be the storm-
That could abash the bluish-gray bird
That kept so many warm.

I've perambulated (Joel's contribution) in the earthen land-
And on the oldest Sea-
Yet, never, in Extremity
It asked a Human-of Me.


This is absurd and almost obscene...keep in mind, they had no idea where the nouns, adjectives or verbs were going to go.

This is my letter to the Mud
That never wrote to Me-
The bulky News that Universe told-
With tender Majesty.

Her Mexico is committed
To toilet paper I cannot see- (That's just irony)
For love of Her-Portly-countrymen
Spanking-of Me.


And finally...

I NEVER ran a bird
I never ran the sea;
Yet know I how the heather looks,
And what a Liger must be.
I never threw with Obama
Nor jumped in Joel
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the teacher were given.

Unfortunately we didn't get to do the rest I had picked out. I was just getting the terms defined as to what kind of verbs, nouns, adjective, etc. that I was looking for. It could have become more and more creative.

I am the vinyl...

I had posted this a few days ago, but some response I received to it made me think it would be badly misunderstood. If you are looking at this as an autobiographical piece, you are mistaken. That being said, I think it is to a point autobiographical for many of us. We are pressed into the world's mold often times without at first realizing it...that is what makes a proper worldview so important. Again, these are just some thoughts I had, don't look at it as my life's story or my current spiritual state, because it isn't.

I am the vinyl. Pressed in a mold and placed on a turntable that spins at dizzying speeds with endless monotony and frightening regularity. The needle finds the groove; the speaker crackles with a dusty uncertainty and then spews maxims, dogmas and endless tenants and absolutes without warmth or conviction. The nostalgic “warmth” of sound is an art gleaned from hours of sermons and being that ear to conversations, that shadow man that was neither part nor parcel to the discussion…parroting, nothing but parroting. When will Love marry my discourse?

This is the external. Inside it feels as if another mold has crushed me into a peculiar conformity—a strange implosion of worldview, ethics and purpose. It constricts me, slows thought; reasoning disappears and before the dust settles, a new figure haunts my shelf.

I have been encoded with billions of sound bytes, video files and MP3 tracks. As if the whole world were a voice and I the indiscriminate Ear that bends low and strains for the beautiful, the grotesque, the lie, the bawdy, the banal, the cryptic and vacuous statements of the upper echelons of style and culture, and pandered to the esoteric philosophies that gild my image but further confuse my mind. I am the dictator, the oppressed, the democracy and the corruption. I have the Bible as my constitution while cutting its entries and pasting in my own like some hallowed scrapbook of personal freedom. I have lain with the Golden Mistress in secret then cursed the wealthy for walking through sunlight with Her, arm in arm. I am that sad paradox. I am man—clothed in religion.