to stand rapt in awe

spring cleaning

2010-06-16T14:17:00.006-05:00

I've taken down most of my first draft writing stuff that was up on this blog because I've been sending stuff out to lit. mags.

So now, I think that I'll be going more informal with the blog, doing day-to-day ramblings and maybe album or book reviews. New start.

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Speaking of cleaning up and starting anew, I've now graduated from college. I'm 22 with about 22 grand in debt with a degree in the least profitable field and working now as a interning pastor--a profession that has in it's job description eternal poverty.

Now with 16 years of education behind me and the world before me, what do I do? I should have an answer, but I kind of don't. There are so many uncertainties. Should I really become a pastor? Will I be any good at it? How will I pay for things in my life? Will I go back to school someday? Should I maybe do something else? What will my life look like in five years, in ten? How should I live my life each day without knowing what’s to come? I won’t have my parents anymore to guide me, I have to stand alone as a man and make my own decisions without they’re counsel. It’s all on me now. What's to guide me? To be frank, I don’t know. I’m not even sure what I’m doing here. I’m on audible right now waiting for whatever situation comes my way, and I’m kind of afraid. I want to dance to my own beat and suck the marrow out of life but I don’t know the dance or the moves and don’t know where to look for the bone.

When I went to pick up my cap and gown, there was a sign with a rather happy looking graduate with the caption that read, “The World is Yours!”

But Jesus sort of had a different view of things—“What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?” he also says "For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.”

This new life before me, this journey, the story to it is already written and known. I don’t know the way or what I'll become, and in a sense what will happen will happen whether I like it or not. But I realized that it’s not how I lead my life, but its how I follow, how I give my life that will determine everything. I really want to live a significant life, something that will mean something. But my significance comes in becoming insignificant, in following Jesus.

Because I'm learning more and more that I can't trust myself, that with all the good intentions and ideas in the world, I am still a man, a physical broken and self-absorbed man, separated from God and everyone else within my own cage. If I lead my life, I'll naturally go to what pleases me immediately and physically, even using others for that means. I'll lose my life.

So during this time in my life I want to learn to follow.

In learning the moves and rhythms of Christ, of God's love--serving others, listening to them, trying to understand, listening to God, struggling to do what he wants instead of what I do no matter how difficult, always thinking about God and others and giving my whole life and being to love--then I'll live.

naked bears and trampolines

2009-12-23T20:30:00.005-06:00

I used to keep track of the years of my life by what gifts I got for Christmas.

My first Christmas, from what I've been told, I got a large bear without fur. His name is Jumbo Love. Someone explained to me that we got him because no one else wanted a naked bear. I used to put his blue bellybutton in my mouth and carry him around by it. I still have him, but he’s in pretty bad shape, sits on top of one of my bookshelves with his left arm half attached.

Another year was a blow up trampoline that my grandparents got me. It took over two hours for my sister and I to blow it up. After jumping on it for ten minutes it deflated and we realized it had ripped on the bottom from a stray Lego.

When I was nine, everybody pitched in to get me this build-it-yourself motorized helicopter. The box said that it was for ages eight and up. It took my father, grandfather and I from morning until dinner-time Christmas day to finish.

We had moved out of the church my father built, no more services in my living room, and lived in a real house. After a year we moved back into the church. It was like we had built this magnificent sand castle—running our thumbs to make spiral towers and padding wet sand until the walls with finger-dents for windows rose knee-high above the surrounding mote--but right when it was finished a kid running after a kite, not paying attention, smashed it.

Money was tight then so we decided not to travel the three hour Christmas pilgrimage to the grandparents. While setting up last year’s two-foot tall plastic tree, I remember my parents fighting about not spending too much on gifts, of telling us that there wouldn't be anything under the tree. I remember being surprised to see shiny metallic paper of nativity-patterns around different sized boxes Christmas morning, of ripping the paper open, of seeing the logo of a PlayStation console, of not being able to talk for awhile, of feeling bad about ripping the wrapping paper. I looked at my father and he was watching me grinning and his eyes looked like they had been rubbed and poked at.

A couple years later, I remember a Christmas at my grandparents, of getting something not so memorable but practical, I think it was a blanket, and taking the trash out after dinner and looking up at the Indiana night sky and seeing stars dancing like the lit parts of a massive pupil and I remember realizing for the first time that a gift doesn’t have to be something you can hold in your hands.

I've been thinking about why we give gifts at Christmas. I think it's because this year I have no money to buy anyone anything. I think gifts are reminders, reminders of love, of renewing old and solidifying new relationships. We think long and hard about what to give, save up, because we want people to know how much they mean to us. It's a tradition that turns the wheels of this economy. It's a tradition that tries, as naked bears and trampolines do, to communicate what words fail to.

Christmas gift giving, I'm reminded, is all partaking in the ripples of an echo, in a song that stars gathered together to sing Glory to. It was a gift that explained the love we all want and are searching for, a gift you can't hold or buy at a department store or rip shiny paper off of. It was a gift that communicated, communicates I so love you. If you want, love me too.

connection

2009-12-12T03:45:00.020-06:00

Separation anxiety. My friend told me that's what he has because after he was born he was separated from his mother. He said that was why. He told me about his intimacy issues--that he broke up with his girlfriend because he felt like he was getting too attached, that whenever a relationship looked like it was about to become one, he broke out of it. He told me that he's afraid to get close but at the same time so wants to be. He asked me if any of what he was telling me made sense.

We live in an age of connectedness. Two clicks and you're plugged into a social network where technology has made friendships more accessible than the cumbersome chore and effort of actually spending time with people. We can be whoever we want to be, screen what we don't want people to see, and portray the "ideal me". We chat and text--an immediacy to communication that a hundred years ago would have been unfathomable. We can be connected to anyone at anytime at any place around the world. There is something daunting about this-- the world at our fingertips.

Italo Calvino wrote a book awhile back about imaginary places called Invisible Cities. In the book, Marco Polo describes to Kublai Kahn the cities of his empire. One city, Chloe, is described not by its architecture or infrastructure but by its inhabitants--a girl twirling her parasol and her rounded hips, an old woman in black with trembling lips, a tattooed giant, a young man with white hair, a female dwarf, twin girls dressed in coral, a blind man with a cheetah on a leash. These people, he describes, walk around the city without ever exchanging more than a glance. No words are ever said, no one ever touches another. He says that the city's inhabitants shoot imaginary arrows at one another to connect, to partake in the collectively created illusion as to avoid all the misunderstandings, the conflicts, the trouble, the pain and regret of falling in love.

Although we are the age of connectedness, we are also the age of separation, of loneliness.

We walk around with our cheetahs on our leashes. We paint our porcelain shells carefully and as beautifully as we can. We shoot arrows at each other. We pretend.

I'm a part of it, this dance. Here I am trying to connect to you.

Because I often forget.

Once I was at this huge event with some twenty-two thousand attendants. I remember seeing and meeting so many different kinds of people, of hearing stories of pains and joys and sufferings. I remember my hotel room every night, laying down into darkness, fixing onto a spot on the ceiling, feeling perfectly alone.

I remember the day after this event, of dealing with this loneliness, Before night, I remember going outside to ask God to show himself to me. I demanded proof that I wasn't alone, that even when I was sick of all my brokenness and neediness, when I hated every part of me, that he didn't. I knew how completely insignificant I was but I wanted to believe he still wanted to be with me. I wanted him to show me. I dared him to.

I remember standing at a clearing in a wet grass-field with my eyes closed, hoping and longing for this sign, a part of me telling me I was being foolish, of thinking of going back, feeling a thud on my leg, opening my eyes to see the smiling face of a small boy with an over-sized head and fat arms stretched up towards me. I remember being confused and picking him up, of him immediately wrapping his arms around me and falling asleep on my shoulder, his faint breathing cooling the hairs on my neck, the gurgling of his snore. I remember a boy's warmth and standing in an open field while looking up at the sun finger-painting the sky before dark.

The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing.

He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside quiet waters,

he refreshes my soul.
He guides me along the right paths
for his name's sake.

Even though I walk
through the darkest valley,
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff,
they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.

Surely your goodness and love will follow me
all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord
forever.

the urban heat island effect

2009-09-15T21:20:00.005-05:00

There is a parking lot next to a large red-bricked church that I used to play in. The church’s red brick is a thorough red, even and fair—more like the church is painted red. Someone once told me that the red brick was like the red of Jesus’ blood. I always thought it looked more like the redder parts of clay that you found digging too-deep holes in front yards.

The red stops though in one area—the wall the church shares with its parking lot. A different brick was used for the wall, brick that looks like it was salvaged from a fire. I always felt bad for that wall, that I was looking at something I wasn’t supposed to. The wall's neo-gothic windows are its only glory— looking into the church’s main sanctuary. During nights I used to stand alone in the parking lot and listen to an orchestra practicing or a baritone belting and remember placing myself in one of the wall’s stretched yellow shadows and thought of sailing across a black ocean in a boat made of light on the winds of a symphony.

The parking lot was the meeting spot for the neighborhood kids. We commonly knew that it was a place of our own, a place that enticed wild behavior. We played catch with anything, from footballs to sticks and rocks, making parking an “at your own risk” endeavor. The parking lot had a sort of lawlessness about it that frightened the adults. It might have been the black of the asphalt. They say that the heat generated from black-top surfaces in the city contribute to global warming, a phenomenon known as “the urban heat island effect”. The heat the lot generated made the air thinner and so harder to breathe, entrancing you until you began to float and feel otherworldly. Its heat enables the imagination. We chased cars that innocently tried to park for meetings and services because they were intrusive wild beasts entering our domain, played off-the wall, pelting innocent girls with tennis ball, and rode the one bicycle the more fortunate one of us owned around the perimeter of the lot until standing up was impossible.

That black island—with its yellow lines, dirt-smudged grinning faces, its pebbles stuck to bottoms of sweaty bare feet, its knee scabs and sticky fingers, with its music, its basketball rhythms and Sunday school melodies, with its heat and its faith and magic—had an effect on me.

a new question

2009-08-24T23:24:00.006-05:00

I was talking with an old friend recently, sitting in a boat in the middle of a lake, about meaning and meaninglessness in life and how we do things for ourselves—things that seem great in the moment but never fully give lasting satisfaction.

They say that a sign of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, getting the same results, while each time expecting something different to happen. By this definition, most people (myself included) are insane.

I’ve been searching for meaning in the tangible, everyday things—in what I want and do and say and how I interact and in what I seek and hope and long for. I’ve been trying to find meaning for me in an endless repetition with reckless abandon, hoping each time to find something, never finding lasting meaning.

They also say that life is a gift. Sometimes it seems more like a piece of coal.

I’ve been asking myself the same old and tiresome question for a long time—What is the meaning to my life? Different answers have come and gone and different idioms have stuck and then lost their weight.

Love, the pulse of all, has always been somewhere in answers I’ve found, but what does that mean, to Love? Another question that encapsulates so many more, that gets asked so many times that its known as the cliché, that if you ask it you endanger yourself of becoming sensitive, yet nonetheless the question on everyone’s heart but the answer to which is beyond reach —What is Love?

Because, as someone once said, if I gain truth and knowledge as no one else has, if I can face anything, if I gain all the riches and power this world can offer, if I do every good and charitable deed, but don’t have love, then I am absolutely nothing.

For me, this question has become everything in my attempting plight to true life. Apart from the right answer, a true, convicting answer has been unknowable.

But someone else once said that the answer to the question was made plainly obvious—that Love made its own definition known when it gave itself for us, that true life begins when we accept that.

I stand humbled, rapt in the awe of my own insignificance and in the moving power of God, that he is Love and life, that he loves me, that he gave and gives himself for me. I am nothing yet lack nothing and it is thoroughly well with my soul.

And so the answer to meaning has become piercingly clear— life is a gift to give, to Love.

I’ve realized that I’ve been asking the wrong questions all along. Meaning is in asking a different repetitive question with the same reckless abandon and with all the fervor and perseverance life affords—How can I give my life?

discipline

2009-08-05T18:05:00.005-05:00

So today I went for a random walk after dropping of some stuff at the cleaners, because it was too beautiful out, and ended up by the river. The smell of dish water and the clapping of the split pea river near the new North Ave bridge brought me back to memories I’d forgotten—of waking up at four, of vaguely riding my bike down smudged light blue streets, of already sore from the day before and the day before that, of stretching on mounds of gravel, of drinking Nalgene water, of carrying the stern of an eight man boat that shouldn’t have been that heavy to a dock peppered in green by the morning geese, of taking off my sandals like Moses and stepping into a starboard rigged fiberglass stern, of wrapping my shirt around my head, of masquerading a pirate, of plugging into everything as my blue and white blade cut the green cheese water, of how my legs and back and arms thought for themselves, of synching to the rhythm of the morning and to seven others, of the agony and the strength, of push and pain and relief in release between strokes, of being pushed beyond my body and then beyond my mind, of pushed to a deeper me, of beads of sweat connecting the dots of my sun freckles, of watching the sun come up while floating and flying in a state beyond pain on the dark river mirroring what looked like a litmus test smeared across the sky-water water-colored canvas—and I remembered being so profoundly alive. But I remembered discipline and commitment.

Looking at my life now, as Arnold would say, I lack discipline. I know what I want to do with my life, of how I want to live, of what God wants me to do, but can’t push myself beyond the limits of my body or mind. I re-learned today how much I need discipline to get there, to be pushed beyond myself, to where I can fully love and live and see what I would otherwise see as irreversibly filthy Chicago River water as God’s beauty and perfection mirrored around me. For me to live a practical life of love, I need discipline.

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So the message of this song might be the opposite of what's above but it reminded me of today and is simply just sick.

a mess of me

2009-07-24T11:30:00.008-05:00

So I began this year hoping to learn what it means to love God and love others and by doing so find what it means to live. I’ve learned it’s hard.

I usually think that I can hold my own. I go about my day under the impression that what I see and experience is true, is right. But I’ve recently been finding that I can’t trust myself. I can’t trust that what I see—an old woman on the 49b with wiry white hair, frail, skin cracked like an elephant’s, hunched over twig crossed legs, in an all dark blue ensemble, squinting through large maroon plastic frames at a tattered copy of War and Peace—is real. I can’t see the page she’s on, what she thinks about it, if she’s on her way home, what she had for dinner last night, if she lives alone, what she thinks about death or the life she’s lived, is living, if she watches Conan or Letterman, if she watches television at all, if she is a mother or wife, if her and I would get along. And even if I knew all these things, I still couldn’t begin to understand. All I can see is a woman on a bus and can only pretend to understand the woman in her. But I can’t pretend because it’s me writing my story on her.

I write my own version of my own story on everything I see. So everything is complicated. Truth is unperceivable through my eyes because there’s a war in me and it’s making a big mess.

Say I like someone. Is that her I’m seeing or who I want to see? Say I don’t like someone or what they’re doing. Is it because of them or is it some complex self-esteem booster?

There are deep desires in me that I’m not even aware of—things driving me and halting me, chemical and cognitive things, things that maybe I can hypothetically analyze (childhood factors, social expectations, etc) but can never really grasp or moreover control. I’m driven by another me and it frightens me.

Because there is this great tension in myself between who I want to be and who I am. There’s a tension in this world between how we want it to be and how it is.

So if I follow the Son of Man, the essentially perfect incarnation of Love and Truth, how do I live with myself? Do I just pretend? How do I love others? As someone once said, I’m just a crooked soul trying to stand up straight."

What do I do? The Shepherd King prayed, Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

From this, even with the mess in me, I’m learning peace—that Everything sees everything in me and loves regardless. He, like a shepherd, leads me away from myself and guides me towards everlasting. So I don't need to worry. Even with the war in me, I can have peace.

As another Shepherd King prayed:

I’m learning that although it’s hard to live in the constraints of my own limited perception, to love God and others in this self-cage, I can trust in the Good Shepherd, who understands and leads. Because he loves and guides me, I don’t need anything—The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing.

manifesto

2009-05-03T23:57:00.006-05:00

Communication is limited. Words are just words. They mean nothing. I can write all day and night, pouring thoughts and soul into words, but something gets lost in the manifestation.

Words are just matches, the kinetic force wanting to run against the sandpaper mind, but without will or desire to strike for want of light or heat are just potential.

Sitting here, I feel so limited in life, so unknowing of what to think or do or how to love or make sense of anyone or myself.

Because words are potential and nothing more.

But let me cliche that--words are potential and I potentially am the definition.

Because with words I have the trampolines of imagination, the social subjective/objective correlatives, the painting images, the comparing metaphors, light that makes sense of this dark. So I must read them, I must write them, I must think them, I must pray them.

I need words like a sickness needs a cure, I need to think and stumble towards truth and love and an assurance that life still has meaning.

I hate that I'm writing these limited words with their limited associations, adding to the chaos and meaninglessness.

But they're all I have.

My chest aches, my parched throat pulsates, my lungs heave, soul pounds flesh to call the quenching assurance of God's words--to wring them out, to cherish them, to view life with them, to live them, to head their call.

Even though words, like me, are partial to break and to misinterpret and be misinterpreted, they begin to make sense of life, the have the potential to paint God, they're how God paints himself to us.

And my mind, soul, strength, and heart are willing and wanting and are so in wanting of Your words.

So here is my manifesto--I'll listen and think and obey and live, because Your words are life to me and everyone and my words and all words and all things and push towards a greater purpose of meaning in truth and compassion and the future towards life eternal.

I need Thee, O I need Thee.
Every hour I need Thee.
O bless me now my Savior,
I come to Thee.

colors

2009-04-22T22:02:00.008-05:00

Where are we going?

The truck smelled of cheese and the stench of a fat man. Mattresses and tables and lamps found in alleys were tied with rope in a chaos bundle.

I knew by now that you had to ask a couple of times if you really wanted a response.

Where are we going?

Home.

Someone explained to me that it was a house-church. Our living wasn't a living room, It was a church. It was painted white with red carpeting that had a liking for coffee stains, something out of a White Stripes video. I imagined that the red carpet used to be white too, but it was stained with blood, that in that room long ago was an epic battle of men and angels, and you can never get rid of the stains of angels. It wasn’t a living room or church to me but another part of the building. When friends came over to visit I brought them through the back to avoid any lengthy and unnecessary explanation. There was no real furniture except for a piano and stacks of wooden folding chairs. In the back was a radiator that clanged and hissed, especially during meetings. My dad said that there was an evil spirit living inside of it. I believed him.

The only artwork in the house was a small framed blue stitching of In this house we serve the Lord. My parents slept on a futon that when folded up served as the seating for our real living room and when down took up the entire room of what was really a bed-room. A small television was for two things only, the news and I Love Lucy at eight thirty before bed. My dad painted the room a red-rust color, he said it was warm. My dad’s office was also my bedroom. The walls were painted with books and my bed in the corner. Our back porch was turned into another bedroom for my sister. My dad painted the room green because green is healing, I believed him. The kitchen was painted pure, a bright yellow with white appliances and white cabinetry of the cheap variety. The bathroom was a toilet that clogged, a vanity that didn’t match the sink, and a stained tub. The tile on the floor was always cold. It was a light blue. The tile on the walls was just a plain blue. The walls were painted a blue that was almost gray. My father never gave a reason for the blue. Someone I didn’t know once came over and said the blue almost matched my eyes, but not quite.

dream and dreamer

2009-04-20T01:49:00.002-05:00

So this song, with its pestering lyrics, was stuck in my head at work the other day--Am I in love with the dreamer, or am I just in love with the dream?

I'd like to believe I'd love the dreamer, the lover.

But it bothers me to think that what I hope to love is not someone but rather an idea, a dream, the idea of Love.

Is that love, to love Love?

If God defines love, the answer would be a no. Love and Everything didn't materialize into the broken existence of flesh and failure and then fling itself into fallen hands because Love loved the concept of love--Love didn't fall in love with itself but saw itself as nothing and Everything and someone as everything.

So do I love someone or just a dream?

the good

2009-04-12T23:56:00.006-05:00

I am really a jerk.

I kind of keep this file cabinet in my mind on people, each with their own folder. I scrutinize mannerisms, lifestyles, characters, childhood histories, possible conditioning factors, social impacts, and come to what I deduce as logical subconscious causalities—tabs on almost everyone I know, no joke.

But I don’t know anything. Someone said Walk a mile in someone’s shoes—that’s a lie, everyone has their own feet and own walk and own shoes.

This guy says it better.

I’ve become this thing that compartmentalizes people into who I construct them to be. I am such an idiot, an amazingly blind and proud one. I don’t know anyone. I don’t know myself.

Someone said If you look for the bad in people expecting to find it, you surely will. This weekend I was hit with the reality that I do look for the bad expecting to find it—someone I thought I knew, but really I didn’t know at all.

Someone also said It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see. All I’ve looked for is the bad I expected.

Even though I blind myself, I need to see the good, the good in people, the amazingly crazy people, the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and watch the glow and listen to the pop and listen to them and love.

the perfect word

2009-04-11T16:48:00.004-05:00

Kind of a crazy idea, that there can be one word that encompasses everything, that defines and understands and is understood by different people from different cultures and ethnicities and generations, that is the philologically universal singular meta-metaphor. The transcendentalists, the etymologists, the humanists, the neo-Platonists—they all were striving for that pre-Adamic word or idea that was complete in itself and in its expression in, through, and of reality.

What if that were possible, that there is or was a word that understood everything, communicated everything, is everything—that we could all read and know exactly its meaning?

What if that “word” was pre-reality? What if that word not only encompassed everything put also created everything? What if that word could speak for itself and did so to reality, that it came amongst the entropic words of humans, the jumble of misunderstandings, that it itself became human and revealed its perfect definition? What if that definition was Grace and Truth? What if that word acted on its own definition? What if the word acted on itself for us, for humanity, that we could someday be encompassed by its definition, that we could be its definition?

What if that word was the Word and Logos and Love and Truth and the Son of Man?
What if that word was God and Mercy and Justice and Father and Mother?
What if that word was Meaning and Purpose and the Sublime?
What if of that Word killed itself and killed the Lie and executed Death?

What if everything I am is in that Word?
What if that Word wants to be with everything I am?

life

2009-04-10T02:15:00.002-05:00

So I began this year thinking that it was simple—love God and love others and live, simple stuff.

But the with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind part that I tried to hide in my mind in the simple Love Live slogan has come and slapped me in the face telling me don’t flatter yourself, it’s not that simple.

The concept of all is so profoundly comprehensive; with every fiber of your being. Loving God with all is true life, but it feels a lot more like dying.

I began the year praying that God would help me love him and others. I’ve failed already with the all your heart. God is too good at answering prayer.

Because love comes unexpectedly, inconveniently, like a plague, and my heart has been made weak with the devices of Shakespeare and Donne and Wordsworth and Keats and Sydney, history’s best, and growing up with three women and romantic comedies and Disney movies, all on one side against me, as if God wanted to see if I could put my heart in my mouth. I couldn’t. My heart has a hard time keeping up with my mouth.

But this past weekend God came to me when I was weak and defeated, my heart gasping through arteries clogged with hypocrisy and chambers full of thorns and rocks with holes letting in the cold. He looked at me, took my failing heart, saw all that it held, told me in a warming gaze he still loved me, healed every wound and gave it back to me, promising I know it’s hard, but I’m here, I’m alive, I’m here with you.

So I can only die, and live loving, and live a life worth living in loving him with my all because he lives, because he's here.

And the road ahead beckons.

religion

2009-03-15T23:40:00.000-05:00

Almost every morning I would pour myself a bowl of Lucky Charms, turn on the television, and press play on a cassette that was very familiar with the inside of the VCR. Wearing my green pajama ensemble with a heavy red Korean throw blanket wrapped around me while slurping and chomping on milk and marshmallow stars and ancient Celtic charms I watched the next scene in the sequence. Peter Pan.

Only for a brief moment could I fly across London in the fog of a morning and race against the mortal clangs of Big Ben and claw towards the second star on the right and dive in crystal seas with mermaids and fight in legendary battles on the Jolly Roger and search and find buried treasure and only then could I be a lost boy on an island with fairies and feet stripped bare. I was religious about it.

Religion, like watching Peter Pan, like words, like metaphors, take you places. Peter Pan was my window pane—with one step, fairy dust, happy thoughts and a push of naive hope could I fly into something pure and beautiful and freeing.

Religion is strokes on a page, man-made constructions of communication. As you read this, as you put these letters and words and work to form this run-on sentence into an idea, you form thoughts and judgments and wait for a closing premise brought by a concluding period. This sentence is religion, you reading it is Spirituality. Words are necessary for thoughts and ideas and imagination but are just words without them.

Religion is the scaffolding, not the building. By itself it is what it is, but the spiritual begins in the imagination—in the image of the word, in the blank spaces of the page, in the association of one thing to the other, in believing, not in watching Peter Pan, but the story he told and to dare believe that the story could be mine. I didn't believe religion, in sitting down with a bowl of cereal and watching a cartoon, I believed in Neverland.

I follow Christ not because I believe in following him, not because I believe in Christianity, but because I believe in him, in Christ—in God’s heart-compelled incarnation, in Love’s pure manifest—and the story his life told, the words he spoke, and dare believe his story can be mine. I hope I can always remember Peter Pan, Lucky Charms, Korean blankets and that it’s not about leading the life of a Christian but is all about following Christ.

[untitled]

2009-03-09T23:02:00.002-05:00

This guy is amazing, like if Michael Bolton and John Mayer had a love child.

battles of men and angels

2009-02-16T15:29:00.000-06:00

I was twelve. Birthdays were an excuse to get everyone together and play messy mud games of football. Septembers brought the season of testosterone, of Doritos and commercials and not thinking. Overgrown boys painted with dirt and each other’s sweet sweat tumbled into our kitchen. My mom prepared everything in ernest; a tower of pizza boxes and the smell of freshly grilled meat throttled my stomach and launched it into my throat. Hunger was the only thing on my mind. The table was lined with heads of soldiers, of men I knew to be just like me. I was no different. I was the same. The still spilled out of our mouths and our collected silence hovered on the encircled table. It was the calm after the squall of masculine identity.

My mom broke the silence. She turned to me with a smile; “What is your life key verse Abraham?” The only time my mother calls me by my full name is either when I’m in it deep or if she’s talking about something spiritual. This was spiritual but it felt like I was in trouble.

I looked around, they were all waiting. I knew what it was. It was prescribed to me like a stamp on my forward that read Religious Boy, that said Freak Show!, that said Better-than-thou. It was in my name, my Hebrew and Muslim and Christian name, named after a man who looked at stars all day and so couldn’t see in front of him –a blind man who could see. It was a tradition that every birthday I recite my life key verse that my father gave me in front of everyone.

Abraham, but not today! Today I was a man. I proved it on the battlefield, I could tackle and catch and run like the rest. The candles on the cake, twelve warriors lined face to face ready for battle. I was ready for anything, the adrenaline still pumping through my awkwardly overgrown physique, I could face the heavenly hosts. I didn’t want to be Abraham today, today I was no one and everyone. I didn’t want to be a man of vision. I didn’t want to see angels anymore. I could feel everyone looking at the hairs on my neck and my magnifying crooked glasses but I stared at the warriors on the cake.

Not now please. But everyone was waiting. I should just get it over with. I was nothing special then and never wanted to be. I refused but seeing my mom standing straight and her hands folded softly in front of her and her eyes closed shut as if she were about to hear the angelic words of healing—“I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing.” There. I said it.

my father's secondhand chair

2009-02-02T13:13:00.001-06:00

I would sit in my father’s old chair. He bought the recliner at the Salvation Army when he was in college. The chair is from the fifties, worn and old, a mustard color with a brown grid of stitched fleur de lis. There is a permanent black indent where the previous owner’s head would be, caused from five packs a day and unemployment. The best part about that chair is that it would vibrate—your legs, neck, back, butt, everything. All you had to do was plug it in and turn the dials. After a while of sitting in it I would feel like my body wasn’t even there anymore, that my soul had escaped, that I could cross over to the metaphysical world of pirate battles and water kingdoms.

My dad’s office was stacked with books, all of which he said he had read. I didn’t really care what they were about but I was fascinated by them, that you could own so many books, that they came is such different shapes and sizes-browns, greens, grey, beige, tattered, old, new, pictured, boring, fascinating, tall, short, fat, ugly, rows, stacked—and promised myself that I would start my own collection, that I would travel the world in search of the most beautiful and rarest of books.

We would practice his sermons. We would memorize them together. I would recite and I would test him and sometimes we would just listen to his recording. I would laugh always at the funny parts; “It is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.”—You know some people actually fit a camel through an eye of a needle? Ironically, it cost them a lot of money. It was still funny to me the tenth time, to imagine a camel being chopped into pieces, weaved into a small string, and stuck into the eye of a needle, to prove that it can happen.

Once, while in the massaging recliner, we talked about the future. He took me to his desk, it sat on stacks of books and cinder blocks and on the desk there was a lamented encased map of the world used as a placement mat. The blues and greens clashed like an epic battle, the spiritual and physical, but water is everywhere, my favorite colors. He told me to close my eyes and point to a place on the map, and that place, just maybe, would be where I would be sent some day. I was excited, closed my eyes, and imagined the most beautiful place, of old books and tall trees and camels and pointed and opened my eyes—Moscow. I was going to Moscow. You know I speak Russian. Do they have books in Moscow?

my box of coins

2009-01-30T13:38:00.000-06:00

I have this small wooden box of coins. The box was my great-grandfather's, grandfather Kreitner with the big swollen hands. It was a gift and when I first opend it there was simply a pin, a half-dollar coin, and a piece of a wish of a wishbone. My dad started the collection of coins. He's been to dozens of countries for conferences and to speak about Jesus and love and truth. The past four years of working at banks has given me a front-line exposure to foreign coins from present and past democracies and tyrannies. I love that box of coins, not because of all of the countries and places I'll probably never see but the fact that the hundreds of coins are worth little to nothing--that unattributed with value outside of their soverign realms they are just coins, just pieces of metal, medals for money meaning absolutely nothing.

[untitled]

2009-01-28T23:34:00.001-06:00

I originally put a poem on here that I wrote for class but I hated it. I now know that I suck at poetry.

Anyway, these guys are so awesome. Glen Hansard is a sick poet.

intensity

2009-01-26T20:10:00.000-06:00

I want to live with fervor, with great intensity.
I want to see the sun turn over each morning and feel so very small and overwhelmed and over-alive; to breathe deeply and find my lungs won't ever be able to hold it all. I want to be sublime. I want to not know but I want to know that I don't need to. I want to do everything purposefully, each motion dictated by the thumping of an inner heart that only I can feel and that bounces and ricochets from my soul filling me with the rhythm of a Spirit that knows that everything is possible, anything can be possible.
I want to believe. Nothing is holding me on this alter-ego-mountain any longer. I want faith to thrust me over the edges of my caged self and sprawl me open-armed with a reaching glow raying and clawing like a desperate kite on fire clapping to the will of the Wind and out into another world, to somewhere where the sun is rolling, to dance and roll to the movement of life. I want to live intensely.

time alone

2008-08-26T22:35:00.001-05:00

I forgot I had this.

So I moved out of my parents house and am living on my own. Oh yeah, and my sister, my bestest friend, got married. It really is a lot for one guy to handle at one time.

Mostly loneliness has become again a familiar friend. Last week I sat up in my underwear almost every night in an empty apartment with a jar of peanut butter and microwaved hot dogs watching the Olympics until the sun came up. Looking back I'm so angry at myself. I guess I had to have something to distract me from being alone. I didn't want to have to think about myself, where my life is going, the flaws in my character, then become depressed, stop eating, start reading Poe, and hating every person I come in contact with.

But anyway, I'm really excited. Life alone has seriously been awesome. I've been able to start a book I've been envisioning for awhile, start really spending time with God, coming face to face with my honest self, and trying to listen. Truth is in not understanding and ignorance is the beginning of bliss. I've realized I cannot know or understand or even have faith before I accept I don't know anything or even can. Only then can I be at peace with all of the wrong in myself, in others, and in the world and be able to see a world not fenced in my the limitations of my mind but opened in hope that there is a Love and Truth that knows and sees and works. It's so warming and comforting to know that I am finite and can only live a life of meaning when I accept my own finitude--in death and in limitations--and Love becomes the meaning to my life; Love that sees this fallen man with hope and accepts him as he is, this Love can run through me when I simply accept it, run through me and overflow to others. The horrible filter of this perfect Love is myself. These days alone have helped me see that I have to forget myself more so that meaning, Love, can flow.

connection

2008-04-27T19:20:00.000-05:00

The best part about social settings are the awkward situations; the desperate start-offs of "Hey, how are you doing?"' that end in short-lived, superficial "Yeah, I'm good, you?" We all are trying, especially I'm trying, trying to connect, trying to understand, attempting to find a way to get the other to care, trying to find love, trying really hard, but not really connecting, not really making it, never filling the space between persons, never getting my soul to navigate it's way through the void to another's, trapped by my strange walls of skin and self-consciousness. I'm trying to empathize, trying to love, and paying close attention to the insignificant details, trying with all the will to love, but never getting there.

"How can I get this person to care about me?"--I so need to stop this. It's not about me.

You'd think it would be easy.

"the glad game"

2008-04-24T12:55:00.000-05:00

Have you ever stood up all night looking at the world from a nihilist's perspective? Not the most cheery conversation. What if life was nothing? For some reason I can’t imagine living without life meaning anything—maybe that’s because I’ve been conditioned to believe that, maybe I just want to believe it, maybe because when I think of Love I’m really just trying to do unto others what I expect to be done unto me, which of course is an investment in survival, and maybe when I think of Hope what I really am thinking is a projectile of my want of self preservation over death, that God is a creation of my mind for a perfect and everlasting existence outside my own finitude, that an objective hypothetical being is a collective subconscious human rendering of wills, maybe we all are programmed like Hobbes wants us to be, to survive beyond an inevitable end which no amount of plastic surgery or ideal healthcare can remedy but that a collective will can prolong, that all that I understand as a human being is a creation of my cognitive software that is functioning by the circuitry of my understanding that evolved or was built for the single desire to preserve myself and my species. Maybe. Could be. Makes sense.

------

There is a movie about a little girl whose parents tragically die. The girl moves into her aunt’s house, a real nasty lady with a lot of money and no friends, and the girl is really annoying because she is extremely happy all the time. I’m actually really annoyed with her right now. What gave that girl the right to be so persistently happy, like pretending to be happy to just bug everyone? Anyway, even the preacher of the town was a hot, unhappy, mess. His sermons were extremely loud, lots of yelling, the veins in his neck would bulge, and he would scream about the not so pleasant nature of Hell, and constantly yelled the phrase “Death comes unexpectedly!”—so much so that the chandler of the small town church raddled on every word and the old man in the front row nearly keeled over and died right there on Sunday morning. The town was, even in church, terribly unhappy. So the gist of the movie is that the girl, who for God knows why was so content with life, spread her happiness to others by simply being happy. Her method?—a game, she calls “The Glad Game”. Pretty much the game goes like: “When something bad happens, instead of complaining about it, you have to find something in the situation to be glad about.” The game really worked. Everyone was happy, by moving away from the unhappy, the morbid, and suddenly everything was awesome for them when they pursued what made them happy.

“Death comes unexpectedly!” That’s so true. Death is really scary like that. In “Family Guy” Death is a grim reaper— black hooded cloak, skeleton body, scythe used as a walking stick, the whole package— but who hates his job of gathering souls and would rather have a beer, watch some college hoops, and hang out with some friends. I wish that the Death in “Family Guy” was real, he wouldn’t be so bad, and he would actually be kind of cool. I’d hang out with him.

Death does come out of nowhere and the thought that someday I will not exist, that my thoughts, everything that I am will cease to endure, that the memories that I accumulate and the likes and dislikes, the genres, the relationships, will all be sucked away forever, is extremely frightening. What is the point then? There really is none, and no, there can’t be a point to life just because I want there to be one. So, here I am, four paragraphs in, asking “What’s the meaning of life?”

From that grandiose question comes a lot, I mean a lot, more questions, questions that may not answer anything, questions that may not ever answer anything. So, as an English teacher once told me, “It’s all about asking the ‘right’ questions.” Yeah, I know, cliché. Maybe, but my objective cognitive question, undermining that statement, to call it cliché, conveys what questions are all about, more questions. More times than none these questions real back on one another, a question contradicting the previous, but they are always going somewhere, an uncharted route. It seems that it is the questioning of what is or not “true”, or maybe even better, questions that have the premise that nothing is true, is questioning in doubt and is what leads to what might be the Truth. Or does it? Was that a pretentious question to ask? Are these questions at the end of this paragraph helpful or distracting? Should I stop?

But questions can go on forever. Life is a lot like being an archeologist in a desert without a map or compass—maybe a whip and a cool hat and defiantly some rugged archeological threads but those are just cosmetics (more so visual tools)—and all you have are your own two feet and you’re searching for that Holy Grail or Missing Link or something. Oh yeah, and it’s always dark and you can’t see. That’s life. So where do you start? Do you just mope around and hope that, by chance, you trip and fall over what you’re looking for? There needs to be some sort of guide in life to find its meaning, something that can only rest internally, something that can keep you away from where life’s meaning is not and lead you toward where it is.

Last New Year’s, a few of us went to a diner around 6am New Year’s Day after staying up watching E.T., counting down 2007 with Alisha Keys, and playing Monopoly and or Taboo. After some hearty omelets, pancakes, and other breakfast foods, somehow during the conversation someone, I forget who, was led to claim that a person’s greatest weakness is also their greatest strength. Interesting. So we went around the table and tested the theory out. Let me tell you, it is really true. When it got to me, a close friend said that my greatest strength/weakness was that I am able to understand people really well, which can be good but can also be really harmful, especially in relationships. So true. Anyway, everyone at the table had one, like “Big Heart” or “Generous” or “Nomadic-in-Nature”, which all can be really great or terribly damaging, it really depends on which way you go.

So, I guess it’s the “greatest strength” side of us that we want to go with, the side that hopefully can lead to some sort of Truth. This is where the “Glad Game” comes into play. Death does come unexpectedly, I’m going to physically die no matter what I do in life, time is short, and if Life does exist, I’ve come to the conclusion that I want to question my way toward it. I want to Live.

Complaining is always out of fear, is giving up, is sitting around waiting for Death, happiness is hope. “The Glad Game”—walking, or questioning, through the desert of life needs to be guided by our “greatest strengths” toward what we see as good. What is good? What do I really want that makes me happy? Why do I want these things? This method, asking the right questions if you will, is one that not only leads toward happiness, even a contagious happiness, but an even more amazing discovery, something that we were maybe meant to uncover but that no one was ever absolutely sure existed, something that could only happen for Indiana Jones, but a discovery that is worth a Life’s time, and then some.

momentary

2008-04-17T22:33:00.000-05:00

Today was Thursday. Thursday was good but today held classes, all four of my classes today and Tuesdays. Four classes, four, one hour and a half classes, four for sitting down and scratching my head, my classes. Today is now over. Tuesday I'll sit down and scratch my head for a couple of hours, pay a lot for it, grab my degree with it, but I'm done with it today.

Tomorrow is Friday. Fridays are work days. Tomorrow I work eight to five. Nine. Nine hours of sitting down and scratching my head, but getting paid for it. But then Saturdays, Mondays, and Wednesdays I will do it again, sit and scratch my head.

My life right now is sitting down and scratching my head, some days, like today, I pay to, and other days, like tomorrow, I get paid. Life has slowed down, only debits and credits and long hours that never end.

Joys are momentary. I've forgotten the joys. I remember as a child playing alone in a parking lot between a bricked church and a little house where two interning pastors and their infant families lived together, when the sun was turning over to sleep and the red and orange from the brick embraced the asphalt lot budding into yellow lines and cars and branches casting their shadows on each other and summer's air pushing itself forward, warm and gentle and friendly, while ruffling the green of the immensely tall trees. I remember being alone and being five and being happy. I remember a girl pushing her little brother in a stroller, or a plastic shopping cart, of looking at me and me being in love and being happy. I remember being five without knowing it, when numbers and hours were foreign and everything mattered.

[untitled]

2008-01-09T15:19:00.001-06:00

So this is my first time doing something like this, sort of strange, and I'm not really sure why I'm compelled to, but anyway...

I think this can be an opportunity for me to be honest. Honesty, when it is self-contained, honestly, may not be the most honest perspective. Something about putting it all out there, for the world to see, it's sort of an ever present gaze, like the looming eyes of Dr T J Eckleburg - a fear and awareness that maybe I should inherit more in faith.

So I saw this movie, Stardust, and it was surprisingly good, something like The Princess Bride meets LOTR. What liked about it was that the main character, a sort of clumsy, not so attractive, dim, and unskilled young man (sound familiar?), changes from self centered, infatuated love for an uninterested girl, to a selfless love that decides that who he loves is far more important than himself and him being loved. Thus the character undergoes a love synthesized metamorphosis, from a weak willed guy into a compassionate man - good stuff.