Saturday, September 29, 2007

Bob Welch - Ebony Eyes live Cal Jam 1978!

Wake up call everybody! Ms. Nicks knows how to rock a tambourine!

Friday, September 28, 2007

Coffee Shop!

I like to sit down next to pretty women,
And listen to them say silly things.
I like to order too much coffee and freak out,
And pretend that I just came here to read.

No pastries for me, I don't like fruity food.
Why did I decide to wear these pants?
They were the cleanest I could find on short notice.
Too much coffee always makes me want to dance.

But I just sit here next to pretty women,
And pretend that I can't hear what they say.
I draw a picture of a dog with a cape on,
And wonder what normal folk are doing today.

Please cease and desist with that guitar sir,
Nobody likes your music, not even me.
Just drink your coffee and shut-up please.
Isn't there somewhere else you need to be?

The pretty women are all gone now.
But more are always on the way.
I guess I'll pack up and drive home now.
I've had enough of people for today.

Thursday, September 27, 2007

Work!

I think my prevailing attitude toward the working world can be summed up as follows: "Give me money and leave me alone." If, one day, I were to win the lottery, it would be the happiest day of my life. Because for that day, and maybe longer, I could believe the lie that I wouldn't need anybody anymore. Thank God for poverty.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Beggar!

I, worldling, have no right to speak of worldliness.
Still, I don't want to be part of the world.
I, selfish, have no right to speak of love.
But I dearly love a girl.
I have no right to speak of Wisdom.
I'm a fool who thinks he's a King.
I have no right to ask for Mercy,
So I've taken, quite rightly, to begging.

Fr. Hopko Rocks!

"It happens that men and women who once were human are simply no longer so. They have become nothing but minds and matter, brains and bodies, computers and consumers, calculators and copulators, constructers and cloners who believe that they are free and powerful but who are in fact being destroyed by the very "Nature" that they wish to conquer as they are enslaved to an oligarchy of "Conditioners" who are themselves enslaved and destroyed by their insane strivings to define, design, manage and manipulate a world and a humanity bereft of the God who boundlessly loves them."

"Those who wish to be wise are constrained to be fools. Those who would be great become small. Those who would be first put themselves last. Those who rule, serve as slaves. Those who would be rich make themselves poor. Those who want to be strong become weak. And those who desire to find and fulfill themselves as persons deny and empty themselves for the sake of the Gospel. And, finally, and most important of all, those who want really to live have really to die. They voluntarily die, in truth and in love, to everyone and everything that is not God and of God."

"When we speak about "taking up our crosses" and "bearing our burdens" in imitation of Christ, by the power of God's Holy Spirit, we also learn by painful experience that the crosses we take up and the burdens we bear must be those that God gives us, and not those that we ourselves choose and desire. Thus we become convinced that when our burdens are unbearable and our crosses crush us in joyless misery -- and we become dark, depressed, despondent and desperate -- the reasons are evident. Either we are choosing our own crosses and burdens, and rejecting those sent to us by our merciful God whose thoughts and ways are not ours; or we are attempting to carry our crosses and bear our burdens by our own powers, and not by God's grace and strength given to us by Christ and the Holy Spirit in the Church.
And so we come to another conviction: The Church -- the communion of faith and love (as St. Ignatius of Antioch defined it: henosis agapis kai pisteos), the community of saints who are Christ's own very "members" as his body and bride - is essential to our human being and life. We cannot be human beings - still less, Christians and saints - by ourselves. We need God and his wise and faithful servants. We need God's commandments and living examples of their fulfillment. We need the Church's scriptures, sacraments, services and saints. And we need one another. As Tertullian said centuries ago, "One Christian is no Christian." And as the Russian proverb puts it, "The only thing that a person can do alone is perish." Like it or not, we are "members of one another" in God. If we like it, it is life and paradise. If we reject it, it is death and hell."

-Excerpted from Fr. Thomas Hopko's '07 St. Vlad's Commencement Address.
http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles7/HopkoCommencement.php

Boo To The World!

So these, you say to me, are the real things:
Freeways, deadlines, wrist-watches, cars, and jobs.
Loneliness, dusk, anger, the weight of imperfection,
The waiting and sighing, anything but thinking of God.

If those are the real things, then I want to be a phony.
But if you were a fool with me,
Then I wonder if we couldn't topple the world:
With a flick of the finger, we're free!

Escapists escape, which is more than can be said,
For the suit wearing drones who forget that we're dead.
Lovers love, which is more dear than they know,
When they tune in with wifey to watch their show.
The knowers know, which is no small thing!
When the world has petered out, the Church will still sing!

Father Stephen!

I liked something on "Glory to God for All Things"! That doesn't happen much, so I'd better link while the linking's good! (The post is mercifully short by the way)

http://fatherstephen.wordpress.com/2007/09/25/praying-like-a-publican-a-reprint/

Death!

The screen will go blank.
The sky will shudder black.
We'll burn off like morning mist.
Who'll be there to tell what happens next?

And yet, and yet: theology is built on "and yet".
And yet, and yet: our eternal life depends on "and yet".
How can mercy look so small, so ungraspable?
Open your hand: what were you holding?
It seemed so solid and heavy.
Your hand open now, you're praying.

Monday, September 24, 2007

Friendship!

Friendship is no less,
Than shared weakness.
When the last song has played,
The last argument been made,
The last fight been won,
There's still that silence
Asking more of us than strength can muster,
And this is where we are one.

Do you think of me at night when there's nothing left to do?
I think of you.
It's my only sanity,
When my prayers run dry,
To trace out your name on my heart,
And remember that the whole word aches with this same ache.
And you ache too.

How To Be A Poet!

http://www.cutsinger.net/wordpress2/?cat=1

A Question!

In Luke, and if I remember right, in the other synoptics, early in his ministry Jesus heals Peter's mother in law of a fever. It's such a small healing and it seems insignificant. Why are we told that he did this?

Thursday, September 20, 2007

Wreckless Eric's Whole Wide World (Cover)!

These guys are breaking my heart!

Whole Wide World (Cover)!

The technically proficient can't cover this song without ruining it. I think this guy is safe on that count.

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

A Cool Fact!

It's a fact, at least if Perennialist crank Rene Guenon is to be believed:
Both the Chinese and Greek languages designate an indefinite multitude on a cosmic scale by the number ten thousand. So, if you were an ancient Greek or Chinese person and you wanted to talk about an epic battle you were at the day before, you could say:
"Looking across the field, I saw ten thousand men with spears charging towards us."
The Greek word murioi, from which I conjecture the English word "myriad" is descended is used both to designate the number ten-thousand, and also to mean 'an innumerable multitude".

Here is my explanation for why cultures so different as the Chinese and Greek have the same way of speaking.

You may have noticed that, when learning how to count in a foreign language, once you are able to count to ten you've pretty much got counting mastered. From then on it's just a vocab problem of learning the word for twenty and thirty and so on. But, something magical goes on when you learn the names for those first ten numbers. It's like all of counting is contained in them. So, you can never really escape the number ten when you are counting: it's insurpassible.

So, ten has a feeling of completeness and insurpassibility. However, ten is also the gateway to all the rest of the numbers, so it must also have something plenitudinous in its nature. How could we hint at this plenitude and still retain the terminal feeling that ten has? We could take ten to the second power and say "there were a hundred men charging towards me", but this doesn't contain the word ten, so we have lost the feeling of insurpassibility. You kind of want to say, "Oh yeah, why weren't there a hundred and one men charging towards you?"

Moving on, we could take ten to the third power: "there were ten hundred men charging towards me", but this doesn't feel quite right because, in saying "ten hundred"instead of "one thousand", we're making the number seem smaller than it is. One thousand kicks ten hundred's butt!

Now, take ten to the fourth power, and it's magic time baby! None of us can really concieve of a thousand of anything. We could comfortably count one hundred of something without taking a break, but to count to one-thousand of something would be pretty mind numbing. You would begin to say to yourself: "this is too much counting, when will it end?" So, one thousand is a great number for symbolizing plenitude and indefinitude. And notice that in saying "ten-thousand" we haven't lost the feeling of insurpassibility that ten has.

If we took ten to the fifth power, 100,000, then we've left ten behind and are emphasizing the number 100. If we take ten to the sixth power we risk looking like we are exaggerating. It looks like ten thousand is our number!

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Schuon!

No doubt some will say that humanitarianism, far from being materialistic by definition, aims at reforming human nature by education and legislation; now it is contradictory to want to reform the human outside the divine since the latter is the essence of the former; to make the attempt is in the end to bring about miseries far worse than those from which one was trying to escape.

Philosophical humanitarianism under-estimates the immortal soul by the very fact that it overestimates the human animal; it is somewhat obliged to denigrate saints in order to better whitewash criminals; the one seems unable to go without the other.

From this results oppression of the contemplatives from their most tender years: in the name of humanitarian egalitarianism, vocations are crushed and geniuses wasted, by schools in particular and by official worldliness in general; every spiritual element is banished from professional and public life and this amounts to removing from life a great part of its content and condemning religion to a slow death.

The modern leveling — which may call itself "democratic" — is the very antipodes of the theocratic equality of the monotheistic religions, for it is founded, not on the theomorphism of man, but on his animality and his rebellion.

Frithjof Schuon

Monday, September 17, 2007

The Best Books For Knowing Truth! (Excluding Revealed Books, and Non-Western Books)!

(1) Plato
Duh! Plato's books are good because you have to be super serious about them to come to a defensible position about their assertions. Kant is like that too, at least that's what they say. But the difference is that Kant hurts your head. When you're reading Plato you feel like you're drinking wine or listening to music: you find yourself nodding your head and thinking you understand. You probably do understand, but you're understanding with a part of yourself that's so deep that when you try to articulate it you end up learning more about yourself than about Plato, which aint a bad thing. To learn about Plato and not just about yourself, you have to take yourself less seriously than you do the book, and the deep insight it gives you. I guess that's another difference between Kant and Plato: it's hard not to turn into a conceited jackass reading Kant and it's hard to stay one when you're reading Plato.

(2) Homer
First book ever written! (Okay, I'm no historian, but I'm saying it's the earliest, greatest book. I may need a graph to show what I'm saying) Anyway: First book ever written and what do we find? Homer knows better than all of us sad moderns put together what it means to be a man. Evolution disproved! Devolution a sad reality! To read Homer is to be comfortably alienated from your conception of what it means to be normal.

(3) Aristotle
Allright, this is not an eclectic list, but I'm just being honest. Besides, these Men contain multitudes, so maybe I am being eclectic. Aristotle combines rigor and profundity in a way second only to Plato. Not that I'm anything close to an Aristotelian, (I wrote one crappy paper on him), but maybe I can smell some kinds of greatness a long way off. Aristotle, I salute you from afar! I don't know how he weathers the storm that is modern science, and, what's more, I don't care. But as far as the making of what appear to me to be meaningful arguments about metaphysics, philosophizing, and ethics is concerned, Aristotle is tops!

(4) Frithjof Schuon
I'm going out on a limb here with this one, but this is my honest opinion: If you want to find an author that can show you profound Truth like Plato, Aristotle, or Homer can, then this is who I would point you to. (I'm cringing as I write this). Here is why I'm probably wrong about this:
(a) I can't appreciate books by Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, Martin Luther, or any of the Fathers of the Church I have pretended to read, like I can appreciate Schuon. Given that this puts me in opposition to every other Christian who has ever lived, I can't help but wonder if I might be a little misguided on this one.
(b) What do I know about profound truth anyway?
(c) Frithjof Schuon was Swiss.
(d) None of my friends like him as much as I do, and I have good friends.
Nevertheless, IN MY CRAZY OPINION, Schuon shows modern man one indispensible aspect of reality better than the three Greeks or anyone else: Religion leads to the Truth!

Thanks!

I met the man made of gratitude.
He destroyed me with his joy.
I put myself back together.
And now I'm alone.
Hopefully he'll come tomorrow,
And I can thank God with him.
And maybe I'll stay broken
For longer this time.

Sunday, September 16, 2007

As Nate and Mom Said: It's One Less Nail To Clip!

This weekend my brother Nate went through the traumatic experience of having the tip of his left middle finger gruesomely mauled by a quickly closing garage door. The doctor had to amputate what was left of the tip. So, my brother has one less joint on that finger. I won't go into details, but his experience would traumatize all but the toughest. He's holding up quite well, all things considered, but, if you will, don't forget him, or our mother, in your prayers tonight.

Hello Friends!

Hello Friends,

I love you all and thank God for all of you. Pray for me and I will for you. There's not much to this life, but to love God. This is hard because we make it hard, and I'm sorry for my part in making it hard. We all have our projects, and our little plans to get the knowledge, money, happiness and power we want. This is good because we're human and made to think. It's bad because we don't think well, or we think well but don't put our thinking into practice. We all have our pettiness, our hatred, our willfull ignorance and congress with evil. But, infinitely more, we have Christ, or maybe I should say He has us. Even when we don't know it well, even if we aren't Christians, we still know this and live off of it (in my view anyway). I wish I was more eloquent, but I don't like this wish. I wish I was a better man, and in Christ I will be!

Love,
Matthew

Friday, September 14, 2007

Elton John - 1970 - Your Song!

I know its not much, but its the best I can do!

Adios Boys!

Malcolm thought about what it would be like in heaven, on that day when he could cross the river separating the Orthodox from the Catholics. He wrote a little story about it.

“I’m going boys.”
“We want to go with you.”
“But you can’t boys. This ache was mine. The reward is mine, too.”
“But how will you cross?”
“By the cross, my boys. The HMS Stuaron is sailing tonight and I paid for my ticket. I’ll tell you what it’s like over there, if I ever come back.”
“Promise you’ll come back, Malcolm.”
“I promise. And promise me you won’t miss me.”
“We’ll miss you Malcolm, but you know we won’t hurt for a moment.”
“I know, boys. I know. Have I ever told you the story of the day Ellie gave birth to her first child?”
“You’ve told the story, Malcolm, but if it’ll keep you here for a little longer, tell it again.”
“Well, allright boys, but only the short version. I can hear the captain calling, and I can smell the flowers on the other side. Her and Jim had been putting it off for too long, and Ellie wasn’t sure she could get pregnant. But, when she did, her and Jim went out for ice cream. Now, you all know what a fight is, right?”
“We knew once. Tell us again.”
“Well, a fight is when two people love each other too much to be nice. That’s what happened that night when Jim and Ellie got ice cream to celebrate the new little life in her. The fight started when Ellie remarked on being lactose intolerant and that it might hurt the baby if she had too much. Jim had been working so hard to keep Ellie happy, and he wanted a little bit of joy without any worry. He wanted to be up here for a minute and he thought Ellie didn’t want to, or the devil made him think it. But, deep down he knew that she did want to. But, as it tends to go on earth, he went about it all wrong. They fought about ice cream, but it was really about God, see? Well, that new little life in Ellie didn’t mind the ice cream, but the fighting made it feel funny. It got all weak and didn’t want to come out: can’t blame him, can we boys?
“You said it!”
“Anyway, the day that baby was born, it almost didn’t make it. But Ellie looked at Jim, and Jim looked at Ellie, and they just knew that whether the baby made it or not, they were gonna get through it together. See, God and that baby, George was his name, God and that baby used Jim’s mistake to make love stronger.”
“Stop it Malcolm, you’re gonna make us remember how to cry.”
“Aw shucks, boys, tears ain’t nothing but liquid joy. You know that. Take care now, the wind’s gonna be blowin’ hard over here for a bit, and you might hear a little gunplay on the water, but don’t be scared. I hear the Metropolitan and his crew are having a little fun with that new pirate ship they got. Word around the campfire is, they aim to stop me. But we know how that’s gonna go, don’t we boys?”
“Malcolm 1, Clergy 0”.
“Couldn’t-a said it better myself. Adios.”

Excerpted from Life As It Stands And Has Been Standing Since Before The World Was Made: A Prosopography of Minnesota by Samson Swedenmusser

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Day Planner Sample Page!

8:00 am-8:10 am: Think about God.
8:10 am-8:20 am: Pray.
8:20 am-11:30 pm: Think about myself.
11:30pm-11:40 pm: Pray.

Breaktime!

I was cleaning a large, new suburban house today before the new owners moved in their furniture. You know the kind of house I'm talking about, right? Cavernous, done up with nice, quirky paint on the inside; the kind of house that, even when it's dirty feels a little too clean; the kind of house where each of the three kids each gets their own personalized room to put their own personal TV and Playstation 3. I was wandering around, tired of wiping up crusty kool-aid from the floor of the fridge. I was looking around the huge empty living room, wondering just how big a couch you would need to make the room look normal, when I broke down and said: I need a break.

I went outside and sat down on the nice new deck and looked at the poor little trees just sitting there in the shadow of these monster houses. There was one scraggly tree, the biggest of the bunch, that had little cherry looking fruits dangling everywhere. Those fruits should have been eaten by someone or something by this time of year. I was feeling bad for myself, and bad for the tree, and just then I heard a voice.
"Please stop looking at me." It was the tree. I could tell because it was waving, but there was no wind.
"Stop looking at you? Why?"
"Don't you know? Trees don't like to be looked at when they're alone."
"But you're not alone. Look, you have two little guys right next to you."
"But I am alone, because I know I'm the best tree in the neighborhood."
"How do you know that?"
"Because I know I'm the biggest.", the tree shook a little like it was sobbing.
"That doesn't make you the best, though."
"That's how it is with us trees: the biggest is the best and the best is the loneliest. That's why we like being in forests, because no-one can tell who the biggest is because everyone is all crowded together."
"Why does being the best make you feel lonely? It should make you feel proud."
"But that's why I feel lonely, because I'm the only one who knows how great our little group of trees is. I'm lonely because I'm proud of us, and there's no-one to tell."
"Well, you just told me."
"Yeah. But you don't count. You're not a tree."
"That's true. Why don't you tell the houses? They used to be trees."
"I can't tell these types of houses anything. Just look at them, you can barely tell one board from another, and there are no big logs jutting out anywhere. They don't even look like wood with all that paint on them."
"Actually, you're pointing at some vinyl siding, but I see what you mean. We didn't used to build houses like this. We used to build log cabins and stuff."
"Oh, don't remind me. Those were the good old days, when a tree would beg the woodcutter to use him for the central beam."
"So I guess humans used to be more important to you guys than they are now."
"Yes. But ever since you started using us to make these crappy houses, we decided you weren't worth much after all."
"I can't blame you, but maybe I can try to correct you a little. We aren't really acting like humans when we do that sort of stuff. We're acting more like demons or something else that's evil and cold. Humans are still really great, it's just there aren't that many humans around anymore."
"Why should I believe you?", I think the tree made a sniffle noise with some of its leaves, or maybe a squirell was swishing around where I couldn't see him.

(To be continued)

Fruitsville!

God's Life is brilliant.

God's Life is brilliant.
God's Love is pure.
I saw an angel.
Of that I'm sure.
She smiled at me on the sidewalk.
She was with another man.
But I won't lose no sleep on that,
Because I've got a plan.

You're beautiful, you're beautiful,
You're beautiful, it's true.
I saw your face, in a crowded place.
And I don't know what to do.
Because I'll never be with you.

She caught my eye, as she walked on by.
She could see from my face that I was flying high.
And I don't think that I'll see her again.
But I saw a beauty that will last 'till the end.

You're beautiful, you're beautiful,
You're beautiful, it's true.
There must be an angel, with a smile on his face,
When he thought up that I should be with you.
But, it's time to face the truth.
I will never be with you.

Monday, September 10, 2007

Donald Fagen - Morph the Cat!

What is going on in this song?

Existence is a Rose!

We can no more escape the cross than we can escape Existence. At the root of all that exists, there is the cross. The ego is a downward path drawing man away from God; the cross is a halting of that path. If Existence is "something of God", it is also something "which is not God", and it is this which the ego embodies. The cross brings the latter back to the former and in so doing permits us to overcome Existence.

What makes the problem of Existence so complex is that God shows through everywhere, since nothing could exist outside of Him; what matters is never to be separated from this distant perception of the Divine. And that is why enjoyment in the shadow of the cross is conceivable and even inevitable; to exist is to enjoy, even though it be at the foot of the cross. That is where man must keep himself, since such is the profound nature of things; man can violate this nature only in appearance. Suffering and death are none other than the cross reappearing in the cosmic flesh; Existence is a rose signed with a cross.

-Frithjof Schuon in The Fullness of God: Frithjof Schuon on Christianity pg. 162

Sunday, September 9, 2007

How Do I Love Thee?!

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints!---I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!---and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

-Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"...feeling out of sight for the ends of Being and ideal Grace."

Who has not felt this pull to the "ends of Being"-a desire to stretch out to the corners of the sky and dissolve into the pure receptive fecundity of the ether? And yet we want to keep a part of our own particular loves-our soul feels it a scandal to relinquish its little objects of affection. We know they must one day go if we are to incarnate "ideal Grace", but we don't want to let them go yet. We decide, then, to seek the kernel of heaven in our gripping, fevered loves. We decide to love "with the passion put to use in [our] old griefs." How can we not then hope to love "better after death", having knowingly added our grief induced passions to the mix? I'm not giving the Orthodox stamp of approval to these sentiments, just pointing out that they seem an accurate representation of the soul's movements from a romantic to a spiritual love.

Saturday, September 8, 2007

?!

I cherish my soul,
Though it be but an aching, liquid longing,
That will not dry
Until the Sun,
And not its image,
Has finally ascended.

Friday, September 7, 2007

From This Very Moment!

What a sea that night! The islands were black shadow humps swallowing the moonlight. The wind didn’t touch us there, when we passed by them. We knew we were passing by when a dead calm settled on the deck. We knew we had passed when the wind started up again. But, back to the sea: what a tossing marble of black, hiding all, revealing only what was reflected on the surface! The moonlight could not penetrate it. My eyes could not penetrate it, but I was lost in staring all the same, looking down, down at the water but only seeing our little steamer lit up with foggy, dirty lamplight. Perhaps I saw a flash of a whale belly, but no, it was only the moonlight and my poor vision.

Staring, staring, and then the voice from below, a little bit of warm golden light, light that you could hear, light that could talk. That voice had called me down below for two nights and was calling me again. No more murky staring, not anymore this night anyway. I left my post and snuck below deck, following the voice to the corner of the bunk room. There he is, behind the hammocks with the off-duty men ranged all around. A little golden lamp burnt calm and small, safe behind glass. His eyes were twinkles. His fingers were little matchsticks, skinny and red at the tip: if they pointed at you, you burst into flame-maybe you were embarassed, maybe ashamed, but you were warm. And always the voice, golden and lulling like the sun on the blue water of the afternoon. You could bake in that voice if you were not careful. Or you could melt like ice if you were just careful enough to listen and not speak, to be loved and not love back-he would melt you if you would freeze in your place at his gentle rebuke.

So, leaning back on the hammock, I froze, looking at the dark shadow cast on the ceiling by my bulky body. I answered his questions in my heart, or let the other men speak for me. It was not my wish to be seen, but he saw into me anyway.
“Gentlemen, what do you love above all, and what will each of you need to be happy?”
“I want money. Enough money, just enough.”
“Good. And you?”
“One day I will be captain of my own ship.”
“Maybe you will. What about you, sir?”
“She is beautiful, and she is all I think about. Here is her picture.”
“She is a beauty to be sure. May you love her well. And now that you have all spoken in your own honest way about your various loves, are we not brought to one conclusion: that whatever a man approves of, whatever he himself and nobody else considers the highest, the most worthy object of his attentions-that is what he loves?”
“How could it be otherwise?”, one man said.
“It is always otherwise with us. Listen and answer: Is not he who fashioned us, made all of these beautiful things we want and gave us our desire for these things, he who nurtures us, sustains us, loves us because he is love-is not he, our Jesus Christ, the most worthy object of love for any man?”
“Yes!”
“And would you say, then, that you love Jesus Christ?”
“Yes!”
“ ‘Yes!’, you say. May it be as true as it is heartfelt! I myself have been trying to love God for forty years and I still do not love him completely. You are looking at me now. Good! If we love someone we always remember them and what they want-we try to please them day and night and are always picking a flower and sighing or seeing them around every corner. Is this the way you all love God? Do you turn to him with such ease and hope? Do you pray to him and fulfill his commandments with love’s zeal?”
Not one man among us said he did. Perhaps for fear of being refuted, perhaps because he saw what he was for a moment. I was frozen in my hammock. I would not have moved if you had a gun to me. The air in the room was shot through with dangerous thought and teetering wills. What would each of us be in this moment that none of us really wants? Where would we choose to walk when the steamer hit land and we went back to our wandering lives? There is no thought in a moment like this-it is too dangerous-like every thought is a step on a path and every path leads either up or down.
“Then let us look to our own good in this moment! At least promise yourselves that from this very moment we will try to love God more than anything and to fulfill His Holy Will!”

Thursday, September 6, 2007

Truth!

I want to see the Truth naked, without the qualifications, questions, doctrinal reservations.
I want to see naked Truth and I want you to see it too.
I want to taste joy without a mediating mind of "nos" and "yesses". And God forbid a "maybe".
Should I be ashamed? Who cares!? Ask the Truth about shame.
Why are we not all in love with each other?

The Bachelor Life!

John threw a huge piece of cornbread at me this morning from ten feet away. I was drinking a Diet Coke at the time. The bread hit the can hard enough to dent it and send coke flying all over my shirt and the floor. It was a really good throw. We were both pretty impressed. Just now he threw a bouncy ball at me. It hit me directly in the face. I have to learn to watch out for flying objects. That, or I need to start fighting back.

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

john mayer - your body is a wonderland!

What can I say? I'm a fruit!

Joy!

Something I just noticed about joy: it wants to share itself with other people. Maybe that's why everyone gets married-so that even when things look really bad, you can still share the burden with whoever knows you best and in doing so remember the joy at the heart of creation. Sounds like a Hallmark card, but ain't it the truth!

Too Many Chicken Nuggets!

Ugh. I just ate two McDonald's cheeseburgers, a large fry and five chicken McNuggets. What the hell is a McNugget? Oh shoot, it's a fasting day! Oh well, what else is new? The commercials that McDonalds put on when I was a kid were much better than the ones they do nowadays. "I'm lovin' it!" - that's so bland. The last one wasn't much better-"We love to see you smile!" You liars, you don't care one bit whether I'm smiling or reeling from a grease overdose.

I don't remember what the slogan was when I was a kid, but I do remember little dancing talking McNuggets. They were perfect in their freakish way: McNuggets are so different looking from anything that is normally considered edible that you expect them to start singing to you. At least back then McDonalds was having a little fun with their image. Nowadays, on the cups and bags they invite you to their website to learn about their ever changing menagerie of "global casting stars". They also have a little profile of a "global casting star" on each bag. The profiles are the most condescending little pieces of drivel: one person is some extreme sports nut, another person is a deaf sign language teacher, another one is a housecleaning fool and on and on. I think the idea is to emphasize "diversity" or something, but all it ends up doing is making everyone look equally disposable: like their personality can be jotted down in a few lines on a greasy bag. But what do you expect from a place like McDonalds: A place that devotes itself to churning out an endless string of uniform food products?

So, why do I go there? Because I'm addicted to it! Help!

Tuesday, September 4, 2007

A Grim Laugh!

The Spirit works in our darkest heart, to make our joy complete.
Though pain rips out from our deepest parts, the punishment is meet.
For no one gets what he doesn't want, though what he wants may burn.
And looking back, no one will think that he recieved less light than he earned.

Monday, September 3, 2007

Crazy Love by Poco (via Hanna-Barbera)!

Beautiful like a child's dream.

The Passion of the Christ!

I must confess the scenes of torture, at first very moving, got a little boring for me, except for when they were mediated through the eyes of the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene. The Virgin truly was co-bearing Christ's sufferings in this movie.

The most affecting part of the movie for me was just before Christ died when he said "My God, my God why have you forsaken me?" I have never felt that question to be so apt as when I watched it here. That question before his death brought home to me the whole point of the Christian tradition: to know and love God with our honest rock-bottom heart, the part of us that is beyond physical and emotional suffering, beyond the reasoning mind. If we did not believe with this part of us that Jesus Christ is the way to the Father, then despite all of the suffering and the drama of the story, we would owe it to God to turn elsewhere. When I heard that question in the movie, I felt like I was standing next to the cross with all of humanity asking God the same thing. Not in an angry, rebellious way, and not because my emotions had gotten the best of me but with full sincerity and with the blessing of heaven. It was like all of prayer was in that moment.

Before watching this, I had never realized how radical a charge it was that Christ not only told Mary that the Beloved Disciple was her son, but also told the Beloved Disciple that Mary was his mother. It seems if Christ's only concern had been to see that Mary was cared for, the first statement would have been enough. It would have been like saying(I am writing my own script here): "Mother, I can't take this man's parents away, but if you want protection, you may look to him." In the movie John nodded when Christ said "Behold, your son", and you believed that John knew his responsibility. But Christ also told John(once again writing my own script): "She is now your real mother." Christ, it seems, was concerned that John cut his ties to his parents in a more radical way than John had envisioned when he confidently agreed to care for Mary. In other words, John was being asked to throw his own mother out on the street, if caring for her came into conflict with caring for Mary. To be stewards of the church is to take on a quiet, but strict ascesis: to stop nodding so confidently and naturally when Christ asks us to love the church: we must look deeper in ourselves, to the part of us that does not offer God assurances, that does not know in a natural way how to love, but that trusts God to love through us.

Allright, Allright, I'll See It!

http://www.cutsinger.net/wordpress2/?p=49

The Most Beautiful Woman In the World!

What is this? How could this be? Is she smiling? Oh God, yes. She's smiling. The sun just broke through. Ouch. Ouch! Damn, that hurts! I wish I could die right now. Back into the cave! Anything but this piercing light! Oh, don't stop! Maybe I died. Did I die? Maybe I was just born. I'll have to find my parents and ask them. They won't recognize me anymore will they? I'll be smiling with her smile, breathing her air. Don't look at me! Don't talk to me! I have nothing to say, just let me look. Stop right there, but keep moving! Just go about your business, nothing to see here!

Oh my gosh, she's petting the dog. She loves him. Pet me please! But she's allergic! Oh, her eyes are watering, she's sneezing and laughing. She's flipping her hair back! It's like in the shampoo commercials! She must be using something better than Pantene though! Here she comes! Quick, behind the tree! What should I be doing? I'm tying my shoe, that's it!

I can hear her walking by. She makes the air whisper! Is it safe to look? Hah! Was it ever safe? Look and look again you fool. Here eyes! Is this what you wanted? Take your fill you gluttons! This will be the end of you and the rest of my senses. No need for you anymore where I'm going. I've seen what I came to see!

She's gone. If she's gone, why does everything look like her? Why is every song about her? Walking living death! Am I resurrected? Then where is she? Where could I be? The sky is still blue. Still blue? It's bluer than that. You're done for, you fool! To the bottle!

Saturday, September 1, 2007

Lonesome Loser!

Filmed the year of my birth. Coincidence?

Terry Jacks - Seasons In The Sun

"Skinned our hearts and skinned our knees?" Great name Mr. Terry Jacks, I don't know about your lyrics.