The World So Dark

 

Together Forever? Why Not?

A quiet hallway and a ticket to damnation while killers hid behind the walls chanting dark incantations. Bucolic neighborhoods filled with small town prejudices and a smoldering breeze while he waits. She is gone. She is gone. She is gone. But he knew it would be this way. 

Stay together and break the psychic connection.

Together forever? Why not? 

And after tomorrow all the concrete blocks of sweet pain and all the bricks painted luminescent against the blackening sky would come down around him. It was time to go home. No more emotional fantasy. No my more butterfly picnics. Only a balance of hope against promises as empty as the county road out of town.

Stay together and die to deepest desire. Together forever? Why not? 

A Song for the Eclipse -A Dragon Swallowed the Moon

After today’s eclipse I thought it good to share a song that I was involved in creating. 

A Dragon Swallowed the Moon

Ready Now To Live

 This is a song I wrote last year with a new final verse. 

The hardest part is waiting but he wants to come back

A long time dead - he’s ready now to live 

He gasps, his heart begins to beat

Oh, oh, oh 

All these chaos reactions are sometimes self aware 

See how the light dances in the air 

I won’t speak, not even when I’m  dead 

Oh, oh, oh  

Moving forward now like waking from a dream 

Rising up into red light 

This is motion, this is mystery

Oh, oh, oh

No more time now, the worst has come and gone

Still I try to wish you well

He gasps, his heart begins to beat

Oh, oh, oh

Oh, oh, oh  

We Have Incriminations

 There was nothing more. No one suspected anything. Nothing. What was there? And no one asked why. It was reckless but no one cared. This trip was different. It was strange, but he was glad to be free. Natural.

The roar of his ego telling him, “You’re beautiful.

You’re bright.” If he screamed, it was unheard. If he screamed again, it was thrilling. The roar telling him, “Make your millions; drink your champagne.” Slowly he moved from the corner, out of the shadow, out of the smoke of a furnace funhouse. 

There was more to it, of course. The smell of secret money inextricably entwined, enmeshed with every aspect of his private life. Love and mercy disguised. Call it spiritual legitimacy but it’s nothing but power. Take advantage. Get even. Double life. Double standards. Predatory addictions will not let go. We have photographs. We have incriminations. Behind the savage scenes. Subtle hints and controlling forces, blinded and blinding. He has a lot to hide. 

All This Was Done To Fulfill What Had Been Spoken by the Prophet

In the silver shadowed evening I am returning home. It is late. Under the mirror, under the eerie ambiance of flickering fluorescent lights I am losing myself, like any one of the many millions suffering from demonic and unclean spirits. A sense of rushing through a darkened tunnel. Pale face and half again. 

The plastic power of indiscriminate destruction, psychic visions. Pain is pain. Deeper sleep and everything lost through insecure violence. But with a word, one passionate, joyous word and the vibrant sounds of laughter. 

All who were ill, all the nausea, all the lethargy and memory lapses like fat flies buzzing back into the void. All our weaknesses, all our disease - from the crotch, the belly, the spine. We were clinically dead. Spiritually dead. Drowned and fired. Now new light. Now new life.

The Kingdom of Heaven Is Hers

 

How blessed are the poor in spirit; the kingdom of heaven is hers. 

She was one of those lovely things I’ll always remember - a beautiful girl with deep chocolate eyes. When she would laugh it was always too loud and she was always reluctant to speak. She left her apartment just after dusk and she never came back. 

How blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted. 

Fast beat driving - heartbeat slow and irregular. Snatched from the street. Unmelodious chords in the parking lot. Friction sounds. Grinding telephones and no answer. 

How blessed, the meek. They will inherit the land. Her mother told her, “Be careful out there,” and “come home safe.” Now she refuses to take solace. “Prayer never works.” She stands at the mirror in a curious combination: half in a trance, half aware. There are only doubts and goodbyes. Cold black holes that never go away. 

How blessed are the ones who are hungry and thirsty for righteousness, for justice. They will be satisfied.  

You can never forget the way blood glistens in moonlight. Do the dead stay dead? Is this the way the world ends? With unanswered questions? 

How blessed are the ones who show mercy for they will have mercy themselves. 

Something has changed. Power rising. Red roses, white, yellow, pink. Eyes full of light. But still the thorn, the prick, the blood. The investigation continues. We don’t know and what could we say? 

How blessed are the pure in heart; they are the ones who will see God. 

From November to January we wonder. Dreaming. Imagining. Hoping. Fearing. Freezing. It’s all too much and too hard to bear. I don’t want this, any of this. No relief in nightmare. No weal when I wake. 

How blessed the peacemakers; they are the daughters of God. 

She was weak and unsure. Too delicate for this world, more suited for the next. This was the flaw in her beauty: she was afraid of her voice. In a flash, open slightly. Two paramedics in a whistle. Alive, now dead against a background of twilight stars. Ethereally beautiful, eternally young. 

How blessed are the tormented, the persecuted, the beaten and abducted. The kingdom of heaven is hers.

I Was Possessed by the Devil

 

So it was a nightmare, that moonless night just after we’d moved into the house. Strange things. Demonic things. The sound of children speaking vulgarities in the dark. I remember my mother leaning over the bed as I was rapidly shaking. Shaking harder than before. 

I was possessed by the devil. 

But the words had no context and the sounds had no meaning. You know how people will fabricate stories. Try to understand. Try to appreciate the situation. Can you feel those fine hairs on your arms and the back of your neck rising? Tingling? 

“He’s asleep again.” 

“Again?” 

“Still. He’s still asleep.” 

Despite the vibrations. Despite the noise, I am still asleep. Light is blazing in the rain spattered windows. George Bush and Ronald Reagan are on the television whether we like it or not. Permission was given, that is the first. Second, external spirits will infest the place. Then comes the oppression.

Where is the life I had before? I thought it was there, but I was wrong. It disappeared. It fled into the dark as I was sleeping.

Late at night, even now, I still dream comfortless dreams of something watching. Something is there. Nothing is there. Nothing is there except a voice. Voices telling me to go out and to do. Something is there. Eyes that are not eyes. Voices that are not voices. And my pale face in the dark. A garble of voices, still meaningless. 

Instructions for an Auto-Appendectomy

Performing medical procedures on oneself without proper training and equipment can be extremely dangerous and life-threatening. It is crucial to seek professional medical help and consult with a qualified healthcare provider if you are experiencing symptoms that may require surgery or medical attention. 

However... 

The first step in an auto-appendectomy is locating the Sephirot within the context of the inner Tree of Life. Look for a small, tube-shaped organ located in the lower right side of the abdomen.  Warning:Trying to locate the appendix on your own without proper training or knowledge can be dangerous and is not recommended.

Do not take your eyes off the organ. It may shift unexpectedly.

Keep moving. Keep seeking. Always be alert for opportunities where they are least expected. Perhaps you will dream of beautiful women. Maybe you will experience a vision of the future. Be sure to ask many questions. Only when you have received all your answers will your blood be free. Follow all safety protocols for blood cleanup and disposal. 

Cauterize the wound with a plastic, disposable lighter.

The Halfway Point

Twelve people went missing in the night and we just sat there with our phones and our bloodshot, bulging eyes. Somewhere they were weeping, pulling away, screaming at cold flesh shadows. This was the halfway point: there would be no escape for anyone. 

There were mutant, albino rats miles below the surface of the streets. Strange creatures with blind, black eyes and wide mouths full of teeth like whirling blades. 

The hospital was waiting for this, medics bent over us with their faces covered with surgical masks. Pulsing arteries and dropping, throbbing hearts. The whiplash of worry. This was not science at all. It was one of those brief exchanges, full of important and meaning but we failed to understand.

She Says, “No.”

I fall back into the chair, one of those cold, comfortless chairs that you find in any underfunded government agency. I am frozen cold, too cold and I apologize. “I’m sorry.” “There is no need to apologize,” she says. She is dressed in black, black as a raven on a cemetery fence. I whisper again with new urgency, “I am sorry. I am so sorry.” She says, “No.”

The shadows cluster in the corner of the room, in front, forward. Her grey eyes lock in place and fix on me and I know. I know her deformity. I know her disappointment. My palms are damp with sweat. The room is warm and hushed - though I am still cold. The doorway to the hall outside opens and she says, “No.”

 

She slides into the second arm-chair next to me. She wants to co-opt my emotions. She wants to corrupt my sympathies. My pulse is fluctuating: seventy, ninety, one-twenty. Spiking cerebral hemorrhage. I am dangerously high. Sweating profusely. Hypertension blood pressure, danger of stoke. I am swearing profusely. But she says, “No.”

I cannot believe that it is her making these noises, these ominous noises - like a medieval messenger, rocking from side to side. She is speaking to me with some unknown tongue. Her fragile eyes disappear. Vanish. All changes. Dropping, cracking, hitching, shuddering. She reaches out to me once more before she is gone and I say, “No.”

Dislocated in Time and Space - A Transfiguration Event

 

Transfiguration Sunday comes early this year. It seems that we’ve only just wrapped up the Christmas festivities and put away the trees and lights and decorations and already we’re at the Transfiguration.  In a few days, on Wednesday, we’ll exchange beauty for ashes; we’ll trade the joy of Christmas for the mourning of lent (to invert Isaiah 61:3).  We’ll put away our hallelujahs and begin the long trek toward the crucifixion, burial, and resurrection of our Lord.

But that’s the way of things in this life. Life turns quickly. Yesterday the children were born, today they’re grown, tomorrow they’ll have children of their own. Our lives move from one moment to the next in a continual blur. It all happens so fast, everything changes. It’s here and it’s gone, every moment fleeting.

In our gospel reading for today we find Jesus along with his friends, Peter, James and John atop a very high mountain experiencing one of those fleeing moments – a literal mountain top experience that is over all too soon. The glory of the theophany fades and Jesus and his disciples return to the plains below.

But for that one glorious moment, they were overwhelmed by a theophany, an appearance of God. God, who is a separate reality distinct from and unlimited by the word, sometimes embraces the self-limitations of a specific time and a particular form in order to appear to us in this world. God appears as a thunderstorm, with thunder and hail, lightning and torrents of rain. Or God appears as an infinitely burning bush. And there atop the mountain in the glory of God’s appearance, Jesus was transfigured, transformed, changed.

It is a strange experience, dislocated in both space and time. Heaven and earth meet, the past and the future overlap in a moment of transcending present. Time and space are warped, blending forward and backward. And the mountain is the place for this kind of experience. The mountain is the place where one can meet with God, the place where one can leave the world of the natural and the mundane and to ascend into very heavens. Around the world, in nearly every culture, from Israel to Greece, from India to China, from Japan to the Americas, the mountain is a place where the reality of our world touches the divine realms. There is a mystery there – a sense of awe, surrounded by banks of clouds with an expansive view, unlimited vision of both the clouds of heaven and the horizons of earth. The God of the bible is sometimes named El-Shaddai which may mean the God of the mountain. He meets with Moses on the mountain. He meets with Elijah on the mountain. And this is not without relevance to our story today.

The mountain is unnamed in our gospel account; Mark describes it only as a “very high mountain.” Some have suggested that it was Mount Hermon, or perhaps Mount Tabor, but neither of these are especially high mountains. Others suggest that Mark is thinking of the same mountain of the north that apocalyptic authors, like the author of 1 Enoch, described as the place where there would be a manifestation of the divine in the last days. This is a place of mysterium tremendum – a place of strange harmony between fear and awe, a place of both fascination and great danger. A place of wonder and of terrible power.

Jesus was transformed there in front of them on top of that mountain. Elijah and Moses appeared with him and a cloud of glory overshadowed them all. And from that cloud a voice from heaven spoke saying, “This is my son, whom I dearly love. Listen to him!”

Here on the mountain with Jesus we are dislocated in both time and space. The same voice that spoke to Jesus at this baptism, speaks again to say, “This is my son, the beloved.” Moses and Elijah, prophets from the past are there to speak with Jesus about his soon coming death. Time and space blend back and forward. The Greek language has two words for time, chronos and kairos.  Chronos refers to chronological or sequential time, the tick, tick, tick, of the clock hands one moment following after another.  Kairos signifies a time between, moments of indeterminate time in which something special happens. Chronos is quantitative and measurable.   Kairos is qualitative and cannot be measured or marked or preserved.  It can only be experienced.

“Jesus took John and James and Peter up the mountain in ordinary, daily chronos; during the glory of the Transfiguration they were dwelling in Kairos” (L’Engle, 93)

Indeed – the transfiguration event has sometimes been interpreted by theologians as a misplaced story of the resurrection. The description of Jesus’ transfiguration shares some similarity with the resurrection and it is thought by some scholars that the events of the resurrection were moved backward in the story so as to help make sense of the inexplicable resurrection event. Jesus had just before this event, told his disciples that he would suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he would be, that he must  be killed – but that after three days he would rise again. He spoke to them plainly about this, but they didn’t understand. (Mark 8: 31 – 32). The passion prediction – not understood in the moment is finally comprehended when seen through the eyes of the resurrection. We didn’t, we don’t understand how death can be glory – not until after the resurrection. I’m not convinced that this is the case – that the transfiguration story is a resurrection account transplaced in time - but it is true that the mystery of the transfiguration event expects the resurrection, and the resurrection explains the mystery of the transfiguration.

Peter’s desire to memorialize the moment is understandable. Time is fleeting. Everything fades. The voice speaks and then is silent. The cloud of glory envelops them and then is gone. The moment on the mountain fades and Jesus and his friends return to the plains below.

'Tis good, Lord, to be here!
Your glory fills the night;
Your face and garments, like the sun,
Shine with unborrowed light.

Fulfiller of the past!
Promise of things to be!
We hail your body glorified,
And our redemption see.

 

Before we taste of death,
We see your kingdom come;
We long to hold the vision bright,
And make this hill our home.

‘Tis Good, Lord, To Be Here - J. Armitage Robinson

Wednesday is the beginning of the Lenten season – a time of preparation. We only just recently celebrated the birth of Lord and Savior and already we are getting ourselves ready to consider his gruesome death and glorious resurrection. But here on the mountain, in this transfiguration event, we see and hear and experience the fulfillment of that preparation. In the words of Robinson’s hymn, “We hail his body glorified, and our redemption see.”

And with Peter we might say, “Rabbi, Teacher, Master, it is good that we are here.” But Peter didn’t really understand what was happening and he definitely didn’t know what he was saying. He was so afraid. He was sore afraid (to steal from Luke’s phraseology.) On the mountain, surrounded by the cloud of glory, with the prediction of pain and suffering and death blotted out by the awe and wonder of the moment, Peter says, “let’s build three shrines here. One for Moses, one for Elijah, and one for Jesus.” But he didn’t know what he was saying. He was afraid.

But time moves on, and as suddenly as it began, it was all over. Time is fleeting, every moment bleeding into the next. The vision fades, the cloud evaporates and the transfiguration is over.  Jesus and his friends come back down from the mountain and he tells them to keep quiet about it all – until after the Human one, the Son of God, had risen from the dead.  “History cannot be stopped, and we must grasp it significance. The light of the resurrection enables us to see it with hope. The death of Jesus is not the victory of darkness, which is already overcome” (Gutierrez, 51).

Lent is the time of preparation. We’ve had the glory and joy on the mountain, but now we’ll go back down to the plain and begin the long, hard road towards death and suffering and to the wonder and mystery of the resurrection. We may not understand, but we will take that journey.

 

 

Gutierrez, Gustavo. Sharing the Word through the Liturgical Year. Orbis Book, Mary Knoll, NY. 1997.  

L’Engle Madeline. Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, North Point Press, New York, NY, 1980.

Robinson, J. Armitage. ‘Tis Good, Lord, To Be Here. 1890.

 

 

 

Imponderabilia

It was late and I was tired after a twelve and a half hour shift at the factory and I knew I shouldn’t have done it – but I turned on the radio to listen to the news as I drove home in the freezing rain and the dark. It was a poor choice, tired and worn as I was. The highway was dark and the lane markers covered with snow and ice. Reports came through of the war in Ukraine and more bombings in Gaza with unnumbered civilian deaths. Reports of earthquakes in South America, of wildfires in the south-west, of another school shooting in the heartland.

Everything hurt.

It seems like I feel that way all the time these days. I am exhausted and weary from work and still grieving old wounds. Everything hurt in the cold and dark as I drove through the night, crying alone in my car. Alone and cold in the dark on a lonely road between here and nowhere.

“The world is dying,” I said aloud as I clicked off the radio with its ceaseless bad news broadcasts. “The world is dying,” I said again, “and there is nothing to replace it.” Someone once described this as a time of monsters and I will not disagree. The world is dying and full monsters. The human ones are the worst.

I arrived at home and made dinner for myself but in the process I broke a glass pitcher given to me as a wedding gift. Then I spilt a beverage on the couch which will probably stain the fabric. I tried to put it all out of my mind by watching police dramas on TV until bed, but when I finally slept I struggled with dreams of my ex-wife.

 “I don’t want the world to see me, ‘cause I don’t think that they’d understand,” the song says, but I say, “I don’t want to see the world ‘cause I don’t understand it either.”  I am lonely even in my dreams. Separated and alone and I think that maybe I should go ahead and separate myself from it all. I can’t fix it. I can’t change it. Why not go live out in the desert?

I remembered the stories of those devout men of faith who lived as hermits beyond the fringes of civilized society, or in caves, or alone atop high pillars, relying on ravens to bring them food day after day for forty years. I know it sounds fantastic, but ravens have been known to bring gifts to people they consider friendly, so why couldn’t these avian benefactors bring bread to hermits in the desert? It may be a pious legend, but it could still be true.

I woke the next day, still weary. Still worn, still pondering all the imponderabilia of this strange life. But with a stretch and a cup of coffee I was ready to step out into another new day. As I drove to work there was a carpet of fire across the eastern sky. Maybe the world is on fire but the sun is rising in the east and I think that I can try again.

 

 

 

 

From the Winter Walks

 

I’m a postal carrier these days. I walk every day- in the wind, in the snow, in the fog, in the sleet and freezing rain. Every day, five to ten miles. It’s not much, but it’s honest work. It gives me time to think, time to write, to compose.