On God

My love grows in shade - hidden. I am surrounded by spirits. Wars happen in the spirit. From glory to glory... though today I have fought over me - 'I' have wept. It is such a wonder... struggle is wondrous. How does it happen? To whom does it cling? Spirits jump ship just to live the struggle through another body - vehicles of consummation. Have you ever seen a spirit skip - skip through bodies like a rock across a clear lake? It happens. Its wondrous. I have been the subject of spiritual attacks as of late. God gestures: paths are laid before me and I am required to walk only one, to hear the high calling, to see clearly and walk. Discovering instances of power, of grace - amazing. Then in a flash - bound by resentments and questions, anxiety flows over me and I am lost. Again, lost. I could reduce it to one thing - an impossibility of purity, ruptures of light. The power given to me a curse, my gifts a burden, my sensitivities my vice... Instances of betrayal - past or presenting - provoke my own absence. I demand that I should be lost to myself. I'm interested in the experimentation. I'm interesting in testing God. Because I know God is not good, God is not knowing, God is what we make of God - God is our God. This is not to say God is bound by the human, but God is deeply relational and only comes so far with us - least God become like us, to proximate, to human - we know what happens to God when God gets to close - killing Jesus was only a first act.

The Book of Job teaches us how God learns from us - evolves with us - curses our righteousness and seeks our justice. And God Is. Despite evolution and because of it, God Is. All learning aside, all context forgiven, there is nothing outside of God. God is All but not reducible to the whole: panentheism - in a word.

I have many gifts and little patients. I have betrayed God over and over. I have demanded an-other life. Still, grace happens for me, still I am loved. It gets more interesting. As I've betrayed God - I've also betrayed what that God represented. I have betrayed the god of my culture over and over - that would be another way of speaking the issue. I have betrayed the god that condemns identified LGBTQIQ persons. I have betrayed the god that demands slave-wage labor. I betray Walmart. I betray throw-away culture. I betray the god that continually ignores structural racism. I not only betray specific gods, but I seek to destroy them. It would be more accurate to say I practice forms of betrayal - knowing that when I arrive home in Chattanooga, Walmart is the only place to buy groceries anymore and I'm still throwing away a great deal of trash...


Why? Supposedly, in the camps... in those death camps... 'why' died like god. What world gives this possibility a shape? "The same world," he answers... "your world." The same world I'm required to walk, to love. Might it not be possible... If death camps can be, if the Third Reich can be, if indeed 'god is dead' - then should it not be possible to build a world of equally opposite energetic quality to those released by the bomb and the exploitive machine of industry and war? I fear if our culture does not understand the 'death of God' - if it continually denies death, there will be no coming-peace for our world. It will falter until it fades unto death. We must learn to die. I cannot die in your place - your death is your own - fully yours - a gift of mortality. The one responsibility you will live is your death and no one can take that gift from you. But this perspective is only available if life is a gift. If life is hoarded - you will fail your death. I cannot die in your place - I cannot gift you with immortality. I can die to be a living example - as others have so graciously shown. I am called to perform death - to prepare a death - to live it.