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.

I pray you have grace on the possibility that is me. Where grace unfolds as accumulated privilege, I pray that you might intervene - insisting on worlds that become different, shading lighter forms of grace upon our bodies...
Give me love. Share your power. Where meditation is practiced bring peace and joy. God grant us the authority to change our world. Teach us to endure the transitions of unrequited love. Lift us up Lord. Save us, so that we may honor those children whose lives will bare witness to our legacies. Keep us alive. Keep us patient - our lovers depend on our patience. Preserve what is young in us Lord. Where truth grows - let it flourish. And let those whose pain is silenced though the binding conditions of tyranny be first to speak in our presence. Where chastity is held sacred, keep it until the beloved comes. Sustain our efforts - my discipline, my discipline Lord, my discipline...
Give Earth its fullest glory. Reveal yourself. For healing - teach us to listen. For becoming - teach us how to die. Where deeper breath possible, please, let it be, let it be. That the power of our traditions guide us; That our revelations grow; That sparks of spirituality emerge; That Gods incarnate again and again... Amen. And Amen.

Prayers and Becoming

I have been crossing thresholds, unable to find my former selves... unredeemed change, incomprehensible movement. Movement backwards is lost to me - backwards is an abyss, ruptures of nihilism allowing presence to escape meaninglessness - 'backwards' as juxtaposed to 'forwards' has no meaning. Bound to envelope spacial and timeless spheres of becoming - I am. Binding revolutionary aptitude for foreseeing the future - I am. My questions have been dissipating under the weight of liquidification and reassimilation; old prohibitions emancipated, an ever-present origin - I am.

In an age of nuclear power and antinuclear campaigns, unrecognizable transuranic elements and ballooning post-industrial capitalisms... Technobiopowers managing life-worlds addicted to the hope of universal convergence... The obsessive desire for survival has outlived the language built to sustain it: ecologically sound, economically reasonable, gendered neutral, humanly intuitive - the luxury of a Gaian Age.

Everyone is aware of the asymmetrical spectacle of power relations. Its in our blood. The endless screens of priorities: lists, dates, tables, rulers, clocks, etc. Endless mathematical reliance! Endless disassociating representations! Full abstraction. Full simulacrum.

Bless us. Purify us. Where prayer can't reach, where voices are silenced, where inheritance is forgotten and tears turned to stone - I am. Come Lord. Light is full in You. Let the Earth be complete with Your Glory. Teach us to Listen. Teach us to Love.

Lost Lover

A message to my lost lover:

I speak a blessing over you. I love you. I will love you when your memory ceases to acknowledge a glimmer of what we were together. I love you because you are precious. You are amazing. You found me in the depths and rescued me. You showed me my light after I was certain it was no more. You found me in my hiding place. For that I am eternally grateful. In my strength I will honor you even if I will never again find your face to kiss and your ear to remind you that you are the reason I am strong. I am desperate to sleep with you again - to feel your arms around my neck and your body with mine. I am grateful that my body remembers yours and hopes for your well-being - your return and your redemption.

Cycles of Violence

Cycles of violence color my life. Cycles of inherited pain, unwitnessed tears, silenced mourning, periods of grey. I have lost lovers. I have lost redemption. Crushed dreams and blackness...

Where do our histories take us? I've been hearing stories from my mother: gendered violence, sexual violation, unreconciled abuses. The men she married were complicit in the horror - my father was complicit. His pain is unquestionable - present in his face and in his house. I miss my father deeply.

I have been crying the past two weeks. I have witnessed the woman I love with another man and her memory of me vanish. I have wept tonight. I have driven my spirit into exile through pain. Still it persists...

Much must die. Most must die. But not all things die. Some things, some refined, very light things will not be stopped - I seek those things with all my being. It is through tears my spirit experiences the depths of lost and absence and it glories in its power to live through pain. Despite Pain. A refusal of death at the heart of its gift. Glory.

Transition

Everything changes. I've been crying more recently. Crying is intense. Crying is awesome. It feels - it is purging. A spiritual exchange of pain... I rarely witness authentic weeping in public.

Hummm...
I was about to write more about crying, but I just saw a black cat out side my door. Incredible. How much meaning can I read into this moment? A complete interruption. A miracle... So much of my experience is bound up with magic. How else to you explain such things? A synchronicity - an appeal to 'rationality'. I had a black cat when I was a boy. But this cat is much more than a reminder. This cat has followed my spirit home.
After I graduated college I returned home. I was home for a year before I moved to S.F. and during that period a cat showed up at my house. Its was young and small in stature; it seemed to be strangely familiar. It was interested in the dogs - not afraid, it was curious and loving. I couldn't help but contrast its presence with my father's cat because both cats seemed to reflect our own individual spirits. Within a month after I left for S.F. Gabby, this amazing soul, departed - it was killed in the street.
What is that? I feel deeply comfortable with the position that Gabby and I were bound to each other. She was a spiritual manifestation of my need, presence, residency, hope. Pets are profound like this - companion species. BUT, how much more profound are you. Your embodiment suggests a kinship that transgresses time. We are spiritual companions to each other. Sometimes that spirit destroys, sometimes it provokes healing - it will never be bound to simple formulas. 'We' - we speak to one another and the language is rich with depth.

This black cat - bold. Disturbingly curious, thin, and just like Gabby - it has my full attention. And during the sighting, I was listening to a song titled 'Miracle'. Further, my own body - from excessive bicycling and untimely eatting - has grown thin. Even further, my attire as of late has been bent toward black - one of my professors is always in black. Its like a perpetual mourning - wearing a history of pain, memory, and creativity. A black cat. My favorite cat was black. I've been asking for disernment - perhaps this is it...