Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Life Work, What You Wrote

Life is not fair. This grinds me to dust. My whole thing is finding a way to deal with this, that I do not flame out, tumble in the chaos, crash my own life. When I get a moment then I play. Much of what I do seems inane but my work is inner work. I need to pace this race and so I do.

When I looked for the spiritual walk that I could do in this unfair life, I had to find a place that was not my fault. I could not live in a faith that starts with it being my fault. I will self destruct there. There is no point to a salvation in it for me. There are no sins of fathers to visit the children and sour things. It cannot be or I die right now, self destruct, no time for salvation. It is far too unfair a case for me to breathe. I literally gasped for breath for much of my childhood. So I found my way. I do not claim it is your right way. It is merely a way within which I can actually live, maybe just a little. It is a way that allows the vision I was given one night to flourish, whether that vision is true or pure fantasy.

Life Work

I pick bones with God
And here is the biggest one.

I came back for this,
To stand in the glare
Of this place, the hard grim light
Of the small losses,
The myriad events
That shrive us today, again,
That do not let go.

We try to forget
But bones will never forget.
I came back for this.

To witness, know, tell,
To see with old eyes, to turn,
Tell Him to His face.

January 13, 2009 1:10 PM

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Here is the power. The mages of today are wordsmiths, musicians, purveyors of the media. The magic has left the tower, and the mages no longer wear a special look. The mages are anyone in the right realm, the places magic of some kind is supported. Under the right conditions we all may encounter God with skin on.

What You Wrote

I am ink, thin blue
Ink in a fine line, one part
Of the word you wrote.
I spell one person,
One heart among so many
Still here in the world.

You wrote us all down.

January 14, 2009 8:24 AM

12 comments:

  1. Yes.

    The magic wears a new face these days...but it is still magic Christopher.

    Bring it on I say!

    xxx

    ReplyDelete
  2. With my pocketknife
    i write your name
    in the bark of a tree
    there you are
    on the edge of the forest
    magic indeed

    ReplyDelete
  3. Been thinking myself about Job, and what a bastard thing that was to do, and about how there'll always be enough suffering, enough myriad events and ordinary losses, enough to feel bad about in more or less any human life that isn't exceptionally lucky, why should anyone need to dump a lot more on anyone else needlessly?

    I 'm a little uncertain about that word 'shrive' there; it means confess, yes?

    I've put you on a reader now so I get here more often and the posts don't build up.

    ReplyDelete
  4. "I am ink,thin blue
    ink in a fine line..."

    "You wrote us all down."

    I love that statement. I believe that statement. I want to be that statement.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I can really appreciate your confrontational nature, even in the face of god. And as to the thin blue vein, oh, there is magic, there is beauty in sacks of skin and for this I am thankful.

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  6. Michelle,I am a little humbled by all this. Yes indeed, bring it on!

    Jozien, :) I feel the forest wind now.

    Lucy, Job is a crucial (sic) book, but I have always felt it ends with fighting words, when God says, Who are you to question me? The answer is, I am the guy you just stuck it to. How dare you?

    Fire that God. Get a new one.

    {{{Karen}}}, :)

    Erin, wrestling with God causes wounds, as is amply told. If you wish to be confrontational, you have to accept the consequences. You will basically lose. The question becomes, How can I honestly do anything else?

    ReplyDelete
  7. bagobones finds thread

    bagobones
    God's creation
    prone to backtalk
    consternation
    thinks he sees
    and has to say
    doesn't know
    his self deceiving
    part of whole cloth
    God's
    been
    weaving

    GD

    ReplyDelete
  8. Ghost, That is precisely the faith statement within the whole thing. If I am self deceived, or in any other way deceived, then I am well and truly trapped AND free will becomes a joke. Your poem is deterministic.

    Actually the joke isn't very funny because so much rides on free will. If free will is not real then this is a cruel universe. I am grateful I know better. Free will is real, autonomy counts, witness is actual, responsibility is basic to my life.

    Except for that and in some other context, your poem is beautiful and so are you, my friend. You are a creative and vibrant human with a hefty dollop of self determined energy. You are created in the image and likeness of the creator.

    By the way, there is of course a great deal that can be illusory. Waking is not only possible but rather easy. It is often not very comfortable. The long term trouble is staying awake, not having a spiritual narcolepsy. We often instead dream that we are awake, which is far more comfortable.

    ReplyDelete
  9. i suspect free will is not an either-or proposition.

    i've found there is a healthy portion of life's unfolding that is beyond my control.... yet it appears my attitude toward God yields considerable freedom "from" certain things, and freedom "to" do a lot of things.... resources and options magically appear where there were none before.

    the "bagobones" poem was for me a lesson in humility and existential humor versus a definitive statement regarding determinism. there is really no good reason why we should not affirm our human experience of free will, witness, responsibility and all you say.... to deny that i suspect would be a significant self deception.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Ghost, you are right about the free will issue. Life is indeed largely a matter of consequence, and worse, largely a matter of unpredictable chance as well. One could say random. Many non-theists insist, random. I am reading a book called The Drunkard's Walk as we write. From the non-theist viewpoint, there is a great deal about our life that is predictable in certain ways in the aggregate, but not in individual cases, that is to say that statistical analysis can apply.

    When Carl Jung looked at this and nonetheless saw so much meaning in precisely this kind of data, he coined the term Synchronicity. This is an area I have taken a deep interest in since the 1970s.

    I have come to a satisfactory conclusion. In a free will universe, even when you restrict the actual moments of free will as they seem to be restricted, there is a problem with God erupting into the midst of things. If I take free will seriously, then I must assume that God will go to great pains to avoid violating it, no matter whose free will it is, not only human:)

    Where will God then act, if He is to have a dynamic presence in His creation? It will be within the so called random (probably only when necessary) and also perhaps occasionally by permission, when He is asked (also probably only when necessary, and never if it is going to violate someone else's free will).

    However this is purely a personal matter of faith.

    Your description of Bagobones as a lesson in humility and existential humor is not at all lost on me. That was the richness that I thought reaches into the other areas beyond the issue of self delusion. I suffer from arrogance in deep ways. It is one of my healing tasks of several decades (since 1981) to somehow shake that false pride out of me.

    What a wonderful discussion:)

    ReplyDelete

The chicken crossed the road. That's poultry in motion.


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