The Sound of Silence: A Reality Check on ‘Christian’ Music and Why’ My’ Jesus is not For Sale!

Rage Against the Machine, has a marvelous quote when it comes to part of their Ethos, ‘Don’t us revolution to sell your band, use your band to sell revolution!’ As odd as it seems, for me this quote encapsulates quite neatly, with a few steps outside it, how I feel about Christian music. There are many Christians in the music business, and not all of them limited to the Christian industry and its various piggy backing sub-genres. But essentially this quotation emphasises, perhaps my largest hang up with Christian music, it’s obsession with ‘truth’, and it’s obsession with the idea that anything that labels itself that is something they should, without any critical incentive, expose themselves to. It’s pretty much an expression best represented by my father, who knows nothing of his Irish heritage, but buys Irish Springs soap to feel authentically Irish, because it has ‘Irish’ in its title. All the while he’s showering, his ignorance and that soap is washing and wearing away the credible impact of anything to do with being Irish, and reduced it to a material process of buying a bar of soap, as if a squeaky finish nice body aroma are equal to reading and comprehending the Tain Bo Cuihle. On the otherside, and this is much more my point, what does being Irish have to do with Irish Springs being a quality product for anyone? In fact, Ireland is being exploited to sell the soap, just like it is exploited to sell Irish Myst, [though that whisky is outrageously awesome], it doesn’t have any superior naming power than taking a name, like Bailey’s, which happens to be an Irish name, creating an air of credibility and selling the Celticism [even modern and contrived to some extent] as an after thought, or a coincidence.

The same is true for Christian music, the fact of excellence being present, the idea of relationship being present, not to God or ideas but even to history in a profound, well chorded, well worded way, has become not simply coincidental of human beings trying to produce a quality product to both live and to bless others, but entirely Ironic. Not only that, but it’s insulting to regular human beings, who create honest, truthful songs, that speak even to ideals and concepts that Christians would agree with are rejected based on some superiority complex a large number of ‘believers’ have due to a strange sort of intimate connection they’ve developed with a piece of garbage, one only has to listen to Dust in the Wind by Kansas to begin to understand there’s just as much truth of every kind in many forms of music.

The questions faced daily by these artists of face are outrageous- some range from the absurd of ‘Why would you bring people down talking about a real, serious issue, or just the plain fact that sorrow exists and SHOULD affect us all?’ ‘Why did you write this song that has nothing to do with something about church or the grand heavens or [insert other continual rubbishes], where is God in this? Why aren’t you singing more about Jesus?’ and my person favourite, ‘If you’re Christians, why aren’t you a CHristian band? You should be a CHristian band!’ This question statement has missed the mark for two reasons- one, it misses the root of the industry of music- which is ruthless and designed only to procure money, on the marketing level- art has very little to do with it, though most performers are very talented artists. Two, returning to the Rage Against the Machine quote, it points to a much more ironic reality- while the impression would be, ‘Use you band to sell Jesus!’ the truth is, given the market that this music enters, ‘Jesus is used to sell the band!’ and honestly I am so sick of people asking this question, because really, deep inside the heart, I don’t find this statement genuine. How can someone ask a group of artists- ‘I just wish you would be CHristians so that people could BENEFIT, from your music.’ HAve they never listened to James Taylors’ Fire and Rain? There’s more honest strength in that song than I have met in almost all Christian music, honestly, there’s more power there in his brief lines, that Jesus is his only hope for standing up and the only way to make it through a day, than I could find in maybe five better Christian songs, likely NONE of them from this decade.

But the fact of the matter is, the question asked these people of faith is, with a smiling vernier, must more shocking, and should fill every honest person with rage and weeping- ‘Why don’t you exploit Jesus to sell your record?’ and ultimately leads to the statement, ‘I wish they would exploit me!’ Do you encounter is in secular music? No, at least there you have people with the goddamned common courtesy to ask an artist to fuck them with their body instead of their art! What is wrong with a subculture that can’t stand and praise artists for simply being inspired by Jesus and being human to make good music- they are actually disappointed that their Jesus is not for sale! They’re actually disappointed that they don’t seem to be bought, and they’re disappointed they wont provide them with ‘the last temptation of Christ’ deep inside themselves. Can you imagine this- if it were Herr Krishnas, or Hindu people being asked to sell their music by being all about Ghandi, they would be furious- but more to the point, if someone actually did it, they would lose all credibility, not for supporting Ghandis ideas, but for actually exploiting him, and ‘not allowing him to just keep his sol flipflops and remain at peace in the jungle’ as Hell’s kitchen would have us believe- how can ‘Christians’ sell their saviour like that, for a few thirty dollar units here and there, and how can they associate their supposed common experience with one man as encapsulated and worth such a cheap cavalier exchange in the first place?

All that being said, a few weeks ago, Mr. Goulet, a friend of mine of facebook posted a link to a blog on why a person doesn’t like Christian music, these are my thoughts on the article, as well as another clip from tripple X church, and then some closing statements:

I think his whole article can be summed up with: Christian ‘music’, trades expressions of excellence for a few lines of ‘Jesus this and great-gravy-goodness-God!’ that, which amounts to a sunday school lesson for adults. It’s brainwashing, spineless, and everything this person said was absolutely true.

I think however, it misses a few key points of ethics- 1) from personal experience, from lifts taken from Secular music and placed in Christian music- it’s entirely hypocritical- The first song of OC Supertones, Chase the Sun, steals the whole drum introduction from Metallica’s Trapped Under Ice. This isn’t so bad on it’s own, artists steal and rework all the time- but interestingly enough, Secular artists are honest about it. Christian artists listen to more secular music than the subculture they market themselves to- yet they are part of an industry which claims their musical catalogue is more positive beneficial and godly than the secular.

Second, on pure ethics- the Christian industry is not Godly. Secular record companies operate this way- they sign you, co-sign a loan for you to produce market distribute your album, say for example a hundred grand. They will bank roll a portion of your touring costs too. But at the end of the day, the price break down of where the money goes- is they get everything and you might be left with 1% of the total cost of every unit sold. And while they wrack up thousands, ideally millions of dollars from your hard work, that 1% has to feed you, clothe you, and pay off your initial loan. The only way to make money at all, which also has to in majority do the same thing, is to lose your humanity becoming ridiculously famous, or tour so extensively with almost no opportunity for rest. When you hear about groups touring for eighteen months, two or three years between albums, you’re not looking at someone who is doing it for the sheer fun, sure there’s a euphoria to it, but it’s the only way they’re going to make any money- many of them, esp. new comers, it’s the only way they are going to make money to get out of debt, and then get back into debt to meet the quota the record company will asign them if their album succeeds. Fail and there’s hell to pay- you still have to pay off the debt. And the Christian Industry operates in the same exact way, in fact they took their frame work from the secular industry- they’re on in the same- it’s all about money, and fuck you if you fuck them.

I have written alot here, so I wont get into the problem of people being sold their Christian identity- through hill song or some artist’s next worship album. I mean there’s something in the bible about paying for the power of Christ, and the Apostles called it insulting to the Power of the Holy Spirit. What happened to ‘…one person brings a song!’? The frame work of secular industry has convinced us all that only performers play music and we in the crowd watch and mime- and the gifts of local communities go untapped for money!

And I wont start on how the Kingdom of heaven, forgiveness, and real life altering power is not to be found in these songs.

Christian music died with Rich Mullins. It ruddy well sucks, it comes from a corrupt and money hungry industry, it doesn’t say anything, it has no standard for excellence, it exploits Jesus to sell units and above all, it inspires people to go out and buy a cultural identity of being a Christian, which does not exist- you’re buying your identity from people, the power to worship God, you’re paying someone, and what was told to Simon Magus when it tried to buy the power of the Holy Spirit- he was chastised for his extremity of wickedness! Praise God from a heart striving for heart felt excellence in your own words as a human being- bring that song to your church and sing it, play it, hand out copies, heck even better keep it between you and God! Who cares about Hillsong and all these other pieces of glazed feces, we have become a people, supposedly belonging to God who have more a common connection based on the bands that are and are not listened to than a connection with a man called Jesus. CHristian music is just audio porn for your warm wet bed inside you, just like porn is your escape from reality when it comes to the fact you don’t have companionship and intimacy, mass produced worship is the sure sign you don’t have God.

I recently picked up a copy of Ozzy Osbourne’s Blizzard of Oz, the opening track on it is ‘I don’t know’ and you know what, whether Ozzy is humble or not, I’ll take the humility of the song telling me it’s more complex than a simple name, from which I can gather in my own desires and directions, ‘because there’s more to a person than name’. And hence, there should be more to music or a sub genre of music that ‘Jesus’. The thing I most do not understand, is that, go head out and rent a copy of Nick & Nora’s Infinite Playlist. There’s a Jewish group in this movie, who clearly don’t give a shit in the deep meaningful way they portray themselves about being Jewish, they make ‘Zionistic’ from what it appears, ‘metal’ in order to exploit the record execs, and well, you can imagine- Jewish youth, [which for some reason the very concept is humourous to me, just at its value not to do with the issue] I mean, what happened to Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley [bet you never thought you'd ever see those four names in the same sentence] just happening to be Jewish, it has nothing to do with excellence of music [ excellence here, ehn, work ethic undeniable] or the fact that making music should have anything fundamental to do with being Jewish, the same is true for Christian music. Which seems somehow to enivision itself making the world CHristian, envisions itself ‘taking it back’, and yet, they don’t give anything of quality and so much more for cornering the market, when the only market they have is themselves. Examine U2 for just a brief moment, every member is a CHristian, yet, they are not a CHristian band, they have enormous Credibility to their faith and music, which sometimes intersects as a given, but not an intention- their sound is forged by the Troubles, just as much as anyone who understands that, knows that a faith that is going to retain itself honest in those conditions, is alot deeper and selfaware than a bar of Irish Springs – envision them then, beginning to sing and compose the songs sung in our churches, I don’t mean an honest expression to God, I mean the songs sung in our churches, and you’d actually get an enormous picture of how insulting in unjust every line would be to anyone who had a heart for God in country such as that, it would be a total mockery of honest people on both sides who have lost family and homes, and somehow, hold our hope for unity that has nothing to do with Catholicism or Protestatnism, but Christ, and still retain a quiet faith. What exactly then should we do? Shall we sing these fluffy songs, which are a clear expression of the irrelevance of our religion on this continent and a sheer, whipped cream mockery of those in other countries who know that faith, and God, and singing a certain song is something people kill for? Honestly I look at the songs we sing, and no one ever will murdered for them, because seriously you have to say and be something to be murdered, but I do find it fucking absurd that our expression of worship mocks the reality in the rest of the world, where people have their breasts cut off because a neighbouring tribe didn’t like that they became Christians. So what I will be doing is sticking with my Ozzy album!

Ironies of Gettysburg

So, about nine months ago, I watched a movie called Gods and Generals, a film based on a book of the same name, written by Geoffrey Shaara as a prequel to his father’s Pulitzer novel- The Killer Angels. It is named for an interesting line in The Killer Angels: ‘There is nothing quite like a God on earth than a General.’ However, just tonight I was fortunate enough to grab, cheaply, the movie adaptation of The Killer Angels, the 1993 epic Gettysburg. This all got me into reading up upon the battle itself, and the impact of the history, which combined with the reading up caused by Gods and Generals, draws some very interesting poetry for this day in American history: all the ironies aside that now adays the US claims, ‘The Union prevailed’, when really, the North prevailed, and the Union subjugated. It’s kind of like saying, ‘we became friends because my boot heal didn’t taste entirely like shit when I slammed it into your face; and by default, now I have one of your teeth, some blood and your flesh smeared all over that heal, now aren’t we just a part of each other!’ But I digress, here are a list of interesting ironies surrounding the battle of Gettysburg, anyone reading this, please do indeed fill in more.

1). Two months before the battle the south lost one of its best Generals in Thomas Stonewall Jackson, done in by friendly fire. The last day of the conflict, Lee orders a desperate unavoidable maneuver, the Pickett charge, in order to break the Union line in the middle. [The position appears weak in and of itself, but because of its middle location, it is perfectly aligned to be covered by Little Round top, and Cemetery Hill's Atillery.] The Objective is to break the Union line, by crossing over  a stonewall on Cemetery Ridge, an object already lost from the get go, just like Jackson. In effect, the Confederacy lost Jackson, then lost the war stepping over him!

2). Gettysburg is referred to as the turning point in the civil war, where, the South achieved it’s ‘High water mark’ at that above mentioned wall, as some troops did in fact cross it. But the turning point is decided, the Conferate dream is laid to rest on Cemetery ridge, the battle ceases here except for a cavalry entanglement a few moments later. Couple that with the fact that Gettysburg incurred the highest casualties of the war.

3). The Battle ended, with the Union army not precisely having the upper hand in numbers, just the better ground in terms of postion and supply- so after the fault at Cemetery Ridge, they hold a stand off on the fourth of July, the anniversary of the Union, which the Confederates hope the Yanks will attack on in raining conditions- the Union does nothing, cutting the Confederates off from objectives they cannot achieve in their condition without commitment to certain conflict, that in winning would allow them to regroup and dig in up in the North. The Hinge is the holiday of the Union.

4).Yet, Meade the Union general is criticised for not presenting an opportunity for the Confederates to seize the day!

5). The first real entanglement- actually noticed alert by Union General Buford, is a detachment of soldiers looking for footwear in a nearby village, which allows him time to pick the best ground in the area that wins them the conflict, ensuring that the Confederate troops will be well supported, under foot as they use those shoes to march a retreat! [there's some speculation about whether there were shoes at all, there is no clarification].

6). When the armies faced each other by an engagement of meeting, Union forces were coming from the south and Confederate forces, passing through Gettysburg, from the North.

7). The Only civilian casualty is Mary ‘Ginny’ Wade- struck by a stray shot flying into her kitchen while she was making bread. Mary Wade, whose middle name, happens to be Virginia! Not only is the Confederate Army of Virginia under Lee Stopped, but it seems one way or another, it is certain that, from this moment on, Virginia will be no more with a breath of her own!

8). And one Coincidence- General Robert Edward Lee, lived only to be sixty three years old, which is the exact year that the disastrous battle took place in, 1863

And those are the compelling ironies I discovered about the battle of Gettysburg, I am sure there are many many more, but just this poetry would lend itself to a good battle hymn full of puns. I might sit down to draft that in a little while.

The Place of the Soul

This is taken, for a first, from two sources, one is a conversation on the forum I frequented, where a participant, Rocky, made some extreme contentions that the ‘Soul’ or psyche, is superior to the body. The second is taken from a conversation with a friend, Finch, who has been speculating about consciousness. The focal point is to represent the fundamental Christian response to the argument of soul and consciousness, and that it is absurd to associate Greek thought onto what Paul is saying, even when he uses words that might imply Greek thought and philosophy, the reality is, in being a Jew writing to Romans and Jews, he would not have used the idea of Psyche being the locus of the human being, and as such likely uses the word Psyche, because the Greek language gives him no real other course of communication, as he is not talking about ZOE, which is physical and Spiritual life together, and he is not speaking of the BIOS, or bodily operations, nor is he talking about the mind, when he uses the word PSYCHE, but rather a lesser used, non philosophical method of the word, which denotes, animation or physical life. The piece does not go into the notion of how Christian society contributed to any real or semblic concept of the self, which is a modern developement which, in it’s emphasis on service and love towards ones neighbour, severely contributed to, but this is just a side notes. Once again this takes up an several simple claimes that the soul of Spiritual are superior, my main arguments are clearly that this is not so, and also proposing that they are simply other forms of material, as the body being other forms of spiritual, which would be in keeping with Judaic and therefore the real root of Christian thinking. It helps also that Roman Stoicism and Celtic thought seem to rally to it’s cause in the majority, while gnosticism and Greek thought are diametrically incompatible. There are some brief historical concepts iterated, a small section where I get rather frustrated talking about mushrooms [completely relevant btw], and some sections where it talks about the nature of sin, or it’s lack of nature and substance and consistency. There are a great number of more definitive clarifiable editions to be made. I will get around to them eventually, but here it is published.

Rocky, there is a flaw in your reasoning. It is too gnostic, and not at all Jewish. Paul’s background, and Jesus’ background for argument and contestation are Jewish, therefore even when dealing with Roman and Greek thinking, the likely outcome of the arguments Paul gives are going to be Jewish in their foundation- hence the duality between Flesh, Spirit and Soul, doesn’t actually exist, to be dualistic towards soul and body would have been repugnant and abominable to Paul, because it was to the Jews. If you have a soul, it is one with the body, so much so that it has no purpose and is completely negligable without one. Soul is not in the middle of the struggle, and body, or carnality is not the problem Paul talks about when it comes to the flesh.

Everything that we do and experience requires a body, from our hurts that must be addressed to our elations and our wills. Nothing we experience is linked to a negligable soul in the same way. You feel God because also you body does, your heart breaks because your body experiences emotions. People who lose their limbs have profound spiritual experiences with pain, as the limb that is there is not there, but is felt.

Please don’t go so far as to intepret poetry and symbolism for thinking that the body and it’s carnality are evil. The body longs to be healed, this is good, its desperation to be healed is also good, but can result in terrible things, just as love can make us kill. I would urge you greatly to begin to see that carnality is not waging against you but for you, as all creation cries out in giving birth, nor is it flimsy, as it is the thing which causes God to look down and bless us with children and crops, and can bring life and vibrance, and also which can cause cataclysm. Everything material bears Christ’s marks and is held together by him, this has caused many to say, he is in all things all things are an expression of himself to us, and that everything is a wonderful and beautiful shirt of mail dressing our lord with wonder.

As I have said before here, and I have been reading in order to give you and explanation, that sin is a place of not, or forgetfulness, of absence etc, and the flesh, being a spiritual entity just as much Spirit, as material and Spirit were made for eachother, making Spirit a kind of material, who in our case is a he and a Person, is full of sin, meaning sin is necessary to be recognised as residing in the body, but not of the body. The flesh is not made of sin, nor are it’s carnal desires and yearnings. In fact it’s desires and yearnings are most likely the very things most ravaged by the presence of the vacuous intruder of sin, which creates places in us where we do not exist, where God does not exist and where the memory of Jesus and correct behaviour is lost or put aside. Our bodies are good and our responses are good as well, in almost every case, they are good because in being hurt or incomplete, and being eaten from the inside out, we should be in pain, and should react not only from the pain but to do away with it, buy being not God many of our self medications eventually exaserbate the problem of the phage of sin. Alcohol numbs the pain until it contributes to it, sex distracts you with another person from actually mending wounds or learning to be healthily alone, or learning to love yourself. Sometimes these keep the pathogen successfully at bay, but never in remission, though it can be convincing that it is. So the porblem is not the sock, as to say the material of the sock were the problem would be nonsense, but where the sock breaks from the wear of a hole is the issue, the pain the sock is in is the issue, and in being living socks, we do not have the ability to fully darn ourselves, we have the means to get damn close with good and proper and necessary things, like needing other people and therapy, as a sock with a hole needs needles and thread, but we have forgotten how to darn, and a sock cannot darn itself, and we cannot recall what it is to be whole socks once we’ve had holes all our lives, or were in some way unable to be fully darned in the first place, or develope snags of hurt, as even being conceived in traumatic, if not birth itself, and all the time in between is a duress, even though it is well worth it.

Unfortunately there are those among us who like to tear at and unravel every sock that is in pain, in or out of the drawer, and to those they expect that those socks should comes unto once they have darned themselves together, and these socks it is, that bear stains that will never or by long shots remember what it was to be their original and pure colours.

This is an incredible distinction, as it has had intense implications on Christian’s view of man as forbade, primarily and fundamentally sinful and depraved, dead inside, unjustified unless accepting Christ, and misrepresenting many doctrines. It has lead us to think, unless someone believes on Christ, they are not justified, yet the whole human race is Justified regardless, for God Chose To Make US! and died for us while we were yet rebels, regardless of whether or not WE would recall our king as he did in fact die to get the attention of those deep parts that still existed in us and needed to remember him. We have actually been taught that Jesus has sin in his flesh which the Holy Spirit kept at bay, rather than realizing, that only God can make something from nothing, and if he is expressing himself and creating himself, then likely he is making from deep within him, and calling himself out from places in which he exists, redeeming by reminding, or taking from where he is still established in the deep powerful parts of a young girl’s womb. We apply this to Jesus conception, without actually using history to say, the in contestation of gnosticism, claiming Jesus was only Spiritual, that God and Jesus were one in material the real clinch is that Man and God are one, and that Spirit and material are compatible, for two corresponding beauties, that God is the standard for what makes us fundamentally and rightly human, and if so for this relationship, then perhaps it is to be said, that Spirit is the fundamental definition of matter, as God himself, holds all material and the universe together.

You wont find me using scripture, even though it is replete all through my post, ‘as creation is crying out as giving birth’ and ‘that God sustains and holds all things together’ it’s less important here than the culture context, soul and body are one, separation in any case is abominable.
If you think this silly, tell me at what point Paul says that his sin is his flesh? And tell me at what point the ability to be objective and observe and think through things became indicative of a soul? We experience emotions much more severely and readily through the flesh, than we do using our minds to step outside the situation, our mind responds then to the body, rationalising our emotions removedly, or entertwining with their justification, usually it is the emotional, ready and accessible foundation of human beings that is most prevalent all of which dominantly circulates through out bodies, in fact cerebracy in many cases creates computistic minds and shuts down the heart. Are you’re going to tell me that because Paul is able to use his mind, as a hard thinker and see the situation, that this is his ‘soul’ talking, or that our ability to think and exempt ourselves to further vantage points is a sign that the soul is removed from the forces of Spirit and flesh, because many people do not think hardly or heartily, in fact this is rare almost exclusively academic notion, whilst the experience of emotion, a soulful thing is processed real time in the body, not the mind. The notion of the soul being formatted like this is also gnostic borrowed thinking, integrated by Classical study by Augustine, Acquinas, to some extent Erasmus, the first two actually thinking that reason and cognition were not fallen, being the most ready signs of a soul and that a healthy one, mental faculty was the highest spiritual virtue and should suppress all the lower base bodily, sinful qualities of man
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Continuing in this avenue, that the soul and the body are one and inseparable are the ideas that God came to save our immortal souls, however, God came to save lives, and that wholistically, hence, resurrection. Have you ever noticed that unless someone is dead Christian focus is about refugee status, resurrection is not on the list, it’s all about ‘dying to join Jesus in the spaceship in the tail of the comet’. There is little contemporary talk about resurrection of the flesh, however it’s Jesus’ main schtick, not that we go to Heaven, but that the kingdom himself has come in him, to earth, and he so loved the world that he, came to save our souls? Or came to give us life, that who believes for him, shall not perish? Or do you think, that if a soul be the essence of what a person is, and then distill all flavour from it with out creating vanities? If you boiled a mushroom clean of flavour, you’d have a thin and tasty broth, but you would have a vain husk of the mushrooms body- but then you must ask why was such essence in the mushroom in the first place, perhaps it is more the body that has created the nature of any essence than any else, after all, together, they are both useful and usefully instinct, being wholly and distinctly unified as ‘mushroom’, which even unto any variation, of flavor to fungal flesh, must be referred to in reference to that material thing in order to even comprehend with marginal success, in any form of coherent commmunication what the fuck things are in the first place. The Body of all things is primus, you cannot say, cream of mushroom soup, and mean only the soul of mushroom, because all associations are projected out from the material, otherwise if soul exists it is collectively worthless in the notion of separation, because you cannot then describe or know it, as prime without the things it comes from, or is projected out from, namely corpus, concrete embodiment.

Continuing in this avenue, that the soul and the body are one and inseparable are the ideas that God came to save our immortal souls, however, God came to save lives, and that wholistically, hence, resurrection. Have you ever noticed that unless someone is dead Christian focus is about refugee status, resurrection is not on the list, it’s all about ‘dying to join Jesus in the spaceship in the tail of the comet’. There is little contemporary talk about resurrection of the flesh, however it’s Jesus’ main schtick, not that we go to Heaven, but that the kingdom himself has come in him, to earth, and he so loved the world that he, came to save our souls? Or came to give us life, that who believes for him, shall not perish?

Yet you yourself fall into this trap, as you say ”you’ the soul’. Yet it is to the body only we can speak of any experience. Most notably most Christian traditions regard soul, only as life force. If you wish to contest this idea and that the ‘soul’ is the ‘you’ we have a problem, because then we enter the Greeks, held by some Christians. idea that the soul is ‘the seat or locus of human will understanding and personality’, this is a huge problem, because as stated, not only is the soul none of these things, but, when we die, ‘the body to dust, and the soul unto God.’ Jesus Christ is the locus of human will, understanding and personality, any other assertion is apostasy, and if the soul then returns to God, we enter more gnosticism.

What has happened then is this, in my speculation: Paul, in talking about his flesh, does not use the word SOMA= body or whole person, he uses SARX= flesh, or more useful to his premise, corpse, the dead weight of sin, not his actual corporeals or his carnality. He then, if the accuracy serves uses the term PSYCHE= life, most often, the temporal life, which must dwell in a body, or it’s not life, which is then unpacked into English as ‘soul’, the problem is, Paul has very little other uses to convey his point, he could use BIOS, but he is not talking about the material of life, and BIOS is a less common usage, he is talking about the energy itself, and while his philosophy is not Greek, the word PSYCHE carried intense philosophical baggage. We then distill, would Paul being Christian, use PSYCHE to mean conscience, that sin vexes it, sure he could, but not being a gnostic where the summation of the human rests in the cognitive mind, why would he? He also doesn’t use the But he then uses something else, he goes on to say, the law vexed him, by multiplying his sins, and preparing him for death, in other words, it created a situation, justly where the sin multiplied and struggled against his very life, the temporal life of the `soul` which evaporates and goes back to God.

We can examine this in context. What makes more sense if Paul uses the idea of the deadweight of sin, waging war within his members, that this directly flayed his mind and this is the biggest problem of it, or this deadly absence was built up in him, and very literally threatened his ability not only to live but to be a living thing with a beating heart at all. What Paul then is speaking of is not the problem of the body and the release of the soul, but the atrophy and dead weight of sin, which consumed his good and was robbing him of life? Considering he is using the idea we have established, that there is something dead in us, and that the Law arouses it in order to propagate it, multiply it, make full its deadly purpose, this could very well mean that it would hurt the conscience, but Paul doesn’t use those words, neither NOU or NOUS for mind, nor, SUNEIDESIS for conscience. He could indeed have used the word, BIOS, but it’s unlikely why this word would be translated as ‘soul’, and confused with the intense philosophical problem it held in Greek thought we are discussing now. Second, examining context, Paul is writing to Jews in Rome, clearly by his reasoning, they have in the past, been good Lawful Jews, and are now arguing that the very thing they should carry on with is that Law they live so well, in fact something that very eventually does not vex their conscience at all, but made them proud and pompous, and made them resist God for their righteous accomplishment. Paul then rightly warns them, ‘Just as those married cannot be again married without death, the only way for this to set you free is to die, either through Jesus, or literal death, brought on by the daring goad of the Law. Live the law and it will literally kill you, as it was killing you before. Or come to Jesus, and thank God for him, which sets us free, and gives us life.’ Any such Dualism about ‘Body/soul separation’ or one favoured over the other is complete loss to the audience Paul is addressing.

So you see it is not the carnal material or it’s passions and desires, but the mysterious and deadly ‘nots’ of sin, not the body, or the SOMA, but the SARX, or corpse of sin, which eats away at the life force unto death. My attestation is, if soul is fundamental to corpus and body, then we may as well work with the primus, the body itself, as we know ourselves and everything in and out according to it, and recognitions of time, place, action and inaction, and why attest a soul at all, when in the end, the philosophy of soul is unhelpful to being human, and the energy of soul as animation is truly superfluos, why say I am driven by soul, rather than simply driven it is redundant. If there is some all encompassing fundamental summation of who and what I am deep down inside, it is Jesus Christ, and not any kind of definitive soul by any of the definitions most accepted, and that Jesus also belongs as the soul of all things, once again making it a moot point by accepted norms. And it’s in this that a great mystery lies, that if this idea of Jesus being present at the core at the root as the foundation author, finger print etc, holding all things together deep inside them, having released out a portion of love to be revered with stewardship, then everything but sin is alive and possesses astounding clarity and definition, all things no matter how concrete or still are until he say so, or sin over takes them, [though this is impossible, for a glass filled with shit, still must bear distinction, between shit and glass, though everything in it is useless, though perhaps the glass can be forever stained, there is still hope, as with every person] so immortally dynamic, and in some way, necessarily alive! Now aint that a frightening and terrible kingdom to unleash upon the earth, which fights to flourish against that which consumes, and says, limitless, when respected, rather than unsustainable when reaped? And has at that life until it cannot be contained!

Finch, the actual Christian reality has very little to do with Going to heaven. Once you get past being taught like a dismal layman by pastors and priests and get through mediocre bible colleges [like the one I went to], and get into the actual scholarship, the grass roots ancient world Judaic foundations, you see, that much of Greek thought on the soul and material is not even remotely compatible. Primarily because Judeo-Christian foundations present the Spiritual as a material, primarily designed to interract or depend on the physical, and vice versa for the physical.

They believed that the soul was so dependent on the body and the body equally so, that to separate them was an abomination, which resulted in death, or mutilation/disfigurement- as in the purely animative energy of the soul, which is not at all consciousness but infact just an internal combustion engine, to coin a phrase, burns out.

Their primary focus is not even to go to heaven, as the Jews have no real concept of heaven as a place for humans, and no concept of hell what so ever, they have the idea of hell on earth in the Gehenna valley, which is what Jesus talks about when he mentions, ‘wailing and gnashing of teeth.’ And an idea of ‘the grave’ expressed by ‘Sheol’, but this is as far as it goes, and Sheol is by nature not an eternal place. When you examine the background of Jesus and Paul, and look into the Greek, you begin to see that not only is there almost zero Greek thought in any of their communication, there is also no supportable argument for the idea of an immortal eternal soul. The core of Christian thinking on this matter doesn’t even factor heaven as some place that we go, but based on biblical precedence, as something or someone who comes here, as illustrated by the Incarnation, and the promise, that Christ will come again.

The fundamental precept is resurrection from the dead as the people who have received life, not a life lived in a distant heaven as a disembodied eternal soul. The entire concept is based on the fact, that the human being is to co-exist and commune peacefully, in a supernatural state, with God and people and all creation, without this foundation, there is nothing eternal about anyone. How that community is established and lived, that is between everyone and their own personal lives responding to their environment and others. The concept of Eternal wrath in hell is actually not fundamentally Christian either, Irenaeus, a gaulish Christian Scholar, and Church Father who combated gnosticism was actually a universalist, and Justin Martyr, also a Church Father suggested that God’s judgement was more attune to punishment regarding annihilation. Now when people start thinking about judgement from a loving God, they skip over alot of truths, like where do we get this idea of God having to be compassionate- Most wide sweepingly, from Christian ideas, because no other God actually has debt free compassion inside their qualities. Two, they skip over the idea that perhaps God is just in punishing people for what they have done to the innocent, overlooked and wronged, who shall account for them, at the expense of God looking pretty and being the God who will overlook our abuses upon others?

Now, back onto the topic of this Supernatural Life, it may not be dependent on word of mouth allegiance and choosing a camp as modern evangelism would have us think, because that idea is not Christian either, but Enlightenment thinking, telling us everything has to be categorical, fit in its place, belong somewhere etc. In fact much of what we call ‘witch burnings’ come from enlightenment thinking, that hermits and naturalists who lived in remote places, who gave people natural remedies to cure ailments, after those people has received prayer for healing and not been healed, by being outside the classable world, had to be evil, if the Church was good. The real stipulation in Judaism is how you live, which is their classification of wisdom, which attests wise people in every culture, including passages taken from other lands than Israel in Proverbs. Wisdom is whether you live honestly, how you treat your neighbour, how you are responsible, and in the end, you motive for it, which only God can see.

Now, the Celts when they became Christians expanded on things, they denounce exnihilo, that God created the universe from nothing, and stipulate that his desire and love were so deep to make and share grandeur, that he exuded himself as the material which made the cosmos, and yet retained himself, and offered a slightly removed and distinct capability to all things to be an expression of himself, and a tree or rock or etc in and of itself, including himself following his making. In this, all creatures have received a portion of his breath, can reflect him, do express him, as any artist gives themselves to their work, but humanity is the only one of these expressions he has kissed, or perhaps to take it further, has kissed, with tongue.

In this sense, humanity is the most realised, in all senses, emotions, communication, ability of action, and consciousness. But it’s very difficult to determine consciousness, reason, etc, because they are there, but by example creating this place as the locus of human is dangerous, precisely because we are holistic by nature, and since I am representing the Christian view here, they rejected gnosticism with good reason, because of what it said about our bodies and about the created world, and they centered the locus of human existence in mind. But traditional Greek thought centers it in the heart, Judeo thought in the bowels. Celtic thought in the actual head. There are huge amounts of problems with this, because the mind, which is said to be good in this mode of thinking, but the body, evil, is mutually exclusive to the point where nothing is sensible about it, without a body, there is no definition to the human, and without that consciousness is impossible, because it literally has no frame of reference, for environment, existence, relevent association to anything,without the counter agent of the body, we cannot even presupposed soul or consciousness to be even it’s cliche of ‘a disembodied globe of light or energy’ etc.

Continuing to examine Greek thought, are we prepared to follow through on their thinking, when they weren’t even smart enough to respond to change reasonably? They concluded that because there was no material permanence, that clearly it fell apart and so was corrupt and should be undesirable to that which is constant [this even conjured their gods as imovable immutable entities perfect and devoid of emotion and sympathy], they concluded that change then has no universal form and is evil, avoid change, leave the material world, and join the whole and pleasant spiritual one, and all you have to do is exercise your mind, and become austere, impervious to your bodily needs and to the environment around, exceptionally different to stoicism, Celtic thinking, and Judaism, which were the prominent cultures surrounding the Greeks. Their reason was so short sighted that they couldn’t even speculate at the idea that perhaps in being so universal, that change maybe the ruling form, not something evil, but the nature of things. Which leads to the final conclusion that even unrelational gnosticism is more relational and less rational than it would want to believe, because while it is understandable, it’s whole philosophy is based entirely on the fact ‘I don’t want to change I don’t want to die, I want to live eternally in bliss, impervious, and how I’ll do it will be to ignore or kill the needs of my body, and ignore every climate which surrounds me, other people, politics, the environment and all it’s ecosystems, because my total objective is to preserve, not just any old good thing, but myself, primarily myself.’ And why shouldn’t they be afraid, because they discovered the reality, that people, on their own are not eternal, so they convinced themselves they could be. Which sounds very much like mainstream Christianity to me these days. Which is in direct contrast to the idea of obedience unto death and that preservation is achieved through my self sacrifice, and a gamble with eternity, that maybe I will forever be extinguished, that Jesus’ life death presents, which dares us to do the same. Now, the fact remains, that in constructing gnosticism, the same might be said of God, I fully accede that possibility, however, in gnosticism is found the fundamental reality, ‘become immortal, by how you stop living, and avoid the material death’. Whilst in Christ it seen, don’t worry about immortality, live for others, and embrace how you die, live to the hilts and seek out a worthy death, in service to the few and the many. The rest is up to the long dark sleep to determine.

The Power and The Glory

This is a response on both personal and intellectual terms to a Question of whether or not non Christians sometimes have a misconception of Christians. I will unfortunately in a severe case focus on a situation in the negative- however I must stress my experiences regarding my interactions with non Christians is more often than not excessively more positive than Christians, there is to my experience with people I would describe as the honourable salt of the earth, genuine desire to live morally, and to not suppress, as much the positives and enjoy ability of life and humanity, and they are much more concerned, without dampeners with open relationship, and truth which swirl and interact with each other. That doesn’t mean there are not negatives, perhaps too much morality to my feelings. The overall concern to my experience is that the dogma and doctrine is not there to deteriorate relationship like it is used for the sake of many ‘Christian necessities’. The non Christians I encounter have their values, and are capable of positive and negative, but my experience is that rather than using a set of beliefs and doctrines to first be suspicious of people, they are exclusive much more for relational fall out than rules and regulations, and that makes them much more admirable to me. I must also confess that my joyful experience amongst them is truly from those I could conclude nothing else but that they have been touched by God. I also have not been in what I would call situations of catastrophic natures or the upper echelons of the non Christian camp, where politics without love is a high priority, and power is lorded over others. Then again, Christians also exist there and the blend of evil people on both sides of this imaginary near meaningless line of ‘Christian and non’ is indecipherable. And when it is like this, when the Christian behaves evilly, I am grieved, but when he does not believe, or does not believe as I do nor met God the same, or maybe not even the same God does well, I rejoice, for it is humanity that is my church not steeples and denominations, and all the earth is our building, and all of us pagans. I hope as you read that why this is becomes clear, even as I still ascribe to Christ, I strive in that ascription to be an exceptional pagan and true to my people and to artistry of mind and heart and body. And truly, what does it matter, when any human fails I am grieved and cry out.

This response also allows me to answer a somewhat obscure statement that was not clearly recieved by a friend, one Mr. Winger. About how a person truly can damage the glory which is God’s reputation.

So here is the response, the beginning question, again of course is that ‘Do non Christians have a misconception of Christians?’:

Completely. I used to have a friend that thought because I was a Christian he could insist on my necessity to let him take advantage of him. We went through a period where we lived together as room mates, and he found out I had received grace on some things from the land lord, and insisted that this was me making him feel like a fool- when really what he meant was, he should have gotten the grace for himself, and I think he wanted me to end the grace period only so he could justify the fact that he refused to meet his responsibility. It was a really bad situation and it was an ‘you wont make me happy as long as I can take from you’. It was so awful. I would invite this room mate to eat the food I had made with my own hands, and he would complain that I gave him anything at all because it wasn’t the flashy commercial stuff I had in the freezer, which is what he wanted and then so much as said that it was all he would accept because that would prove that i was generous and loved him as a friend. So yes people definitely have a misconception of what a Christian is, though many Christians help them with that; personally my experience is that people presume that love should be raped and is weak and gives us, they don’t understand that love is actually a terrible terrible dangerous and painful thing, with balls and teeth and a spine, and is on occasion an asshole like Jesus was. But they think love is week and should because we are people of service and love just give whatever they want and should give nothing else.

However, Christians largely malfunction proceedings with others, even with other Christians, through neglect and indifference, largely due to , in my opinion, our insatiable need to leave this place as a worthless lump, because it is ‘falling apart’ and go to heaven. Which is Ironic, because it is exactly the heresy that it is essentially worthless and aspiritual and fallen that caused us to exploit it in the first place and make it come in some instances and place crashing down around us. To go into further detail:

One of the reasons I think Christians have screwed this up is because they have misconceived of what glory is. They think it is being lifted up into some wonderful state of being where we shine and can do so many wonderful things, and have power and might and decadence, and they try and apply this worldly imperial, conquering impression upon the Jesus who was born in a shitty chaffy manger- likely they would think, he did not cry, he was not covered in placenta, and he did not need his diaper changed. We have got it in our heads that glory is simply a nature which needs no action in regards to itself, and if it does it is to become impervious and collecting of lifeless things. But Christ’s glory is in how far down to earth he came, and died a shameful bloody death, this is his reputation, this is what he is known for- not even the reputation of the resurrection is declared as great as his humility to die a traitorous death.

While the truth is that the failure to live up to this is the reputation of man, incomplete, incapable of wielding the power of our own bodies with responsibility or perhaps rather with all seriousness. But once the two realities are combined, the irresistible ever loving God suffers on occasion, and sometimes like with the priests recently, most notably in Ireland people ask, where was this irresistible healing protecting serving love; is your God real, is his love loving, is it truly compassionate, because now we see it does not transform you! and they are right to say so, but on some level, this is false and as much true, and we as Christians neglect the fact that we do have an obligation to repair that reputation. [It is my assertion that it does most definitely, as we let it, and sometimes we let it as naturally as it could be, for God is along side all of us and in all our cells waiting to come forth, and at times releasing grace to our needed portions].

This is actually a difficult and paradoxical segment of the line. To put in two more cents. There are an incredible amount of factors that contribute to the problem. Much of which is due to the fact that neither side likes to look at contexts. So that Christians react with hostility and the non believers react with wide painting generalisations.

There is a context to the Crusades that is ignored always- the intensity of Muslims, Turks and Saracins to forcibly convert the world. They ignore the context that the first Crusades were undergone in order to liberate Constantinople and Jerusalem, not to exploit people or forgive sins, or the slaughter infidels. But when society begins to run things or religious responsibility makes accessions to accommodate society or sometimes politics for practical reasons, the risk exists you will begin to look like your enemy, esp. If you respond to pain as though you need to hurt those who hurt you- I don’t think many people put much rational thought, for obvious reasons into responses of vengeance- forgetting that if your vengeful need is justified for their hurting you, perhaps, to the contrary of you emotions telling it is not, their actions of hurtfulness were warranted as well. Perhaps, though not necessarily, preemptively. Now doesn’t that make vengeance put us deep inside a sticky pot? Better to concern ourselves with forgiveness and justice that can ourselves restore the situation as much as possible. But also the benefits of the Crusades are ignored, like the founding of the Knights Hospitaller, whose inception concerned establishing hosptials for travellers and defending caravans of both Christian and non from raiders. You might know them today as one of the larges humanitarian movements in the world, St. John’s Ambulance.

While Christians who wishing to be faith filled, go about protesting legislations they have not seriously thought about and likely never will, offending and damaging relationships with a lack of humility.
At the same time, the world, and by that i don’t mean the earth, I mean society, doesn’t understand much of the Christian format, the ‘Unto death, for the good of others and all reality’. While this is not always the case, as through legends and even some forms of human sacrifice they have gotten the point, it can be understood on a practical level what isn’t good for me isn’t good for society the economy etc. Responses to the homeless are a good example these people are treated with contempt because they drag down society, they are not ‘good’ for others and so on; not part of an innocuous cosmic order. [though they are the bi product of the perceived and practised cosmic order] Rome demonstrates this, the dominance of other cultures is good for the plebs, because it increases the slave population, for service and for slaughter, making the whole world Roman in land re-distribution etc. And in our bored still chaotic little society we see it too, why are we consumer driven, because the money used to acquire can quickly qualify for the appearance of mastery and control, no matter how meaningless it may be. [I myself am a seduced victim and willing participant in this]. Even our sports wreak of the sandy arena. Most of our athletes come from minorities, meagre means, or nations conquered or dominated by the United States or other western nations, they wage sport, something named for the expense of the loser, to gain winnings in ‘Sacrementum Gladitorium’. Our prostitution fits the same bill and so do the creation of other inoculations of decadent appearance made by slaves [ or accurately, once slaves, who will soon be rising up] from China and Japan, make sick and lustful to look like Rome, and crowd the Rhone with an influx of bodies to seize their golden eagles and cast them down. So the idea of coming unto a God who we must open ourselves to dangerously and intimately is no wonderful thought or sometimes wanted reality, even when in reality the signs of our power are indications of how much it is truly missing. Why do empires slaughter in the first place because really deep down inside they are insecure about the rule of their very own little tract of land. And in historical cases of human sacrifice we can see even that this desire to be exposed to God is not common, in fact those who are given are either prisoners, slaves, selected, forced, or volunteer because no one else is going to. So when Christianity comes, not as a Tanist’s or appeasing religion of atonement, but one of self suicide by the giving acts of love and the dissipating of our being unto all creation to give life and testify to its sanctity and its forgotten memory once mighty and remove it from its unfortunate but inexcusable bumbling amnesia. It is no wonder that some or many will be repulsed. It is easier to revel in what is, without having to remember what once was and could be again- especially if you love things that you have earned all your life to compensate the lingering itchy thought that once you were mighty, but no longer, so let us put on the armour of wealth and affluence and lording it over people, and fuse to the flesh and never take it off. How dangerous is a religion, if when lived flourishingly in its proper place, strips off that hard skin and asks that the only armour you might wear is simply your vulnerable naked frame protected only by your bones, and even that is an offering unto all. [it is in this reality I hold close the naked Celtic warrior, fearless and offering of everything to the swarthy fight].

There is also another feature present in this cling to the order of the universe, and that is indeed the humility of God himself. It is one thing to be repulsed by a God who asks us to release all our encourtrement in order to make the world a better humaned place. It can even be lived out begrudgingly, ‘He commands that I stoop, and he is indeed in command’ we can even interpose, from a God simply asking us to do it, that ‘it will only be for a time, that I will be humbled, so I can appreciate my wealth and so become wealthy again.’ As though we are all so fortunate as Job [quite the ironic thing to say]. But this is nothing more than insisting our order of the universe, of course we can look at certain forms of people and wonder, why can’t they get this and that and the honourable together so that they could prove, God loves them. That’s how we say it, ‘to prove how God loves them.’ But mostly Christians mean it in a snide so that God would love is what they mean, and so we see the motivation behind all the treatment of the depressed, the homeless, the homosexual, and the misguided heathen misperseption of the not so Godly who claims themselves wholly so. They insist a certain order or function, usually measured by community and economical checklist upon the world and so upon people. And their humility only comes upon those temporary terms, that truly ‘God can only make me humble for a purpose and a time so that I can once more command’ perhaps he does, no truly he does, but what they mean is that he will restore their means and possession as if this was the point of their lives. You see it is easy for such people to put themselves into the position, that this suicide through relinquish is for God who is above them or their equal, even though for some it is undoable. But this is where the women and girls and boys and men are winnowed, because God does asks that you do it for him, but to all those whom you think below you, all those whom you have attributed to be against the order of the universe and the author of the universe the almighty God himself, he even does not command it, he himself gives up all his position, humbles himself forever, takes the ultimate station of the lowly, the poor, homeless, depressed, homosexials, rapists, murderers, burn victims, foolish with money, gamblers, men who play the rackets, pimps and whores, not simply the hard working salt of the earth, but everyone, and he humbles himself from his majestic throne and becomes a warrior king in the trenches with these people who actually wish to live better, but can’t, he would rather look like them, not simply to rescue if that cannot be done, but to simply suffer through with them, because that is sometimes the only righteousness of love that can be done. And its this perminent irrevocable humility and recognition unto the people who haul over the order of men which has been called God that even some people who think they’re Christians cannot abide, the perminence of Christ’s humility and the exaltation of those who are by our systems humiliated and then blamed for their lot to preserve the lascerations of our own construct, this is the thing they do not just find hard but absolutely intollerable. There are those upon pulpits that must call their own grandchildren sins in order for them to preserve the satanism of their own world view, because not even Jesus is allowed to come down from heaven and challenge them with the fact that our way of life is not constitute the preclusion of living. It is for these people that people first need to drive the very reason Jesus himself stands by them more than anyone else before they become Christians, that whether they come to Christ is less important than what they fuck, that working hard at a paycheck is more important than whether or not you ever believe that, or needing to be cured is more important than caring whether or not they feel like a human being at any point in time during their illness is irrelevant. That their is a Jesus they crucify in every single human being they say does not live up to their social order is something is something they are deeply aware of and they execute him for their salvation, but a salvation of a different kind, because for our social order to exist it needs the execution of millions of Jesuses, whilst God’s only needed one. Here however is the paradox, Christ does stand by them, because like all their scape goats and victims, he is their only chance, and I do not know if even I could stand by them, but they need an advocate. The only hope we can express is that they listen to the cosmic voice defending their merits even as they diminish and that they see God alive around them and repent.

The second element to this misunderstanding is that many believe that because of this self suicide through acts of love that Christian acts of love can be raped and exploited to the extreme, that in every instance, others don’t have to steal from us to get our cloaks, they can just simply ask for both and we have to give, as though, as mentioned before, context and consideration is completely unnecessary. As if to say that generosity and foolishness are Christian traits rather than Human traits. And I believe that a small reality exists, either in honest living of Jesus Christ, unintentionally, or a false lording of Dogma and doctrine over pagans and agnostics and the whole plethora of other important and valuable people, [who happen to believe it or not be very nearly one and the same with their beliefs, but we are not sensitive to such totality, funny how the sword is only one sided when come to certain pious people groups] they can be very starkly made to feel inhuman and wish to return the favour, or begin to convince themselves falsely that Christians are not human, or begin to see correctly that some Christians are not as human as they should be.

This however is not a one sided coin, both sides are defaced even. CS Lewis says in his The Problem of Pain, that no one can diminish the glory of God. This is somewhat true but incomplete. As a Celt, I believe Jesus actually inhabits and is the foundation of every created particle and energy and even idea, even in evil, there he is at the heart neglected forgotten ignored and wanting to be seen. So his glory is replete in all things, his reputation is intact and everything that exists speaks to us about God and tells us something about him, even natural poisons can tell us this, for God does protect what is good in the world, though poisonous plants maybe a bit overly selfish about this message- an example is, a tree is an image of God, but not The Image of God. But at the same time, trees die, and this indeed says something contrary to the reputation of God. Yet even in this nothing is lost, because now good can come, in creations display of holy communion, bacteria insects and the elements distribute the tree into themselves for nourishment, and into creation for benefit, just as God does for us, and asks that we do.

But the situation is far far more dire when it comes to people. People are not just A image of God, they are The Image of God. This goes towards everything that we experience, from positive love, to terrible love, to loving hate to horrid hate, it is only capable in the articulate and heightened capacity we have as human beings, which to be so and know one’s self also requires a body. As the image of God we are his reputation on earth, which is his glory. Irenaeus, a fabulous Gaulish Scholar, states that ‘the Glory of God is Man fully alive’, his presence on earth. In this we can also come to see that we are not fallen people, for even the most evil of men are made to be in God’s image, need love, can be redeemed, and deserve respect honour and dignity, no fallen being even good can acquire such commanding accolades derived from being a type of miniature God head, and not still be in some way, that derivative fixture of a God head. So then, how can we damage the glory of God, because by sin, however you wish to define it, I choose the idea that it makes us fight everything that is native to being well and whole and full human, which is still present inside us, perhaps, most likely without the capacity of total responsibility or seriousness. So what does sin enable us to do if is makes us fight our own humanity, become nothingness, try and twist us to where we cannot exist, for a human being who becomes less human even in other forms, cannot exist? It sends up false testimony and false reputation about and against God, and so also all his other miniature fixtures of his God head. Christians not only do this constantly, by protesting homosexual legislation, but the perpetuate it by say that ‘The native problem isn’t my problem’.

It is every Christian’s problem, considering people who came in the name of Christ and stole their way of life, who created residential schools, and gave them booze without a training in wisdom, caused much of the issues we deal with today, and are STILL stealing their lands, it is every Christian’s responsibility to repair this injury to God’s glory. To refuse to like there has been no sinful effect at the hands of Christians is to perpetuate the rumour that God is a stripper and exploiter of the earth and a rapist. Something that truly truly truly is a false witness to God. It seems absurd that something so cosmically important as the truth of God boils down to the absurd simplicity of telling the truth over convorting a lie- but it does and God has been so honourable and gracious to us as to lend to us this dangerous authority, to tell the world, even those who do not know him, to tell the world of him. To show his heart, and tell the truth. To exist in creation as he exists in himself, telling other forms of him of his exploits and industry and compassion, so that they remember- how terrible and damaging it is to have a false rumour confirmed, so it appears- why it is the very things that can out of rage very really kill and cause murder. It’s not so lightly received that not only the testimony by idea but by action may truly kill and inoculate the Christ in everything around us?

It is a very harsh road to walk and an easy hair to unevenly split. To serve a God whom says, there is an order, but you may not see it, and when it is for the purpose greater order is enacted, or order altogether does not need to apply- anything can happen all things are possible. It is difficult to remain humble when welcomed into long history that when examined has offered the world so much, and when it is looked for it is honest and readily found. It is the not the sole client to the world’s benefaction by any means. I don’t even need to scratch the surface any farther than literature to describe the sheer blessing religion and theistic thinking has been to literature in the authors of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Kafka, Kiekergaard, Einstein, even Nietzche would not be Nietzche without religion to thrust against. But this is the fact, comfort can be derived from this reality, pride, camaraderie, the resplendence of acceptance and enjoyment to be in such company and also Fascism and Reichism and bigotry can follow all these pleasant encountrement and inspirations that cause us to languish in the thought. Severe arrogance and false security, ignorance and idiocy can also be distilled from it. Christianity even exhibits these traits, it’s absolutely necessary recognition in history as a most often times, with some exceptions a beneficial entity, can, now more than ever become a monster that can absolutely not acknowledge the good and humanity found in other cultures and other people, and cannot with the humility of those truly possessed of understanding know that the perception of order in the universe is not stockaded within our book, our steeples or our control, nor is it ours to wield to the exception of anyone. We can actually preach believe and live out drivel because no one has to actually know anything other than Jesus is true, and by this it means as par the Greeks, Truth is reality, therefore a kind of reality. Yet, if Jesus meets no other realities, as so many Christians believe, there are none, failing even from fantasy and horror and folklore to acknowledge where these archetypal fears and embedded misgivings come from, then Jesus himself is not real, because he can not determine an actual reality, because he is not relating or implementing inside other realities. If he stay in a book where some say is the only place to meet him, well then he also does have to show us where he has been living vibrantly in other cultures, or hiding in the corner of someone’s life, always there, or namelessly existing mightily on some obscure shore where the natives convort themselves in loin clothes. We don’t have to submit to something that doesn’t execute itself into reality by contesting or revealing itself in realities, and we also don’t have to listen to anyone else’s reality, we can stay fascists with an esoteric inside tract, and never have to learn, we can remain drooling children crush sand castles. We can stifle others like idiots, and be complete heinous fools, who name Jesus Christos, and tell them no no, his name is Joshua Messiah. We can convolute the idea that Seamus Hamish and James are not different languages of the same name.

I believe it is for this reason Christianity has adopted the idea that the world is crumbling, let us leave. Because really it lets them avoid the very Jesus they say is the only reality. Because if for Jesus to be real he must embed in reality, then concluding that he is not here when he is all around us and we exist but to exit and so no longer exist, is the safest place to be, oblivion, away from a pesky God, who asks us to take him deep into the heart of all things, and find the socket that his plug fits in. Control is given if you can tell people, reality isn’t here, and the fact remains then, for those who feel helpless and robbed of power and wish to be in authority so they cannot be touched but can touch all others, if Jesus is at the heart of everything, then the only way they can have control is to kill him in it, dissect him from it, and at the very end, do the same to themselves, becoming devils like Satan who driven mad with his foundation in Christ, mutilates himself.

I often times wonder what is the use of becoming Christian. Not loving Jesus and truth and pledging a life to discipline service and a worthy cause of harmonising all things, but actually joining the sub culture, buying into the idea that the ‘world’ the book uses is not society but creation, and that it’s something you have to leave. Music you have to give up, clothes you can’t wear, good things in creation that not for sickness but for ‘cosmic order’ you must avoid, things you can’t do with your own body, things you must do, like plop it in a pew for a usually useless homily designed for dogs that have no wisdom, sitting patiently for food that is particalised and synthesised to taste like something resembling beef and only has a gradient of beef in it, while their tails wag, and tongues dangle and glands gush for real meat. All the while the premium brands of food remain un opened, premium brands of Colossians or Hebrews eleven, or the difficult chewy bits are extracted before hand. What is the benefit of this whole thing if the mandate is to extract oneself and be in harmony with other refugees from reality where you don’t even have friends of different varying or non beliefs within four years, if you follow the basic demographic blue print? Why Go to Colleges that don’t interact with their communities, destroy body and soul with their rules instead of inspire hearts and mind to cool and righted actions with wisdom, who don’t defend the spiritual realms with sturdy action, and worthy leadership from their faculties [yes I am talking to you EBC with your upper Warder problems] just because it has bible or Christian in it? It’s much better to go to seminary in a secular college [this is a double edged sword because more older colleges were founded as seminaries, who grew up to be open to a wider glory to welcome all people]. What is the point of all the ‘set apart’ language if it robs you of yourself and of your culture, what good is it to keep your soul and lose the world, that sounds like a reality where I cannot share my soul with anyone or anything [I don't believe in souls, but for examples sake]? It is far better for us to finally climb into the archon of our destiny and wake up, to know that we are to be exceptional pagans, a royal nation of persists to the nations, immersed descending and travelling to the heart and root of the matter, not bailing out but in it to the end, and if needs be shall suffer the shame of defeat, though we go to our almost certain end, no not almost, total suicide by service and distribution of our tissue to saturate love and the fruit of love into ever crevasse and cranny, and passionately and orgiastic love making unto God in all things, which is the utter most foundation of worship. Set apart to be among people and deliver them God, in a bizarre way. A way that is like the magic trick of the coil or egg behind the ear, except that it has indeed always been there. This is an honest reputation that does no injury to the Glory of God, what we need is the power to do it, the courage to stand to the bitter end, and the humility to wield it, and when this is our reality then Justice will come, we will be proud of our God not because of our pain, but because we are of the same material and have always been, without fascism or exclusion, and his reputation shall be fully repaired, the justice that does not punish but puts right the wrong ever lastingly so, that the dead shall rise will be thick and real, and God shall be so reputable he will be drawn into our midst, he wont be able to stay away and all the energy of creation shall with one labour pain, give birth to God and generate him there with us, transport him, from heaven to new heaven.

Now, I am not sure if I should tie this up with a neat ‘correctness’, since I have forcefully built a case for, likely the need to avoid being a Christian. I am not sure if this is positive or negative, at some places I observe a total lack of need, but for all intents and purposes here I am a thrashed and jaded participant in the camp- a scape goat, one goaded, thrashing out like an angry dog who has been starved and abused truthfully by this camp- by things done to me, and things done to others. For nothing more than the fact I ascribe to unity understanding forgiveness love and compassion. I must make a plea, and statements, though I don’t think it can ever be nor do I want to place a neat and final bow on these things. We are all human, and I believe we live and die, by God or by that concept and by that bodily flesh, not precisely because of exact beliefs. Therefore when Christians act out of line, it is for a reason that should be humbly and mercifully met, just as all human beings need to be met with, no matter what. At the same time, I am not attacking humanity, nor God, nor the honest heart of those who mean to follow, or are wanting to and are trapped or possessed by the reality they find themselves in which could be negative harmful. I am attacking, perhaps with too much venom and guile an institution, a contrived and falsified culture that is not honestly derivative of an honest absorption of reality, and ideas and concepts and actions that I will be the first to scream are irresponsible, unjust, inhuman and therefore in the deep dark, brooding Spirit filled with mystery and calm power, NOT OF GOD, and so not of his followers, which includes Christians. The foundation also while I believe in the hidden and mysterious and wondrous merit of all humanity. Shout loudly because I believe for the heart of Christianity that it is falling apart, rotting from the inside out, needs desperately to meet the God it longs to love, and should not be doing many of the things it is doing as an institution because it should not be rotting, and it should be meeting God, and it should not be thinking songs in the pew are worshipping God when laughing and weeping with other people, who are the only way to hear see, smell, taste and touch God on earth is what we’re called to. IN fact we have these sense and orifices specifically not simply to be human and godly but to experience more humanity and God himself and be truly ourselves. I shout and wail and taunt and call spades a spade, because I cannot be quiet. If I were made of stone I would come to life, a golem to testify and sternly hold God’s people to their road. If that is arrogance, I don’t know where else I am called, and I will perpetually crumble and be chipped away at, into nothingness as I go if I am a disobedient blackguard by my words. I would not speak if I was not sure, this is not the reputation of the God I have met being carried out, and this is not the emblem of his creation being carried uprightly.

I know we are not yet perfect, but I am tired of that being an excuse to falter or delay the need for real and total redemption, it is one more debasement and recession, not to ‘submit [up] our flesh to make this difference’, and one more decision not to be food that causes love, one more unenlightened inspiration resistant sigh, I don’t want to be Jesus today, I would rather leave than impact the earth in a mighty and beneficial way, mostly because it might hurt. I have talked about this elsewhere and wont go into it in detail, but I am tired of that. Basically I cannot emphasise my reality more than ever, I am terrified all the time, but I must seek into the shadow that I might ever be meeting the light, I must ask the silly and dangerous questions. And I must ask these things because I meet God everywhere in everything in everyone, in fact I am frenzied and walk into the caves and the heart of the earth because I know no other way of saying it, than I believe I have met God and this meeting has set me aflame with boiling seething life. It is a life that is pained when others die, a life that is pained when other can’t live, because it is pained when it cannot live, it is a life that cares about everything without filter, it is an anguish and a constant irritating raw sensation that will not let me sleep, allows no rest, while the chase is on and there is work to do. It makes me hunger and thirst for an ideal so sturdy and secure that it is madness and insanity- it makes me take no side but that which brings like, which means total compromise and no concessions all at the same time. It makes me want to fight and drink in everything from antedote to poison just to know it’s goodness and be more human. I hear this being speaking in music, in birds in the wind in other people. I see his eyes in butterflies and tigers, and flowers, I know his touch in a bath, in love making, in the rain, in the cold, in the bonfire, in sand between my toes.

I know his kiss in water and beer, and popcorn and licorice and cheese. I know his heart and will in battle and seppoku and fearless courage and love, I see his mind in words and literature, I see his power in fatherhood and rearing children, I understand the anguish of husbandry and farming and drawing out a yield from all things. I know his company in a pipe, and a stroll, I know his accomplished hand in well made food. It is an intolerable compliment, as Lewis says, that he and it from he will not leave me be, that drives me mad with wonder, and screws me up with fury wherever it is maliciously silenced or cut out from any place, I have been brought to life, that cannot be contained, I must live and love and be hurt and dashed and run without fear, I must not test the water on an arctic shore by believing it can be done without a leap off the ice. There is no escape and so I have made peace with my fate and decided to be at peace with me and no longer fight myself or my humanity I shall live valiantly and die well, as an offering to many.

At the same time, if you have met and experience differently I will not insist my view upon you. For many reasons, but none less than the real terror and horror it takes to walk in the caves, which I do not do without fear and tears and anger and hatred, sometimes for the very force that may bring me through because it’s faith that I have met a man who is God, and in that faith he and myself bring me to where I am, most often times in a darkness only met with shaking valour, and hopelessness is there and real as well. This is not a judgement against anyone, nor is it a negative assessment to over pomp myself. It is simply and admission that while I know I do it, I don’t know who or why except by the above, and I am not flawless, with few exceptions I am guilty of many of the concepts I now detest, and am still struggling with, and I attack myself with the people who I find at fault by way of necessary solidarity, I cannot pull out of a sinking ship, by the above I think that is obvious, but I do think we can stop the plunge. This is all I can say, and hope that it is a good reputation given.

One More Task with Certainty, Though Our Head is Cut Off

The following is a dialogue with persons who shall remain anonymous. It involves primarily what it is to have the will to love and be love. There is a section that may seem to repeat my last theological post about the message found in sexual desires. However that is not precisely the case, it makes several new points that relate to the previous ‘letter’ and several pertinent point relating to a section called ‘part two’ which addresses another dialogue in which the other participant made conclusions that by simply following a regimented set of rule and regulations supposedly upheld by the religious frame work most of us find ourselves in that this solves the strenuousness to an almost total degree in our unions, even going so far as to say, if his particular friend has waited for marriage, she would have had an almost guaranteed more positive sexual experience, and not be reduced to a place of despair where she inevitably took her own life the second section contests this view of ‘order’ ‘regimentation’ those ‘Guarauntees’ and the total reality that Love is nearly a complete and total blind gamble, sometimes a leap a booby trap and sometimes even an ambush. Section two, I have included the conditions, anonymously of almost all the results of friends I have and their relationships over the last four years to reiterate the realities of relationships even for Christians which the other participant seems to ignore or have little experience with. I am slightly harsh with them only because their naivity should clearly keep them from asserting their own severely utested theory as sound advice to others. And it is offensive given the varied results of all the relationships given brief or extended detail. I feel not that I have answers to the issues faced only to make a point to the impossible idea of knowing how to make a relationship work a certain way and believe given the varied results, and that living with many as their relationships began, or in very intimate proximity, feel I know something about the systems or lack of uniformity that went into their beginnings- few if any played by the norms of the rules, and many of those non normative results have yielded a lasting result and many of the normative ones have not. Once again I have not answers as how to succeed, only observations and the very real and adamant assertion that it is not the success of the relationship, but the success of love and humanity in the persons involved, even in negativity and failure that is the point.

Section one begins by contesting an example which heavily focused on an example involving sexual practice as seen through the identity of a chocolate cake, and that the notion is we want good food, not a diet of chocolate cake, which in the end amounted to the attitude we should stop eating chocolate cake in our relationships [in this case the cake also represented all forms of sexual negativity, porn, for this person masturbation, lust, promiscuity, fornication and overly tactile flirting.] I have tried to convey the fact that this idea is not sturdy, because , remaining within the metaphor, as I have come to observe, sex is actually the chocolate cake or potato chips we experience between one another. The healthy food is not to be a metaphor for good sex, but all the things besides sex that sustain the relationship as long as that can be done. Still remaining in the metaphor, it is really faulty to make this association, because now we are only to feel good about eating healthy instead of feeling well about pleasurable things in their right quantity and generally this is the way which religious dogmatism and social taboo approach ironically give the image, even weight gain. ‘No chocolate cake for me, I might feel ashamed.’

And then we proceed to slap others writst who could eat a whole cake and be the better for it and well in conscience. I do believe those are the fundamental fillers of context and should allow people to best connect what would have seemed ambiguous imperceptions in the reading.

Section two is highly poetic.

Section One: The Will to Love

The Chocolate cake doesn’t need to leave how we eat it does. None of these ideas are fundamentally going to work for one very simple reason: it’s always being approached from the same principal, that the idea is sound and good, the method needs work. But the method fails because the principal is not sound and good. The problem is not a primal desire but a relational deficiency, which in the fact the primal desire puts in stark and acute reality. We crave sex because we are isolated, in need of a simple hug, because we are supposed to emulate God with creation- whether that comes by painting, fucking or through sports, they all come from the same place- the human desire to expand beyond ourselves and to contribute to the cosmos- it is a fundamental human madness that when not met, and when needing to be met by certain formations becomes the craving ‘sex manifest’.

As Christians we have this blemished idea regarding relationship and interpersonal relationships. In fact when it comes to most of our relationships we have blemished view. We tell people who are desperate for friendship or romance that they need to know how to self sooth, that they need to derive their identity more from God than from their relationships. But in all my short life, I have never known anyone who can live up to this stoicism of relationship. In fact what I have encountered is that those who have even gotten the fancy for the idea of God’s love, and worse with those who have experienced it and derive their identity most from God is the insane and intense madness to have the unbridled as deep as possible touching as closely as tightly where no secrets can be kept or held or left unclutched by the nearness without seams, to have that bliss and anguish.

It is those who are unfeeling and indifferent whom I have experienced, who have a lack of being deep inside, or a place of being they do not have the courage to face who confound themselves with the idea they need to be ‘self met’ more than met by or to meet others.

It is exactly the acknowledgement of that craving of total daring and vulnerable intimacy that springs from having known God or from wanting to know him, or knowing him, and to these that ideas or practices of ‘only so often’ or ‘only on the surface of a relationship’ is never enough. We deride these people that they are too desperate or out of control, or sorrowfully incomplete, or ‘just not competent’ interpersonally. We tell them the longings of their heart are sinful and their lust for company is not human but foreign to it [because there they are with all their innards hanging out, messy honest and true, and brave, and it either makes us frightened or jealous]. But they are the courageous ones who know what they need and that other people, and conversation and to suck all the marrow out of life and to drink up immortality and to experience the nimbus of relationship in the most intense fashion imaginable. Junkies of Love becoming Love itself, so that they are love in their inner most and demonstrate love at their outer most at the very least.

However our response to this craving both sexually cosmically and relationally is not to let them drink the cure and remedy to this itching persistance to get to the heart of things, like the Master in Doctor Who, with his insessant drums of war spurring him insatiably on inside his mind; we encourage these people to spend their time practicing and preparing to live, brewing jam that can never be tasted, while all the while the truth is, they are alive let them live damnit, as Cat Stevens says ‘Learned of love and abcs, skinned our hearts and skinned our knees’ we are so afraid of having a thing we don’t even want others to have it. We as a church ask them to know God as their foundation, by constantly requesting that these people not only desist from their craving of all things human, but that they attain such a house by not gorging on all things Christ. By not knowing the communion in the sensations of sex, by not knowing the touch of grass the smells of trees and dew, the sound of birds, the taste of bear, the sound of Stairway to Heaven, or the kerplunking of jazz, the smell of tobacco, the awareness of drugs used responsibly, by ignoring the glory of a shirt woven from two cloths, by making words more devilish than than polite curses strung together, avoiding magic, and refaining from sex in all forms but allowing violence, even regailing fantasy as a dangerousness against God and his word. Insisting on becoming human by making all human things foreign to us, ignoring Ghandi because he’s not from our camp. To know God by becoming ordered in the sense that we refrain from a break neck and frantic pursuit of his face. To the people who are haunted in the night we say stop being haunted, and ignore the dream and to the people who have seen his face and panic in a tazmanian panic across the earth seeking everything that can show it to them, we say stop searching and calm down. How insulting and how impossible unless you beat them to pieces with a weapon like sexual shame.

The fact that we experience sexual lust in a way we cannot deal with it and seek out porn to make it easily go away is that when the sex manifest rears up inside of us to say, ‘we are not getting that total intimacy, and vulnerably daring connection with all things, ‘Go NOW! and seek God where ever he is how ever you can.’ It’s easier to masturbate than to see that our body is telling us something so much more intrinsic and at the moment so much more a priority than that gripping insanity which is the only way the body knows how to speak with our intense need, with the deepest characteristic we have, the longing to be like our father and create! It is easier to look at porn than put time and effort into blessing another human being with the same love and closeness we ourselves want. It’s easier to watch porn stars moaning ‘for us’ than to actually ask if God is stirring the primordial furnace of our body to search and seek for him- it’s easier to stifle cosmic waves by reducing them to simple and ill gotten sex than to have them completely up heave and usurp our lives to pursue God with that intensity. It’s easier to keep my job and my lifestyle than sit and contemplate how the irritation of my life giving loins is more in tune to the will of God than the way we generally live from day to conveniently modernised day.

My friend has this crass saying that ‘his balls pulse with the power of a thousand moons’. But I don’t think he is that far off from the truth when it comes to God calling out to us when you consider that the creative is linked to everything we do, from art to sex to farming, everything though ‘our sexuality pulses with the power of a thousand loves.’ we may feel it sexually but it is only the tip of a warm and vibrant Iceberg, only the point of an entire sword, the power of those loves grips us there because it is the most maddening place and the most recognisable place to know we wish to grow and need to grow out from ourselves, and connect and sew. Once we start learning from our bodies exactly where the sexual creative energy of God is really trying to say and point us to, then we will begin to harness our desires and succeed in them and we will be willing to do the difficult thing of lay all aside to find God as those who do not simply wish to love him wonderfully but only go to church on Sunday or only soup kitchens when our schedules let us volunteer.

Our Bodies are an expression of God, the expression of God on this earth, the most sacred and must spiritual thing we have. We cannot know ourselves, nor receive God without a body. There is nothing but material- even what is spiritual, that which differentiates from matter is but another kind of material. All things are renditions from God of himself, as I care for it I care for a portion of God a note in the song of himself, I therefore make love to an expression of love.

As long as we view the spiritual, and it’s calling as some sort of ‘higher’ wafty spiritual vapour we should follow even with sex we’re never going to succeed. The spiritual is primal deep down in the core of us and the earth, it’s not polite or gentle, though it can behave that way, it’s not quaint- it is violent and the violent take hold of it, because it seizes them and when the sexual desire grips if we think that it’s only expression is to be satisfied by a monstrous ejaculation, or mass copulation, it’s we who are underscoring sex and what it means. Our bodies were made for the gospel because we were and as far as a God who cares about resurrection is concerned, there’s something about humanity that just cannot go without matter. You want to cast sex and spirit up in the clouds be my guest, you want to separate it from parts of the animal spirit God gave us, which we do possess as a godly trait, be my guest, but it will fail and it will come crashing down to where it belongs- on earth testifying to the glory of God.

Part two, the relationship perplexity, and its incomprehensible behaviour, that still requires the will to love: [this is once again a dialogue, it is not addressed personally to anyone tagged here]
I don’t think you should be telling any body else what they know about sex and sin and human beings, since you yourself known about squat, and I don’t mean the be rude, but you don’t know or have not experienced enough about it. My experience with myself and my closest friends is a much sordid perplexing issue. Of three relationships, including mine, all with believing Christians involved- they have failed, this I can say from a grouping of about eight of my male friends and their relationships with their girl friends and spouses [myself included in that number] four relationships of which failed, two from Marriage, one after sustained periods of intercourse and my perspective, that in having intercourse we made a marital commitment, sacred and unbreakable. Two of my friends, who were not only married but called to leadership and ministry are either divorced or been left, or been the one to do the leaving. One I attended the wedding of, the other I was the best man at. My relationship failed and likely will remain so despite any desire wish or action to the contrary. Another relationship failed when one of my friends girlfriends cheated on him, after they had had sex, they are no longer together. Three of my friends relationships took the same ‘preregistered’ sexual step, as mine did, sexually committing to a sacred concept through the submission of their bodies, and then they proceeded to registere the nature of their relationship. One relationship has sustained itself by cohabitation and it has gone through utter hell on both ends that I have observed, and without the bonds of registration, they have persevered. Another, involving likely my only friend in full time official ministry as a youth pastor is persevering- even though more than once this friend has expressed the serious possibility of divorce, I don’t know who might have suggested it, maybe both at different times, but it was seriously discussed multiple times. This isn’t even including that many speakers and professors of mine at bible colleges come out from starkly failed relationships some mutiply so. So, with this immersion in avid experience within the Christian circle of relationships, there is no working system, and no chance of being able to eternally determine another persons actions and decisions. The very act of love is gambling- and not a one of us gave our bodies lightly or temporarily. So respectfully, shove your concepts and ideas up your ass. Some of us have failed at our relationships but none of us have failed as human beings and that’s the factor, not whether you have premarital sex or register the supposed nature of your relationship, but what kind of person you want to be.
Marriage and waiting would not have protected your friend from her suicide- because marriage, by which you really mean a registration of a a relationship with a certain nature about it, does nothing to retain a human being to another human being. Only who you want to be can do that, and sometimes the cost of marriage however unfortunate cannot allow you to be who you are, at which case, spiritual suicide is no more acceptable than ending a marriage. God is not powerless in any of these situations, but at the same time, love does not insist it’s own way and some people decide they prefer evil actions or evil things. At the end of the day, the decision to sustain the marriage and the decision to not fail at being human are not always the same.

I would also like to point out that another relationship involving two friends of the same circle also flopped after about eight months, without any intercourse in the least, both believing marriage was their intended goal and life long task together. One party called the other out on a point of integrity, so they felt and the person being challenged ended the relationship- Crushing my other friend to smitherines, they literally cried themselves senseless while they were asleep, they didn’t just cry themselves to sleep they cried as they slept for three months afterwards [or so it was explained to me]. It was total wracking defeat and spiritual disembowelment for this person, and they were not and are not a light or flighty person, this person lived through alot and this destroyed them for a time, no sex at all, having the courage to challenge the person they loved and the other betrayed them- so I do believe, that you’re wet and green and don’t have a clue what you’re talking about, except to simplify a very complex and poignant issue that is not so simple and cannot be regimented into a proper format- Reason and love have nothing to do with each other- you can construct the syllogism, but it is not universal- for it must start with the existential, the nonsensical encounter which becomes love, ‘I meet you, I love you, I see God in you like no one else, and this lets me see you like no one else can be seen.’ Sometimes I find myself speculating on the extent that for a man when he loves a woman it means for him to say ‘no other human being is actually a woman’ and for a woman ‘no other human being is actually a man’. It also shows the total sin in not working something out- it is to say that there is no God, because you are saying that either he is not compelling in another person- or that he was never there in the first place. And yet in all relationships people can exhibit the godliness that throws them brightly out into the world to be seen and loved and they can exhibit the fracture. The problem is that people can sometimes have divergent glories so extreme and callings and purposes so severe that it actually drives them apart. We also live in a reality that honours our mistakes or lack of wisdom and when that happens, we must determine if we want to honour them and see them through, or sever our mistakes where they stand. Sometimes two people make divergent decisions at the revelation of a mistake. I do believe God desires that even foolish mistakes be made into wise successes- because he is faithful and whole and capable- but at some point I also think he understands, and the end of a mistake can be mercy.

Why do Paul and Barnabas, such good friends fight to fiercely that it drives them apart and they do not talk to one another and go on different journeys? Clearly these men are both Apostles, friends who love Jesus and each other intensely and serve a God of healing communication understanding and reconciliation- and their friendship is dissolves or at least experiences A separated or divorce. Why does my father love farming more than his own family- I am sure in his heart he is confused and hurting, even though he does feel or does genuinely love God- he has made decisions on who he wants to be- and somewhere along the lines everything is broken- and his love in the end insists his way, from people nd from God- so it isn’t very loving. Why does the mother of my Child essentially tell me I have nothing to offer another human being enough to warrant love- because I have nothing to offer her, she believes, that could re-kindle her love for me? I have no idea. She essentially says, there’s not enough God in me for her to love me as a lover- she doesn’t see it that way. But the fact I do see it so may mean we’re looking for different parts of God, or unfortunately the possibility exists we’re looking for different Gods in people and who can determine that one of us is looking for the real God, I cannot not, all I know is that it hurts to the core and might always, but it is lessening of late, but not less perplexing. The issue is too complex and I can myself throw around these truthful ideas, but can come to no conclusions nor equations. All I know is that I choose to be as human as possible, which means to look as much like Jesus as I can, and I am determined never to fail at that- and to love fearlessly to the death, of myself or of my relationships.

Ultimately, at the end of the day, we cannot let that sentiment ‘it’s morally wrong’ to do that get in the way. Ultimately it’s who we are who we will become and sometimes, who we will become in the relationship is just as immoral because of who we will become. God is of course mighty to save- and we are stubborn people- but there is something to be said about changing and being and becoming together- and not every lack of change can be excused through disobedient will, or a lack of God or a resistance to his presence- sometimes he has tasks, as he says even, Son will betray father, not because they’re leaving or don’t love but because they’ve met God- and this sets priorities, and not being those people how can we call their priorities wrong? At the most all we can do about it is be afraid it could happen to us, be hurt when it does, have compassion for those it does happen to, and determine over and over again who we want to be for one will be taken the other left.

We make decisions every day that hurt countless people based on who we want to be, even when we wish to be like Jesus, and be good and be most human. We give all the change in our pocket to the homeless, one man gets change the next man to ask gets none. The difference is that some marriages are sustained not on the sacrifice of self in mutual exchanges of each person being Church and Christ, and their ability to literally be love, but of one person giving up who they are, not what they’re doing, not the sacrificial sewing and investment- but actually killing their own personal glory just to avoid the sin of divorce- then it’s not a case of they can’t see God, but they’re not there to see God, nor to be seen- they’re not, and that is worse than telling someone they can’t see God, because one does not exist, and the other well, what do they really love then? ‘A shadow and a thought’?. And while some have people kill their spirit for the sake of harmony- others don’t let people become and they’re so similar its almost not worth noticing. We know it is a sin, not when we ask God to act for us, but when we ask him not to be himself, or worse ask him to be another god, so how can we ask his image to do the same? He is mighty to save- but he also has a plan that transcends our circumstance- which does reap and sew. Some relationships fail for his purpose- some because of adamant disobedience, and some because the sinful catastrophe of sustaining things is worse than ending them.

And even in this convoluted and sordid reality, the human thing to do is to love past the hilts, all the way to the pommel, to stick out your neck rush in head first, and love without fear- because the issue is not whether we live or die, or remain married, or stay away from sex before we register our marriages, nor even that we love, but that we are love and becoming love and barring death that we can do this all again- not that love succeeds outside of us but that it succeeds in our continuing to be it, pursue it give it, live it, fight for it, even when it means to surrender and lose it.
I believe that this is the point of ‘Love Conquering all’, not that it is victorious in all things outside of us, nor in repairing all things, but that it conquers you, and repairs you, even if that leaves you crippled with the pains of life and of others. We have a screwed up perception that love equals happiness and comfort and freedom, and is tame- this is true, it should comfort you, it should make you delighted and it should set you free but it is never tame, the violent seize the kingdom of love and send it forth, the barbarian without laws is the only one of heart who can love without boundaries or taboo, or laws and theories about how it should be done, the raw uncalcuable mystery of an unnamed genous that has gone on persisting just outside of our periffery flourishing as a scion, untouched by all process. This is the thing that grows in the rainforest and doesn’t run even though the foresters might come and it be lost forever- it lives on the edge which forces it to live without pretenses and intrigues, and this is the only kind of worthy love, a wide open heart, usually torn that is willing to accept venom spayed into its very depths- without allusions and chocolates and candles and flowers and vacations and fancy things- but cold blooded love that in the cold leaves us so mysteriously and literally warm, because deep inside it has been conquered by warmth and cannot slumber, for it is a flower of flame that is warmth itself. Loves nature is to fire like a shard and be unbashful, to be no light under a basket, and to bear the risk that it’s very light, the very other purpose of another light and another glory may be the thing that puts it out or makes it burn away all the quicker, ‘The flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have shone so very brightly!’ As blade runner would have us know.

Somewhere a large group of people decided it was a good idea to say that love must look a certain way and ignored the fact that love more often than not leads to death on a cross. They prefer it to be a metaphor and if you take this literally then you’re foolish. It might be preferential to examine the opposite, since God dies no metaphorical death, why would our death only be virtual in response- shall we live our faith as a video game only in every respect and what for, all it can amount to is we have never lived and never loved, nothing is real nor worthy of care ad appreciation. Shall God’s people be idols who cannot speak, who cannot hear, who cannot feel or see, or move? Then why is it acceptable for us to never love and never die except in wonderfully percieved ideas? I hate the quote ‘it is better to have loved’ and etc etc and all that bullshit cliche, but it is true, it is better to love and to die and to rise again, than to spend all your life making sure you have the right ideas about God and the universe and making sure that’s the person you will be. It’s better to face men head on because what can they do to me, there is a very real thing that declares ‘I am yours!’ Rather than to sigh relief that ‘What can men do to me?’ I am not in the line of fire, for the right ideas.

There is a reason perfect love drives away all fear- because there are very real things to be afraid of and love doesn’t remove these things, in fact what it does really is make all the risks and mistakes ok, makes all the pain ok, makes the fact that we will be ripped apart, left cold and alone, left in shambles, left under over passes starving but embracing our lovers and friends by the worthiness of it, ok, and obedient and still godly in the more perplexing and serving and faithful and valiant, vulnerable, daring and crucified means, ‘I can walk through utter darkness for lo I will find my lover there, either because he was there before me or shall come after me- and while I may be nervous I will not be timid’ it makes it ok, even when it is unbearable, it makes worth; makes the things we should fear more dull even when it is gone, because for a time they were dulled in the first place and they can never become sharper because of it- it might mean that it will hurt more and more, because scar tissue is harder to injure and dull blades never cut neatly. But bring it on, love can actually endure, it can face the fear, and once it has passed love will still remain- it can endure the fire and grow again as the plant itself is a greater fire, it is the fire of fruit bearing with the flames and tongues of leaves and lusciousness and life. It is not that the tree burns down, but that it’s seeds fall and die and yield, and when they burn down again and more life falls, dies and yields, and in this, that from within the tree comes the seeds, which are not conquered even when failure seems to strike, from inside the tree comes the love which has conquered itself to live and live and live, that with larger fires comes more life and so then larger fires and so then more life. But for this to flourish we must not focus on avoiding the fire that can consume our outward glory, we must foster a love so deep and rich and fruitful inside of us that we are never to really fear the fire, or the rakey hands with which it will pull us down to a worthy death. At the end of the say it is that deep love which will adamantly and with rigorous defiance of the catastrophe regrow the outward glory! Even if our relationships never come back together again, even if our friends fall away from us- all we can do is make sure the person we are is a person who does not drive away, that even in defeat persists their fight to flourishes new life, and to always rise again, that’s a principal worth more than a system or process, more cosmic and more necessary to the human race maintaining its ‘order’ than any morality that can be moralised upon people.

The rule of the Samurai has a proverb, ‘Even in death a Samurai should be able to complete one more task with certainty, even if his head is cut off he should be able to act with one last motion and strike.’ I have paraphrased here, but it is true, from the warrior class of those whose entire purpose is to be of service unto death, that though our heads are cut off and we are certainly dead the one who loves, the very lover themselves should still be able and even executing one last task and that with certainty- to love.

A Mysterious and Lusting Desire

Once again from triple X church, through reading the context will become clear, and the subject matter though addressed to those whose names have been eliminated is clearly a universal situation:

Here I think, it might be time to introduce you to something that I tried to write as a massive post sometime ago, and as usual in this place, failed. Your lust is not evil or wrong. In fact I would conclude it’s not a rapacious hunger, or a lust at all, but a very intuitive desire. We’ve talked before about our source of pornography problem before- a stark craving for intimacy and connection. So, when your lust strikes, do whatever seems most human and obedient, and I stress on your own, not to suppress fight or remove the lust- but to follow it’s leading submitted and obedient to God. When it arises, call it what it gloriously is- the wonderful desire to be strong, the be recognised, to leave a mark in time and space- to connect with God, people and the universe, and seek ways to obey this craving in your being, because while sex is part of it, and that is where this longing and craving is manifesting itself and sometimes in blessed circumstance, sexual satisfaction is exactly the right connection with God people and the universe we need, the source and nature of these longings and madnesses is not sexual, but intimate, human, holistic, pure, godly, and your better nature attempting whole heartedly, that it is not good for man to be alone, but it is good for man to be in company and in harmony.

Part of those companies and harmonies, is to sew and reap, and rear children from a sexual place- glorious before God. Almost we can no more greatly be joined to God people and the universe but by spreading our seed. But it is not the only place, and while the sexual fruit is perhaps the strongest and most immediate, the plethora of additional places so out weighs the sexual numerically that they are on even terms. Sometimes the sex the lust, the desire, gratifies itself in sex and porn and masturbation because it’s easier access and immediate. You don’t have to spend time harvesting real intimacy if you do it that way, you don’t have to spend time and work with another person, you don’t have to go for a walk stop for the roses or listen to the birds. You don’t have to stop and pray, or ponder the wonders of His majesty, and bring out greatly embarrassing longing and weak helplessness to achieve it before out God. But immediately following that, we know, we can painfully feel it, it was the deep preternatural desire of connection with God people and the universe, and not primarily sexually that we were craving, lacking and still missing and it hurts like a monster- and brings us shame, in the paradox that it’s not our fault we’re alone in so many ways, but we haven’t done anything to improve it when the proof and compass that sends us out to plug into the vast conduit lurches inside of us and we lust.

So what I think you should do, is just stop and listen to your body. Don’t do anything simply for it’s process, connect with everything you do, from eating to talking, and let it absorb you and vice versa. Stop fighting your longings and begin to see them as what they are, survival mechanisms leading us to God- and yes the snivelling pesky persistence of lusts held in ignorance are revolting and infuriating, but as the great divorce shows us, a lust that is killed is reborn as a strong, sturdy and steady desire which is our aid and ever present will, from a lizard to stead. So stop, don’t try and find the answer, don’t try and change, be human, and where you are relax and be one with your surroundings and your loved ones. And accept your flaws as the things that lead you into God and which he blesses and addresses particularly to himself. Make life not about measuring up, but of making love, and the love will bear fruit of all kinds, as long as the love making is its own reward.

Have you ever thought of fighting your desires in a different way? It’s easy to bludgeon ourselves with our failures and how we feel sexually repugnant. But at the end of the day, all I have ever seen from that is bad news. We feel good about ourselves only when we are the least human, only when we’re able to deflect or opress the very things that make us feel weak. Yet, fighting who we are and our desires, fighting ourselves is not productive, in fact it is a symptom of despair, concession, and the very fruit of sin, tearing us to pieces from the inside out. A wolf in a trap chews off it’s arm only because it has no one else to rescue it. When a farmer’s fence fails and a few cows get out on the road, because the grass in the field is gone, he spends all his time losing the cows that got away, and waists the rest of the time trying to keep the cows in field that doesn’t feed them- all the while still fixing the same fence that keeps falling down. Which eventually loses him the cows, and that field, and eventually leaves him with a patch of land which has maybe a few weak and unfed cows, mad with hunger, and a fixed fence which has no purpose- and the field is a wasteland that cannot support food for those few cattle even, and then they die- and to explain the metaphor- at the end of the field metaphor we have an empty muddy desolate place only weeds can grow with no desires needing to be fed.

What we all need is to be wolves who know they have the aptitude to get out of their trap, and that if not someone is not only coming but has come to rescue us.

What we need to be are wise farmers with our sexuality. If the farm is our body, then we must take care of it very very well. A farmer does many things with his crops if they are to take care of their heard- which we’ll call our skills and our desires- sexual included, and sex is both a desire and a skill. The farmer sets some fields aside for grain. They set others aside for rest. They set others aside for grazing, they set others aside for hay, and when they harvest they set the grain sheaves aside for straw and bedding for their desires. The whole farm exists to support the desires- feed them and care for them. Grain, foliage, bedding, and rest to later on produce the same needs at a later date. These steps and practices are not just merciful, in that our desires are nourished and encouraged by them, they’re practical as well so that we don’t become exhausted, and lose control of ourselves.

So if you’re desires are getting out of control, in the idea that we are yielding people, bearing fruit before God, then likely reality is, you’re not failing to be disciplined with them, you’re failing to nurture them, provide for them, feed them with quality and abundance- and I don’t mean that you should indulge them, or indulge them at every turn, because like I said, their are fields set aside for rest- and fields that yield grain and bedding for when it is cold.

So here is a suggestion. The next time you are gripped by desire, don’t panic, and don’t try and fight it, or avoid it, or indulge it. You don’t break a horse by actually breaking it by beating it down, you break a tumultuous and magnificent animal by playing to it’s nature and riding it out. When you break a horse, you’re not taking anythying away from it, and you’re not adding anything to it. You’re persisting with it, bonding with it, harnessing that horse, becoming in command of it, being patient with it, because when the horse realizes that you’re there to stay, and that you mean it no harm, and have trained and directed it, it will support you carry you listen to you, protect you even- even feed you with its own life if it gets that bad- it becomes your intimate ally not a threat or an enemy. And you don’t do this by forbidding it to move, you do this by learning from its movements, anticipating it’s movements, allowing it to move off in one direction, and easily and gently, but not weakly or timidly guiding it not in a new one, but even extending its motion into your control. And for this to happen, the horse must be accustomed to you, your smell, your presence, your voice, your touch, your weight on its back, and you must be ready to be thrown from it, so you learn to respect and understand the magical quality of what is going on with this animal. You’re learning to act as one with it, and it’s learning to make you part of its being, and vice versa.

I can think of no greater analogy of what sex is, learning to embrace attach, love and master not only desire, but oneself, for bursts of brilliance, rather than burning or snuffing out. The problem is, that what we do, cannot be done without a lack of loathing, or a lack of confidence. What these things lead to is shooting the horse in frustration and anxiety. It’s made worse by the fact that the horse is simply a metaphor for a deep meaningful powerful and critical part of ourselves. A part that we cannot do without, and a part that like Eustice in Narnia, we cannot cut deep enough to truly take control of the situation, we are timid with ourselves, merciful not out of compassion but weakness and sympathy we posses for ourselves- not a declaration of worthiness, but our inability to acknowledge our flaws insecurities, failures, etc- to cut so deep is to admit that these things are there- to not cut so deep is to say, I am only human, what a weakness, instead of I am human, what total strength, And in being fully human or learning to be so, becoming to be so, God and I can cut together.

I do not have to come in anger toward my desires, I can learn from them, so like with harnessing a wild horse, I can learn to give that creature peace without driving it away or setting it free- I can learn how to wield it, and truly unleash it in magnificent focussed waves of resilient and terrible mastery, I can channel that power into raging roaring directed deluge that truly runs a worthy and primal course through a blasting fissure instead of seeping and dissipating over the landscape.

If I refuse to listen to that horse, I will not breach it and I together, it will lash out and kill me, or I will condemn its spirit. Grasping the mastery is a sweaty labourious task of love. It is good stewardship and making love to creation, good ministry it is, which involves, with God, doing the same with our own bodies. If I ignored a tooth ache, I would be an idiot, esp. if I neglected it so much I couldn’t eat.

If I ignored a hernia, or rather saw it and just pushed it back in, I would be foolish. If I felt my appendix pain, and let it burst under the incessant chanting, ‘I have no appendix, I have no appendix’ I would be an idiot who cannot see the wisdom which my own body possesses before my conscious mind. So when our sexuality, and our intimacy begin to ache, why don’t we listen to them? Why do we shut them out and chant over and over, ‘I shouldn’t be horny, I shouldn’t be horny. I will make the horny go away, I wont give in, I wont acknowledge the gripping pain, the gnawing anxiety, the loneliness, the lack of connection, the desire to be filled and to fill, and bless and be blessed, and sew into and be sewn into all creation’. If you walked around holding your head, all day and just telling people who asked, ‘Yeah it’s just my aneurysm, it will go away.’ How do you think they’ll look at you, and how without treatment do you think an aneurysm is going away- only with the death of you.

Personally I think our times of deepest arousal is when God, even if only in our bodily material is closest to us. We we then indulge because it is easier than doing the terrifying thing, calling out, or asking deep within, ‘Is that you Lord?’ And we feel shame in the end because really, we didn’t ask, and we avoided God, yes because it was terrifying to be wounded by our own being so deeply and honestly, but also because we love God. And it’s not different from the shame you feel when you lie, betray live falsely, murder, steal, etc. But unlike those sins, we ignore the fact that it is good and right on occasion to meet these palpitations in a way that doesn’t hurt anyone. I don’t think it is the universally consistent and acceptable way, but I don’t deny that on occasion that is actually the connection and release God has blessed and condoned- but more often than not, the release he convicts us of is to embrace him, embrace others, embrace creation, to live a life of sewing and reaping and the great lack and absence, the sometimes total lack of nourishments to those deep necessary and often unmet godly longings in us, and that cannot be met in sexually, but come to us through sexual desire because truly, when the reality presses it cannot just be a tight chest. When we are being told, bear fruit, connect severely and totally, take on the human role of affecting the universe, it must grip us with a complete and visceral madness- but if God is God, then his madness is in his hands, and it will be good and wonderful. We just simply don’t submit it to him, but we should.

Think what it might be like if we took our sexual desire, and took a page from the animals. To hunt and screw with unbroken unstuttering unyielding will. To direct that towards the service of God with one goal and one purpose, within the scope of what it is to be submitted to the will of God, and what it means to be a human being, just as the Lion pride is submitted to what it is to be lions, and what is best for them for the time under God- that Lions would persist. There are of course obvious things that don’t connection in the nature of a lion to a person- but the lion takes it’s nature, from God, and does all that is in its power to unwaveringly execute that purpose- and it does so with the raw direction of its intended desires. God is asking the same of us, that we should become not passionless, nor careless but that we would be the full human animal he made to be him on earth, with the raw directed intention of our desire for him, surging and seething within all our cells. I think sex in us, is the boldest flag of that intention, and it is screaming at us constantly- we react sinfully when we seek to silence the scream only by any orgasmic, ejaculating means, or that this is the only intention and purpose the grip of such desires possess, instead of learning from it, listening to it and teaching it to sing. And what can you assume the result is if we never let it hum or open its mouth, or only let it sing the same thing? It will never reach its potential and it will never have anything to speak or affect. It will become mutilated by growing inside, and around all the restrictions that impede or refuse such a juggernaut as the human spirit growth, and then we have an abomination and behemoth on our hands that has been made into the image of sin, which is never in the first place possessed or reflected. Yet even this can be undone, by listening to its throes of agony, and administering healing.

I have already mentioned one Lewis source, I find that it is appropriate to end then with an Irish quote and a situation from his Great Divorce. A man is walking through heaven in the Great divorce, he has a pesky little lizard, a salamander or similar creature on his shoulder, which he is aware of but refuses to acknowledge, and is incapable of dealing with. An angel asks him if he may kill the lizard. The man reacts in a paradoxical way, as to say, ‘no I am afraid’ but also in such a frightful half assed way ‘Silly angel, I don’t know what you’re talking about, a lizard, there is no lizard.’ and poof lizard becomes pink elephant. But eventually without guarantee or thought of return, the man concedes and the angel kills the lizard. It hurts the man in a real and crippling way, but then he heals, and his former lizard appears as a mighty and wilful stallion, which propels him towards higher horizons, it is no longer a nagging incessant irritant but a persistent unyielding power to the man’ benefit, which he controls and directs and gives him purpose and certainty rather than misgiving and shyness. There is reconciliation within himself with himself, and it is mighty and earth changing to behold and to wield- all is good and what is human in God has triumphed. But to do this we must embrace the fact that ‘We are human there for nothing that is human is foreign to us’, which means first among such things are God and our bodies. To ignore one or hurt one is to ignore and hurt the other.And to discipline with out nourishment, is to corral God a well as our body, to starve him of ourselves, and starve us of him and to make both of us mad with the hunger of love which we never feed.

The Bloodied Lump of Love

This was taken yet again from an exerpt from xxxchurch.com/prayerwall. The context is one of the posters, is upset and discouraged because she doesn’t know how to spend time with her friends any more since they are all not Christians, and she is being badgered by a Christian friend to forcefully witness and bring Christ in among them, a badgering that by default of the word is not full of love and compassion, but the idea of, ‘Why aren’t you doing this now, more and this way, you have to, and if not, God wont be happy.’

Netty, first, profanity, not a litmus, slander, gossip, cursing other people, and lies these are the things that we to control our tongue about.

Second, I am going to speculate here, that your lesbian friend, responded to your faith because of the judgement others, or yourself, intentionally or unintentionally have heaped upon her. At which point, it’s not your faith that has impacted her negatively, but judgement, which for the honest and struggling and confused, and in need, I don’t see in Jesus; there is no Judgement for those in their best and most honest struggle to honour people and creation and to live as humanly as possible. For those who think that is not the point and rape the earth on purpose, and exploit people for their ease, he is full of vicious acidic judgement, but it is not devoid of compassion and longing, nor is it empty of forgiveness, on the contrary, his judgement comes from a forgiveness freely given that is willfully and progressively grieved. But he never responds first out of Judgement. Forgiveness is in fact, God’s first reaction. If you don’t believe it, look what the first thing he does. He doesn’t pursue Justice in the garden, he slaughters two other animals, and has compassion on Adam and Eve’s shame by covering it for them, and to their immediate needs if not their cosmic needs, his way is much more sufficient.

If you don’t believe it, look at Israel. If God’s first care was justice, he would ask for the best virgins from each family, or the best first borns, and they would be sacrificed for the forgiveness fo the nation. But there is no human sacrifice at any point in Judaism, because God’s first inclination is forgiveness and our preservation. Even in the sacrifice of Creatures, it seems very odd to me that in an offering given to buy mercy, since that is the traditional view point. But then God turns around and shares the offering given to hold back wrath? If our depravity is so great, as the tradition goes, shouldn’t he need to consume it all? But he consumes half and the family of that lamb consumes the other, and the priest sticks his fork into the pot and takes a portion. Now there is an ancient practice among kings, that when they had defeated other kings, and subjected them and their people, they would take up the king unto their own table as a living trophy. Sometimes the defeated king would become a living sacrifice as the Romans would strangle their prisoner kings as offerings to their gods Mars and Janus at their Triumphs. So, if then God is asking for us to offer up a payment so he will forgive us, in truth offering up a tribute, and then he lets us eat with him, he’s shaming us more, rubbing it in our face, extorting and cohercing thanks giving, and proving himself to be cruel and petty. It’s like the mob boss who says to a shop keep, ‘I’ll protect you if you pay me. If you don’t, I wont simply not protect you, I’ll be the danger you should be afraid of.’ So clearly the system has to be saying something else, something more wonderful something more free on an interrelational sense and something much more redemptive.

While I still need to think about it in order to understand exactly the image that is going on- I am very much leaning toward the fact that this is an exercise exactly translated into the Eucharist/ Communion that Christians celebrate now, in which case, it is what God hopes to creates in us and remind us of, deeply in our heart and core of our marrow about love, about his love- there is no underscoring the reality of sin, but it is a revelation to know that it is not anger and fury that is being addressed in the offerings, because at the end of the day, that’s useless to us, it means God is not hungry for blood anymore, but it is not transformative- because it is essentially selfish or worse, indifferent to us for what he really wants, cold wealth, and we are paying the ransom. But since God likens himself to a bridegroom, full of mercy compassion, forgiveness and patience, he cannot be one to shame us, not when he welcomes us into his presence, not when he shares his and our food with all of us.

Now I have heard that, when the lamb was sacrificed, the people would be covered in the blood to include them in the blessing of the blood covenant, but it was also to remind them, that if they broke the covenant, this is what they would look like, bloody masses of death, torn apart. But I am starting to see, that if we keep the coventant, this is how we should look like: The slaughtered lamb, which in the end, who does that sound like we’re becoming like? We should, in the end, by keeping the covenant, end up bloody tortured lumps for the sake of love and the God who is love.

So the idea then of this constant communion, in which usually burnt offerings of grain or water are given in thanks, and a lamb is given for, the sake of infusing us with the coursing life of what it is to out pour love to everyone. So, humanity with their taint of sin, acknowledging it serious but without impugning the good in humanity that God has established- he is shown honour by providing the lamb through which God will show us what the fullest expression of love looks like. A labour that pours out everything for and gives of its flesh for the nourishing and healing and viviality of humanity, and the earth. Nothing of this truth is lost from Moses Covenant, nor David’s which was sealed in Christ. After the show is made, God says maybe two things, if we don’t have life, he says let us get the life that posses this show inside you. But then you have to ask, if there is not life, why let man provide the lamb? Even when the living love became flesh, man still provided part of it, for he is son of Man and son of God. Because the truth is the life is supressed, or opressed, if we wish to be honest about being slaves. And if we have life, then God says, lets get this life in this example, because it is a living example, to wage war in your members with the life that is opressed, and have it overcome that which is opressing, that which makes you fight yourselves and your deepest truths, and avoid the living show which shows the depths of love. So the point of this ritual is not to bathe us in the escape from wrath in keeping the deal, and to tell us that we will be ripped to pieces if we fail or disobey, it is to tell us, this is the depths of love- and in recieving the fruit of its blood and flesh, you also will be filled with this living love and seek to dispense it’s fruits, even your blood and flesh to others unto everyone, and upon dying you will even rise from the dead to do it again.

There is an element of Judgement in failure, and it ends in a poetry seen in scripture. Israel did not follow the covenant and send itself to the nations so God broke then distributed them to the nations and took them into exile. If the thing we wish to accomplish is new life and redmeption and we fail, our notions and cities and empires are brought down by creation itself and the new life of redemption is brought into these places by the wonderful and beautiful natural fury of plants and wild animals which set right and put back in place the order and beauty of eden, if only in a reflection that anticipates the fullness. And if we vex humanity and live unjustly, then the love that is vexed will come and tear us apart by force, because we did not submit out of living love to be torn apart for others sake, unless those who are unjust meet and consume that life before love is exhausted, and for their forunate sake, love is deep and flowing, and lambs and a man have been sent and we who are of that man are being sent, and should be going but many of us don’t.

Which brings me to the point. I don’t think your friend has reached the point of the sacrifice. Through him you’ve experienced the judgement that is foreign from the heart of God and does not belong to him and it hurts like a bitch. It is no longer enough to witness these days, because people rightly have come to know, Jesus is not full of Judgement, yet he is represented so, and so is the father, and so witness in the same sense as we have come to mean it is not necessarily connected to the heart of God. What might be a good suggestion, is not to debate or proselitise with your friends, but serve them as one willing to be a bloodied mass for their sake. Encourage them and compassion with them, listen to them, ask more questions of them than you give answers, share their experiences and earn their comraderie. You are a new person among them, so you must earn their trust again, because the person they once new has changed, and you can understand how that can make people leary, they are wondering, have you betrayed them, will you, are you their enemy, what is in your heart, the same ‘god’ who has hurt and pursued them for their deaths and made them bristle that they did not recieve the love they desperately needed and longed for? None of this is your fault, but we are generational people and Christianity is no different and we cannot come into our tradition ignoring them, because then what must be redeemed remains forever undredeemed. You can see it in the black population in the united states, they think the abolition of slavery fixed everything. You can see it in Canada, that white people in this society think, well white people from hundreds of years ago did this, which is ignorant on both cases, only forty years ago we still had to deal with these issues, and second it ignores the idea that the people who did these things were linked to us either through blood and culture or this very land and it only allows things to never heal.

So share their experiences, note when your friends are joking and joke with them, share their hearts and minds and learn to learn from them, delve deep into the heart of your friends and the culture you’re in, bring christ to the core of them, gently and slowly and without pretentions and retrieve Christ from the heart of them, because it;s there in the simple fact that all of them are hungry for love and to love. No love can exist without an agenda, but it can choose to lose for the sake of the welbeing, and it suffers no defeat with numbness, but it also rejoices in every subtle harmony. If I would recommend, distance yourself from your CHristian friend because he is full of judgement and works, and make it known to him why, That his pressure is not good for you and not good for the gospel, because it assumes the same thing is what is needed for every situation in exactly the same proud and obtrusive manner. Christ needs to be born again in every situation, and in us so that he and we can exactly and properly minister to everyone, not so they can be saved, but that their need be met by him, and that both of us might bless one another with the life giving living love that ooses out of us like blood.

It is in this rebirth of Christ I am most intrigued by. In Christ of the Celts, Newell quotes from Teilhard de Chardin, ‘Christ must be born again.’ He also quotes a prayer from George Macleod ‘Make it our custom to go, til the new outline of your body for our day becomes visible in our midst’. In this way, since through teachings of people like Rikk Watts, so intent that heaven comes here, as God is obsessed with the earth and as we might see from Scripture, it all really has the earth as the focal point, and nothing else really, at every point, Heaven, God is coming here. So as I have learned Heaven comes here, I also like to add, ‘when God’s people cry out to be free.’ This is not far off even the Catholic Catechism, that our job is to create the kingdom of heaven here on earth, to be about the methods of redemption and healing. I am constantly having a vision regarding this, I stare at a tree, a common tree of any kind, by it’s height and breadth it is young, but it is captivating an drawing in, then it begins to course with light but subtly, almost auraicly, and then it begins to change, it shakes itself almost with nervousness, and then with a snap and a return to calm, becomes prismatic, polished platinum like, rainbowish, crystaline. I don’t think it is what trees will be or become, but I do believe it is the way in which all things shall be made new, and all things throb with life found in Christ, and how through our labour in constantly becoming this bloodied lump of love, we draw out the Christ deep inside all things, they call out and rally to us who desperately and heroically love, and their vibrancy shines out so the shadow cannot over come him in them. They become even more wonderous, perhaps no more so than now, except that we can see it, and acknowledge it. And the only thing preventing this, is that so few of those who have Christ are waging war for them, and the ones who are do it at a neglect of feeding the hungry. They would rather fight the problem than labour for solutions. they want things to simply stop rather than make them whole. But if we let this living love get deep inside of us, not just to give us life, but to get deep that it finds the places where not just as persons but as peoples we were once living and have forgotten or do not think of anymore that we are there still alive, like a the branch in winter that is still vibrantly green inside. To cope with the shadow, we have hibernated, and we have deadened our outer layers. We have even told ourselves that unlike the mighty Oaks God wishes to reveal us as [which is interesting for God says he wishes to reveal glory already in us, which could only be Christ, and which could only come from suffering through as offerings of love] we are simply brambles of shame and harm that should truly be burned away. We have convinced ourselves of this out of safety and fear, and in the end, we cannot come forward to receive life, and we are far too frightened to venture inward to where life might reside because the price might be that the Christ in which all material and spirit springs and is fastened might be beyond our control, that we would flourish into life mightily and then we would have to suffer the axes and fire. But if we constantly convince ourselves, Jesus is the oak and this is good enough, then where is the forest he has salvaged unafraid of axe and fire, it does not exist, and what it does need is heaven to come to earth with a mighty flash and thunder and to burn away for the sake of change. However, if we allow Jesus reach down in side, to spring up from the green in our branches which we have sent down inside and be birthed in us, and draw out himself eternall within the fibre of our very bodies, and allow us to give our sap to the world, the more and more he is birthed, the stronger and more viscous is his reality, until finally he has been birthed in the flesh among us truly, and the citizens will have laboured to bring their king home, to draw him out of ourselves, to draw him out of the earth, and to allow him back into all things, ‘And the people said, let him reign, and so he ruled. Let us make God make us in his own image, and so he did.’ This may be difficult to hear for some, but once we have met Christ and adopted his image, it is not a purchase or a reward but a heart felt living that wishes so much harmony and giving as to always be receiving the free gift of transformation, which will in the end call the king back to his very kingdom that he established and wish we will have been washing with sweat, tear, blood, and laughter and the placental fluids of our out giving and our labour and the filling of life we possess and have received, constantly exchanged earth to heaven, that all things might be offered us to have their heavenly lode and veins rendered with new circulations and conviviality.

Christ of The Celts: Innitial thoughts

I have just begun reading Philip Newell’s latest book, Christ of the Celts. His largest premise so far in the first chapter is that the Gospel doesn’t come to teach us about, or expose our sins, truly he says ‘The gospel was not given to show us how we have failed, or been false. This is not news and it is not good.’ He equates what sin or its nature as being extreme forgetfulness an psychosis. He states several times that the purpose of the Gospel is not to declare that the fundamental element of humanity is twisted corrupt and false, but that it truly is the freshest purest and most raw fundamental atomic and anatomic source of God, and his irreplaceably his image- it cannot be removed or undone- what he says, as I have picked it up, is that we have forgotten, because we have been brainwashed, that what we testify from our actions as false is false because it is not God, and it is not God because it is not his true reputation; Christ comes to tell us not how we have forgotten, but what the memory is, and this exposes the falseness, but at the same time corrects it- there is fluid not distinction between salvation and clarity, there truly cannot be a moment where we know our faults without remembering in the heart of us who God is. The problem is that so many of us have known our thoughts and longed for one who would compassion with us because of them and change us from them, that resting at the heart of us, and those who claim to know God have come along and said, ‘no no, Jesus can’t compassion with you yet, because our filthiness hasn’t licked his judging boots yet.’

Being blind in my right eye, I have an excellent access to a hard example of the differences present in the two exercises of the gospel this way. The first says, your eye was always meant to see, it has just forgotten, but look upon Christ as he looks at you and someday, perhaps this day it will remember. The other version of this gospel supposes this arguement, the fundamental nature of your eye, was never to see in the first place, because the heart of it is cut off, vile and dead before God. Which at the end of the day, is absurd to approach an eye like so- even if you supplant or amputate organs there is the knowledgeable truth that something at the fundamental level of their tissue is not evil, even in cancer, you have the truth that two forms of cells are competing good and well, and behaving good, one by the success of the other suffers and so does the organism, by good and success pain and evil come to pass- God comes to say, you should remember this success is not good success. Otherwise why would the Gospel come to speak at all, if it can only tell leppers, you are leppers because they fundamental core of your being is leprosy- but Jesus doesn’t heal like that- because neither we nor politics nor devils can change the fundamental frame work of our material, which is Godliness forgotten. In this sense since we are made in God’s image, when Jesus heals or speaks wisdom, as he is the truth on which all things are built, a extraordinary thing takes place- our bodies remember if we allow them to, and he in us as he has always been, since we were founded in him, actually works with him for the sake of healing a restored memory. I do believe at the end of the day that this is the failure of Christianity, insisting upon ourselves and others that we forget, both our roots and the God who planted them, to languish in the gnostic loss of self, rather than come to Christ and be ourselves, humble, human, wonderfully not God, in our place, at his side as a consort mysteriously his equal in likeness and grace, open and submissive, like a lover who opens her body and mightily powerful because of it, which shakes the earth, and the bed posts by it.

He goes on to state how Scotus, a philosopher from Ireland and a contemporary of Augustine, called sin, the leprosy of our souls, which makes us insensitive, as leprosy is a disease of insensitivity, and permeatates it to the point where we forget touch, and forget or lose the ability to be gentle and sensitive to one another. Which, deep inside, makes me think of our insecurities, and my thoughts many times that I have said before- in being like Christ there is a part of us which is not like him which must be good and proper, and I believe our insecurities are that part and never go away, because they are the real strength in us, sensitive, and longing and ripe with the rawness, and strength to admit we need them alleviated not in their severance, but by the embrace of God which allows us to embrace ourselves. It is only weakness when we attempt to be strong to lessen this about them, to set ourselves againt them, and set ourselves above either their experience or other people for the sake of our calm in the midst of the insecurity that comes with being rightfully human.To remove insecurity is a sure sign that we have forgotten the nature of our God, and the nature of ourselves, by seeking to be impervious invulnerable and be in control, it is the abhorent choice or sometimes the compulsion of pathogenic reality which cannot lose, but numbs itself on horrorshow, ultra violence and stark consumption for serenity calm and the ease of transformative vaccuity.

The past Chapter is Empty notes, which concerns the doctrine of ex nihilo, ‘from nothing’ in the way that God created creation, as apposed to the Celtic version that God created out of an outward giving that is an expression of himself, and that through this theory, called Theophany, something of a cohesive and interlocking song which constructs creation, we get material, that may not exactly be divine, but is completely sacred, and from this we recieve not a neutrality of nature but the fundamental aspect to the doctrines of stewardship.

Newell doesn’t actually explain these doctrines so much exactly I have been familiar with them previous and am riffing in my own words on several Christian Celtic philosophers who proposed this idea, which Newell mentions. The idea of ‘song’ actually being the basis of creation is not new, many theologians believed that creation came into being by music. Also having started reading This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levin, it is interesting to note that all molecular structures actually have pitch threshholds, a frequency of tone at which point their molecules vibrate in reponse and they ‘unmake themselves’ to emphasise my ignorance as to an official term, but they pull or vibrate in such a way as to come apart, and again heightening the threshhold the pitch wold have to reach to vibrate and break them again. You see this when a singer breaks a wine glass. You can see this when you hit the right accustic pitch for a building or room and it resonates in that surrounding. Just thought that was interesting.

Second the topic of Jesus being married came up in this chapter since it was talking about material and material things and the hampering they have recieved because of ‘ex nihilo’ doctrines pertaining without doubt to sex. Now I wouldn’t even bring this up, since if not for a conversation recently with a friend I would brush it away as absurd, and probably begin to doubt the core of the book. However that conversation with a friend brough up an exceptionally good point: people called Jesus Rabbi, a title he would not have had if he were not married in Jewish culture, now obviously this has been translated into plain ‘teacher’ in many versions, but in some texts you can still find it as Rabbi. This becomes even more complicated when you consider Mary Magdelene’s honour among the group, the extreme access within it, to wash Jesus’ feet, to covort with Mary Jesus’ mother and Mary, likely the sister of Martha, whom we are told by theit interactions twice, at their home and at Lazarus’ rising are close friends of the family, if not likely cousins of his, following Jesus arround as attendants, this seems to be a great familial association she shares with the female attendants. I am not even going to touch the Da Vinci Code bullshit of the possibility, I am not crazy I am just looking at the biblical realities. Even as a device, rendered poetically, or as her back ground was a helpful poetical/ active parabolic element in Scripture: a whore, rescued by God for no reason other than his compassion, not innosence or beauty, but that he came upon her at her need, this is a very striking reality about Christ and his church, if we follow that to its conclusion even poetically we see what is going fundamentally as an illustration.

There was one more thing pertaing to the thesis of the book, that Christ comes to remind us not that we need to be saved from corruption at our cores, but that we need to know we have been brainwashed to reject our core, fight ourselves, resist who we are, refuse our insecurities. It has to do with God calling us by name, and in calling, he is calling then to those able to respond, and expected to respond. If he calls by name to those who are evil and so really don’t exist, and those who are depraved and so really don’t know him, how can he call us by name, unless he knows us, and we in hearing his voice know him? And if he calls to those who appose him, how can he call their names like they are his, who addresses a rebel by name, and with a call? A king calls in those who have rebelled to his throne usually becsause he believes they really do love him, or at the least love what is best for the country.A king usually calls rebels back because he wishes to remind them of his good love for those who are in rebellion, and end their insurrection by a show of ‘the good ole times sake’ to rekindle their hearts to fealty. If he is a just king he calls in this way, if he is not he calls to poison their win while they sit at his table, or to arrest them on the road as they come close, betraying them. The other call is that which would make rebells and night time theives disperse, but in this case it would be generic not by name, and the call would not wish a response, nor would it need to be known except in its terror.

But who here would say this is how God calls us, in such a way as to make us run from him? Does he not gather the lambs, the chicks, the little children to himself? There is a third way a king may call, when he goes out under a banner of truce to make peace, and if we are all rebels, don’t we first have to be his people, if he is the king? And what king of Righteousness calls those who are not defeated to make terms of peace with him unless he is full of love and heartfeltness for his countrymen? Indeed for the sake of peace he sells himself as a hostage for the sake of peaceful fruit between him and HIS countrymen, for peace comes not when people walk away from one another, but when the come close and see that they are alike. As James blunt has put it ‘I went out to make war and saw my foe, how much he was like me, and so I went out to cut myself’. [forgive me if th exactness if off, the spirit of the line is true].

Our Stagnation

Many of you may Remember at the end of August that Jessie Golem posted her dislike of Christianity in a long post which fostered enormous response- which I felt inspired to come to her defence in regard to. I intended to put on a bit of a clinic and produce several instalments, which began with part one on Christian fascism and imperialism. While this does not cover necessarily all the points I wanted to get across and actually combines two of them I believe it is a worthy inclusion which challenges and incises the point and flaws of which we deal with in our present Church here in North America.

Some background: This segment has been transferred from xxxchurch.com/prayerwall, from a discussion of a young man asking prayer for his brother who was struggling with homosexual porn use, everything is already anonymous so feel free to go and see a wider context for the position presented here, the title of the discussion thread is ‘please help, please pray, my 14 yr old brother is fighting homosexuality’. Otherwise my response is to a statement made by myson, confronting an individual who holds themselves to a gay Christian and to have had several same sex relationships. In this confrontation he mentions the authority of scripture as a finalising and absolute category- whilst I do not entirely disagree, what that means is anomalous and so I decided to address him on this controversial topic which I am sure many people never considered to be relevantly controversial now and then- at least not in the idea that the church has it wrong- both by what it says and holds as prime focus, and how it applies it- but that’s just simple math at the end of the day.

I do apologise to anyone who will likely be confused or misunderstand, please attempt to go with the flow, and address any passages that by my own limitation you do not get- its not you it’s me, believe me. Please finish if you begin, I do not at all believe there is anything in this post of useless value at this point, it will at the least be provocative and challenging:

Our Stagnation:

But myson, does this mean that we have now all the knowledge and relationship we need and that from Scripture? If so, why do the ages continue, why do the ages change? Why do new books of inovative and progressive theology continue to be studied and written and distributed? Why is it the assumption of most Christians, that they do not need the total extensive intelligesta of christianity- they pick the most conservative, least developing doctrines and notions of faith- they pick total depravity because that makes it all simple, they read the bible out of context without the need to let circumstance, history, or the fact that we all possess and agenda towards it guide a responsible application- out of this comes the declaration that Scripture is authority and Authoritative.

I struggle with this notion so very much, not least of all because Christianity was first to say that the world is leading towards something- and it is not destruction, but reconciliation and community with God. That would insinuate that Christianity should at every moment being moving foreward and creating innovation and being progressive- it should be the Rush of all stages of humanity in every field- just as Rush is the king band of progressive rock- we should always be re-examining, always be experiment, always striving for excellence and an uncompromising attitude that is still marketable- yet we don’t, we rest on laurels of the past, some of which are hundreds of years old, on the assumption that these values are the values of Christ, when really they were values of victorian and georgian austerity and much more the virtues of snap spring wound English before the back broke and they all become much more relaxed pleasant people.

So here is the question- unless God has sent us a drout of his Spirit- how is it that Christianity, which should be the garner for transformation- chooses to plant itself firmly in the stance and caste of that which will least transform us, is little transforming and that which was old, hundreds of years ago- why do they insist values do not change- is this not the same as saying, Christianity does not change? In which case, while we would like to be as Christ like as possible, isn’t there still a distinction to be made- we are not Christ, who is the same yesterday today and tomorrow- what reason have we to assume his church should always be the same- whilst we are the refuge for the imperfect both in image and in capability- God is still the God of the living, and so we should be burying our brothers brought to life with the clear signs they have given us something- with the clear signs of foreward motion- yet, they drop like flies all around us- and everything mostly stays the same- and if their is no change, then it means we are not changing- which should be the most revolting thing to consider when a Christian contemplates that we are all about or almost about nothing else but transformation into the changed humanity of Jesus Christ. I know each generation leaves us and a new one comes, which must start from scratch- mostly false, because we should be teaching them- but we teach a system that reaches a head not in poetry on relation, but in systematology and math, applied to scripture, we teach a system which reaches a head not in the idea that each generation grinds a more sure polish over the scope which is the dark glass we see through as Paul says, but that the victorian pretensiousness and snoot of the eighteenth century, a cultural stale point of judgement and cold sweat about the function of the body- ground out the clearest and most sure polish on the binoculars and anyone who tries to polish it again as if God has something more to show us, and yet another way to change us is hailed as a discontent.

Now I will not argue that this austerity was pointless or incidiously intended, in fact it was engineered chiefly in its inceptions because we believed that our bodies, ourselves, other people, all creation and our relationship with God had absolute paramount importance- but guess what- the heart of a thing does not allow us to do is rest for too long within it- and when cultural climate changes the time for rest is done- and the climate has long changed. If the spirit of this intention were still alive in our Christianity, it would not look the way it does, so impedeous about the importance of everything that it allows no one to do anything, let alone important things- it even ostricises and murders those who don’t have it on the assumption that they behave viley because they are vile and desire villainy- as it consigms prostitutes to abuse rather than loving them out of their situations- because somehow Christian morality is something the worthy recieve or are born to, or something good natured moral people just don’t want- as though any one who does it wants that kind of life. But what is living continues to bear fruit, it bears fruit as it gains practice of heavier and girthier and tremendous yield, it bears itself to be polinated by many intendents and likewise polinates many it intends- and we can see the fruit of Christianities transformation under its present values- that it will only accept incest from other Christians when it is time to be polinated, and it sends pathogenic spoors against any other kind of fruit to kill it and slake its progress- and it does this with abstonant words.

We can see this tinctured and disgusting rejection of truth and refusal to transform, based solely on the easy joy of a simle life with no other responsibility than to make other people like you for the size of your pay check, or the kind of church you attend- and the proof of it comes right out of scripture and our bad abhorent attitude. The fathers of our religion, from Adam downwards had better relationships with God than we do- surely even as we have the Holy Spirit and the patriarchs recieved the law by angels and the distant whisper of God’s Spirit, somehow it is us who are crippled to act- somehow it is us who read scripture more literally, but as soon as something real entangles us or we are facing an issue of image- what God wants of us is not a material reality but a metaphor- from baptims to ‘dying to self’ these are not euphamisms, they are very real expectations- to die with blood and the rigor of flesh in mortality- to actually be reborn in martyrdom by taking the plunge. These are not metaphors- they are realities that as Christians we should be facing everyday- seeking out the good and sometimes shameful death at the hands of violent molesters loved by God.

But now when people hear God’s voice, they run to their bible’s to confirm- Our fathers in that very book did some similar things- but if we did the same similar things- like cast lots- it would be denounced as pagan and testing- you yourself myson are willing to defend why homosexuality is a sin- but I don’t see you casting lots like David or the Apostles did- is it that such a thing is far clear cut and final for our liking? When God speaks these days we run to our bible- we confirm we deliberate, we play it safe, all with God himself possessing us. But our fathers did not so many things- they sometimes consulted the scripture, they sometimes threw the lots, they often were met by strange and eccentric men who spoke strange things and it was known very soon if it were the voice of God. But for the most part, all our fathers knew when God spoke, they knew his voice, they knew what he said, and they knew what he wanted- all while they did not have the mind of Christ- and whilst according to our Scriptural thinking God could not possess their inner most beings. But look, Amos knows that it is God calling him to do the unspeakable shameful thing- marry a whore- and then speak God’s truth like people will listen to him with Credibility- Ezekiel knows it is the Lord who tells him to build a fire fueled with human shit, or Declares that no longer will son suffer judgement for the sins of his father but each will bare their own account. saying that Phoenicia, Egypt and Edom will all come to the lord and all will three shall be known as his children and his people. Jeremiah is confronted with a God that may not be as good as we suspect- sending plagues so bad mothers will eat their babies- Peter is asked to take unclean animals, slay and eat, Elijah is given food from an unclean woman, not an Israelite, David and his wondering men eat the bread of presence, Daniel prophesise that Israel will become a beast with a boastful haughty horn screeching blasphemes. Paul tells us not to fret if we eat meat given to idols, or that the Israel that is saved should respect her gentile brothers that are saved. These are all precedence showing that God has always called us to do things that do not follow the normatives set down by scripture- but the concensus among Christians today is that God does not do that, funny how their own book says other wise. True man quickly grows apart from God- but this does not apply to us, for we have been gathered to his bosom, filled with life, Shakinah, knowledge truth temperance over our passion, even as we are given a new passion.

But tell me, how many of us hear something and come to scripture to find it, and come then to ‘His sheep will know his voice’ and are convicted of the truth of why the do not know- when clearly someone was speaking- bar mental disorder what is the explanation? They do not actually know his voice. How many come upon taste and see and are convicted of the truth, that why don’t they have the taste? Because the bible is what they eat, not God himself, they haven’t met him yet, and that’s the truth of the matter, simplistic bibliographying, stringent morality- the idea that these things and perspectives are absolute, they are the last bastions of those who are more interested in have a structure that they barely have to participate in- and easily does not expect them to transform- it answers their questions without actually having to make them think- it gives them values they may actually hold already- all the while never having to ask God how he will teach us what is right- because three hundred years ago God spoke for the final time and this is what we got.

How many of us go then through scripture and discover that we should work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, completing the work of Christ yet to be done- and in this is found the clinch- we do not have to be in fear and trembling or of any expectation if we continue in a way designed not to meet God- and the theologically contrite thing to say is that Jesus’ work is done, we are saved- unless we are to transform beyond salvation- beyond simply being healed or recieveing healing- but to become nurses and paramedics. VEry few are wrecked or convicted by these realities- it comes out of dichotomy, if we are totally depraved them to be saved is to be in no more need- and now so many are saved- but if we are sick like a disease, and incomplete then perhaps the process of pain and passion and crucifixion is exceptionally necassary- for if we are not so far Gone, then perhaps the magic is more practical and less romantic and dramatic- and the stuff of real life that doesn’t get turned into movies or aired on the news- maybe it is as simple as the person who visits and stands by the burn victim until wellness or death becomes them- and that is salvation and transformation.

How many people read verses that tell us we should not consigm ourselves to what we ‘cannot do’, and are convicted, or that religious austerity and rigidness actually depletes and injures your body, making a mockery of religion, and ourselves and our anscestry- because they should have given you not simply the hope but the reality of something relentlessly chugging forewards, something of great desperate hard work of the kingdom being established on earth, but they should have left you with one more castle, or sortie outwards that inspired us to sortie from the gates- but we have to find too few, which are older than three hundred years, because our values have killed our growth.

How many people sit back and realise that the living God is living because unlike idols who need support and balance all engineered by man, Gods image stands on its own, breathes automatically, blinks sees, hears, speaks, no more so its own than when indeed it knows that the engineer is God. And we want to create a litmus that will only allow this thing that can do so many things without support, to run when we say to walk to crawl, to speak and crap and fuck only when we say? And the sad thing is, we tell people when and how they can do this, under our conditions never willing or wanting to do them ourselves until neither do they and whose image are they cast in then? It’s little wonder Metallica is still cranking out hits like Unforgiven.

How many people read that there is a kind of righteousness that has power and a kind that doesn’t- mostly when speaking of power- it means the chance to give life and death- and I look around and I see so many things about our churches that do not give life, nor let people die- and I see then that we do nothing important or meaningful- we cannot kille, though some try very very hard, and we cannot bring people to life- though we think we have the method and try very very hard. And the worst is that, based on the ease of never having to change- we never have to accomodate- and so we insist that someone else’s modes are really deadly when they’re just as pathetic as our own- but watch out for how we will treat the person who is content with the suitedness of that pathos in their own mode- because that is a person who is about to grow and begin or continue down a road that will begin to hand out death and life at exactly the places it should be, because it can see through itself, it will see through all things- and that’s the enemy, self contentedness in the inconsequence of inconsequential things- nihilism to the things nihilistic in nature- will produce incentivism in the things to be insensed about. And in regards to homosexuality I think that is really after thefact that we might actually have to submit to God and force the risk of changing on his terms, what we are afraid of, those who are content before God- because the only thing in these cases which can bring death is the lack of honesty- there is trumping honesty once decisions have been made- like marrying a woman if you’re gay- you committed and God is good to transform and make peace and bring wholeness and faithfulness- it happens also in heterosexual relationships and once again- God is able to transform and make peace and make whole faithfulness- but to those who find their honesty- then let them accept the inconsequence of it, and quickly make down the path to life giving. Each relationship of any nature has the chance to give life that is not just producing children- we all have that choice to make before God, and those who do not believe need him so much more and likely recieve so much more of his help- but in this sense, gay or straight they face no difference of mandate or choice.

But still are we willing to lose the fight of this doctrinal conflict, at least in appearances, are we willing to surrender, are we willing to make concessions- because this is not the same as changing out confession of Jesus Christ- but to bullwhistle and continue on- it can only turn to bitterness and hate- and going in to win is not the side of Christ- the only thing he refuses to lose is us- he goes so far to say, may no one fall away on account of me- and in that he means us, his body. If Christianity is right to appose Homosexuality, it is not going to be by blow by blow defence of hetero sexual relationships or by banning supportive legislation- it will be by serving the gay community and submitting to the rule of the land- and going to its death for those it has no other right to exercise but sacrifice. Christs moment of glory is the moment he died in full shameful display for what he was- the son of God. I am sure many homosexuals feel they can relate. But are we willing to lose, accepting that God is God and that what is right endures even with our silence, even while our consciences are pained? Isn’t there something else that transcends our need to act in oppostion and rallies our obedience to submit and serve and even protect the homosexual community, or do we fall into the same group of people who would rather fifty thousand gay people die of aids, only to help them when straight people start dying of it? One of my favourite preachers once equated the shame and misery visited upon people in this age for association of that disease that if Jesus came today he might be dying of it.

I fail to see what hope we have as a faith if we cannot reconcile ourselves to enter all situations in mangers and on donkeys. I fail to see what hope we have of faith if we cannot see that Christ is like Duditz from Dreamcatcher, or Edward Scissorhands- and strive perhaps not to be that- but be content that he and we in some postitve and perplexing mystery are that and can be content in it. Unless we can start to see the absolute descent, and almost near lack of needed supernaturality in Jesus- the true fact being how ultimately he salted the earth by how close he came to it- eventually being covered in it- unless we can bring ourselves so low to kiss that same earth as he did- we have no hope. If on the other hand we choose to lose, not so we might win, but actually choose to concede and bow down, Jesus might actually begin to look like who he really is- and that through us.

Let us stop fighting this war and actually come to grips not with the scripture that supports us, but with the scripture that lays us bare before God- the no flesh is justified. it is not man and woman together that makes God happy, but people out for healing, mending and wholeness and in recieving also the giving of it- this is the person he scowers the earth for, wether gay or straight knowledgeable, ignorant, acquainted or unacquainted with.

Though I have said so much already to return to the scriptural argument- as far as Scripture told me the bible was not very special at all- except in honesty and perspective- it in itself was not authoritative- except from the source- but in this sourcing itself in God- why then do we cling to it so dearly- why not go to the source itself instead of seeing the source through the coin of scripture? Every coin is always going to have someone’s stamp on it, King James has his stamp all over his gold coin, and it would be very odd indeed to kiss that coin, it might be like kissing him. It is something entirely different to go to the mine itself, to touch and kiss and be covered in the static charge that gold conducts, and be drenched in gold dust til you’re breathing it, to sit in darkness and be permeated by precious qaulity in its purity. It was not long ago that Tolstoy wrote ‘The Kingdom of God is within you’ But I doubt any of us have read it- but if he was correct in title alone- set the book down for a while, and go to the source- unlearn all that we have learned save Christ and meet the Living Lord.

The Mondo [drafted June 17th]

So…. Today I purchased Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. As I took it out from the shop, it was a good grab at Value Village, for only 2.09$, I was confronted by an interesting fact of size. I have always enjoyed the compact style of a book, which of course, War and Peace, is in no way compact, it comprises three volumes which are not all divided into chapters by the authority of the Contents, but by book, each volume of three encompassing five books. Still, while it takes me longer to complete a short novel or novella, for example, A Clockwork Orange took me more than a year, and that only because a course forced me to read a great deal more at an increased pace, and then I did not even finish it until after the four month course if my memory serves; I do not enjoy the clunkiness of large books, I enjoy the compactness and sleek of publications like Heart of Darkness for their over all format, that can fit in a pocket, or not encumber a bag with loss of space or increased weight. However, since this is about my fourth or fifth purchase of this published magnitude, I am forced enquire why? I know why in some regard, given the consumptive industry of the day, that of serial through gazette or news paper, an author was only paid according to the number of instalments published in their serial. More chapters, meant more need to buy the ‘soap’ of the day as it were, the longer the work, the longer one had income and employment, and the more successful, the more likely to retain the next serial next time through. I am still confronted, however with the ‘why’. If for no other reason than, with the exception of Mobey Dick and the rumours of some of Dickens’ work being equally long, I have no other precedence other than French and Russian authors. I have in my possession, entirely unabridged copies of Alexander Dumas’ Count of Monte Cristo, Victor Hugo’s Les Miserable, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Piece, and Fyodor D’s The Brothers Karamazov. All of which breach the nine hundred page barrier, or very nearly with The Count coming to 875, and whilst I know, this depends largely on format, the bewilderment remains. The adage, ‘less is more’ comes to mind. The evaluation remains as well, the epic against the concise, and odd enquiries into the nature of literature bombard. Is the narrative and prose that composes the small contained compelling and powerful in less than two hundred pages superior? Or can such snivelling successes of size be compared to the classical epic they must contend with obvious disenfranchisement? Is this the result of marketing from that day and age as well as format, the difference of demographic?