hints and guesses

Why is Tim Tebow so Offensive?

2011-12-01T13:03:00.000-08:00

First off let me say I am not an expert on American Football, and this article isn’t about sports. But I do enjoy the game and reserve a great deal of admiration for athleticism exhibited by those who make their living in the sport. If you’ve casually followed the NFL season this year you know that one of the most dramatic narratives of the season has been the emergence of Tim Tebow as the starting quarterback.

On the surface it is a good storyline from a sporting perspective. The Denver Broncos starts the season with a 1-4 record before their starting quarterback gets injured. Their second string QB then leads them on a remarkable run of 5-1, complete with plenty of critical last ditch scoring plays and fourth quarter comebacks.

Now I don’t know much about the technical arguments for and against Tim Tebow as a player. I do tend to enjoy those who play any sport in an inventive way and it seems that he does that. What’s more is that from a win-loss perspective it seems to be effective. At the same time I understand that there are those who know the game who believe his unique style of play will soon enough be broken, some coach will figure out how to defend it and his mediocre ability to execute a traditional offense will render him obsolete—an interesting footnote in NFL lore, who mattered for a season but accomplished very little. Only time will prove whether or not the skeptics are correct.

But that skepticism is only one side of the controversy surrounding Tebow. There is another side, that the non-sporting media seems to have firmly latched onto, and that is his outspoken Christian faith and the way he expresses it both on and off the field. There are those on both sides of the sacred-secular divide who either love him or hate him for the very same things—kneeling to pray before games, thanking Jesus in press conferences, deferring praise for the Broncos recent success. What interests me most about all this is that despite the media’s scrutinizing it, he really doesn't seem all that outspoken about Christianity, or at least not in a way that should be at all offensive. Despite the attempts of some to paint him as some sort of bible-thumping fundamentalist he really just seems to be a someone who takes his religious convictions seriously.

Should this really be offensive? If a doctor took a moment to himself to pray before seeing a patient, asking for wisdom and skill to perform his job well, it would be harsh to criticize him for it. The only difference with Tebow seems to be that a camera is on him.

Of course it is true that Tebow is intentional in what he says, that his consistent expressions of faith are in their own way evangelical. It is not too much to say that he is using his position of influence to express a belief that he holds. But why should that be offensive? To express one’s point of view is not only a legal right in this country it is also something most people do constantly. Even in cases where personal opinion does not match up with the majority view it usually doesn’t cause offense. Whether in trivial matters of taste (i.e. “I like the taste of anchovies”) or more important matters of political viewpoint (i.e. “I would vote for Ron Paul for president”) we generally allow people the room to hold opinions that are different from our own. You may hate anchovies, and you may think Ron Paul would be the worst person to lead the country, but my personal endorsement of these things should not open me up to hostility. If, however I insist that we get anchovies on a pizza that both of us will eat, or I compel or manipulate you to vote for Ron Paul against your convictions, then I have done something worthy of criticism. That said, I think it would be utterly irrational to suggest that Tebow praying before games, pointing to heaven when he pulls off a good play, or thanking Jesus in press conferences anyway denies someone else their liberty to hold a different position regarding faith. Nevertheless such displays of personal conviction are bothersome to us as a society and it must somehow be accounted for.

Stay with me on this, but at this point I believe it would be worthwhile to dip into the realm of the hip-hop and rap culture. Whether it is in liner notes or at awards ceremonies, it is frequent for a rapper begin his acknowledgments with the same line, or one very similar to it, that Tebow uses at press conferences, “I’d like to thank my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” The only criticisms I’ve heard of this practice within the R&B world has been from religious sources decrying the apparent hypocrisy. The secular world seems utterly unaffected by it.

Should we take away from this phenomenon that we are, as a culture, okay with a musician working hard to make an album that glorifies any number of things we culturally will deem morally reprehensible (self-aggrandizement, objectification of women, illicit drug use, gang violence) and then publicly thanking Jesus for making that work possible? While at the same time we are not okay with an athlete performing well in his sport and then doing the same? If so what does that say about as a society? The only conclusion that I can draw from this apparent contradiction is that we are only okay with expressions of religious faith if we don’t think the person expressing it really means it.

It is precisely because the rapper exhibits so little religious conviction in his art and lifestyle that we find his expression of faith inoffensive and non-threatening. Tim Tebow’s expressions of faith seem instead to be indicative of a sincere and earnest faith in a God who is worthy of glory and calls his followers to humility. In short, we can disregard it when Dr. Dre says it. “Don’t worry,” we think “he doesn’t mean anything by it.” But when Tim Tebow says it we worry that it means something.

To say it another way it seems that as a society we are more comfortable with hypocrisy than integrity. And that should make us worry.

--------

I found this article from a secular perspective very thought provoking:
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/11/the-refreshing-seriousness-of-tim-tebow/249151/

Rest

2011-01-09T14:04:00.001-08:00

It's a words sort of the day. The kind of day one might spend curled up reading a book while the fire crackles. Or maybe the kind of day one might spend writing a blog post. One of the two. My wife and i just so happen to be covering both of those bases.

It snowed today here in Dallas. Not much, but enough to look pretty while it fell and collect in places that were cold and not too wet from the several hours of rain that had preceded them. It is helping along the general mood of the day. A time of hibernating. A time to rest and reflect.

In the Creation account the day starts with the evening "it was evening and morning on the first day". The Sabbath also begins with the sun going down. In George MacDonald's book "Lilith" the Raven points out that this means each day's rest precedes it's work. He argues no one can deserve a good night's sleep, instead God in His mercy gives us rest before we need it, preparing us for what is to come.

It feels like big things are coming. Life has gotten bigger than it ever has been even though i feel like i am more than ever mired in the concerns of just getting by. Struggling to figure out how to provide for my wife and child to be while also being faithful for the calling i feel God has laid upon us as a family. But these few weeks feel like a beautiful time to sleep easy and dream beautiful dreams. To rest before we work.

love,
luke

What you can expect...

2010-12-19T16:48:00.000-08:00

So, the blog yet lives. It has been revived from the ash-heap of spam and neglect. Sort of. There is still a lot of spam comments on older entries that i've yet to delete. Maybe i will someday, but don't count on it. However! I am now moderating comments, so there will be no new spam. Hooray!

Why is the blog being revived? Well, i haven't written much poetry lately, so it's not for that reason. And i don't have many stories to tell, so it's also not for that reason. But life is moving forward and i am hoping that very soon there will be stories to tell and (hopefully) poems to write and i would like to get back in the habit of sharing. If the Lord so wills Sarah and i will soon be missionaries and i would love to have a venue for keeping with people back home and across the world. Blogs seem to be handy for that.

So even though we don't have a time-line yet i figured i might as well get into the practice of putting myself out there in writing. If anyone still reads i hope you enjoy. Maybe this bit of virtual space will be useful for something yet.

love,
luke

Spam spam spam

2010-12-13T15:14:00.001-08:00

I'm so sorry my precious blog. I neglected you for so long and now you are so incredibly spam ridden.

love,
luke

Thoughts worth thinking but not writing down

2010-03-25T07:43:00.000-07:00

I wrote sometime in September (or perhaps October?) that i was going to take a break from theological ranting and rambling. That i was going to step down of the soapbox for a while and not use this space as a place to sermonize or diatribe until i could learn how to speak the truth in love. Well, i'm still working on learning that. And i'm learning under a new tutor called matrimony, gentler and more difficult than any professor i've yet sat under. I confess i still have a long way to go, longer than i ever initially expected.

But as the months have passed since i was last in the academic setting, and as my life settles into a more normal civilian routine i do find myself musing on questions of contemporary importance. But i beginning to realize that just because a thought may be worth thinking that by no means entails it is worth writing down, much less for others to read. Our meditations may instruct and enlighten our own mind, but they to me to be almost entirely contingent upon the vast and incomprehensible matrix of our own minds and emotions, and therefore largely incommunicable. A word only intelligible to the mind to which it is native.

So even as i find myself reading again (i had forgotten how wonderful fiction is!) and as my mind begins to return to its lettered ways i think i will consider a more regular return to this space. But not to set down weighty things deeply entangled with my own peculiar heart, but perhaps to record snatches of rhymes, beautiful occurrences, the happenings in my herb garden: things that can be understood as they are and for what they are, that require no great intellectual effort to interact with.

love,
luke

Repenting of a Common Sin

2009-10-27T20:00:00.001-07:00

All that ever Is and Was
Knelt down before us
Rolled Himself up, broke His own back
Slit His wrists and bled out wine

And we stand before that sacrifice
And fight over what meanings are rightly found
In the mystery
So if the wine stops flowing
If the wheat stops flowering
If our ribs stick out
And our mouths go parched
Who can we blame but ourselves?

The bounty of the universe
Lay down before us, broken so we could be one
Bleeding so we could have peace
And we traded theology for grace
And a fistfight for our wedding bed.

Thus the whisper comes, "Repent"

The Wind blows through the Wheat
It shakes my knees
And i am awestruck, hungry
Before these mysteries.

-------

love,
luke

Kitsune facing the Sun

2009-10-21T18:58:00.000-07:00

Go down to the river
Just before dawn
The water stirs
A crane flies
Through rising mist

The river does not lie
The river runs straight
between the boundaries of the banks
Weaving like the crane
Working life into the earth

The river runs down to the sea
Spills its song into the waves
Wastes its life
Nourishing
What is never sated
Filling
What is never filled

But the fox on the bank is a liar
But not a thief
A trickster
Who might devour children
But only as a joke
If a pun could be made

The mists rise
The crane flies
The river runs to the sea
And dies
And the fox lies beside the river
Pondering the next deception.

But after sudden sunrise
When the mists scatter
And the crane cries
The river runs on (but no longer dies)
And the fox turns away
Before the light
His seven tails shining briefly
Before he descends to the den
From which, one day
He will never rise.

-------

love,
luke

The death of the small gods

2009-10-20T08:05:00.001-07:00

He took the god down to the river
Thinking it might drown
He took it by the horns
Shore off it's beard
Ripped off it's ears
Broke it and buried it on the bank

And one day that bank washed away
The rotten god washed to the endless sea
A year of jubilee was declared
"Free," The birds sang, "free, free, free."

And as i leave
The river goes on flowing unseeing
The trees go on growing unhearing
(but singing with the birds)
And the god's small voice stilled
And unheard.

-------

love,
luke

Exitus, Reditus, and Stasis

2009-09-22T19:58:00.001-07:00

Christ did not shake the dust from His feet
Upon ascension
It clings to Him still
Though He walks now in heaven
That inglorious stink
Goes with Him.
Suspending his form
Cruciform between
The realms of Spirit and dust.

Christ did not shake the dust from His feet
Upon leaving Eden
In the loins of Adam and the belly of Eve
The seed remained housed in
Vessels of clay,
Grace laying wait.

And so we, banished from Eden
And not yet ascended
We, frail children clothed in ashes
Housed in dust,
When we again
Are in the presence
We will see that we never left
And that He never left us.

-------

love,
luke

For the kids at Regent (a meditation on James 1:26 and 27)

2009-09-14T18:02:00.000-07:00

This is for the kids at Regent, and seminarians across the world. We few who care, who debate with passion the important issues. Who are complimentarian or egalitarian. Who know and care about words like supralapsarianism and ecumenism. Who think Calvin was bastion of orthodoxy (or heresy). Who study for the ministry in hallowed halls of the academy instead of on the streets of the downtown east side. This is for me. And by the grace of God it will be the last thing of its kind that i write for many months.

I must confess i grow weary. It is so easy to be drawn into debate. It is so easy to passionately believe that these things matter. I confess that i am both the origin and perpetuation of so much useless discussion regarding women in ministry, homosexual marriage, predestination, and ecclesial unity. But ministry, love, salvation, and unity do not happen because of my debates. They certainly do not happen because of my all too frequent vitriol or venom. And i confess that i am weary even as i perpetuate the discussion, even as i rehash old ideas that aren't my own to counter old ideas that are not the property of my interlocutors. We identify ourselves as Calvinist, Egalitarian, Pro-Family, Protestant (yet Ecumenical). But i wonder, are we really just fools? Do we forsake the gospel when we get wrapped up in ideas about our faith when the substance of religion that is pure and undefiled is this: "to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world."

Doctrine is important; i'm sure Jesus cares about homosexuals, and even about whether or not they should marry. And i have definite opinions on that topic (which may or may not be shared by Jesus). But that is not the substance of my faith, and until i can meet non-Christians who, when finding i am studying for the ministry, do not first ask me about homosexuality, women's issues, abortion, or George Bush perhaps i should be focusing on the important things like showing the world a pure and undefiled religion. We have been drawn into debates, debates about important things, debates that really do inform people's lives. But if we go one verse before James' definition of pure religion we read this damning line: "If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person's religion is worthless."

So i confess, i have lived with an unbridled tongue, and have done violence against Christ's gospel because of it. I can no longer speak authoritatively about anything because my religion is all to often worthless. So i will keep my opinions, but i will keep them to myself, at least until my tongue is bridled and the substance of my religion is not debate, but love. I don't know if this applies to you, but i think this semester might be a good time for me to practice silence.

love,
luke

Soil

2009-09-08T17:21:00.001-07:00

I.

We are waiting for this soil to be lifted up
We creatures of earth
Toes like roots,
We are trees,
Cursing those who hang their love on us

II.

We are waiting for this
Soil to be lifted up
The seed has entered field
But how long the days
Between
Plow time and harvest
April and October
We think of what is coming
And what will be.

III.

We are waiting for
This soil to be lifted up
But how hard the sacrifice of the sickle
The sacrifice of the fruit tree
That sanctified earth
Every mother's agony in bringing life through birth
That furrowed bleeding brow plowed through
Hanging off of our misshapen branches
The fruit of all our labor rotting in a tomb

IV.

We are waiting
For this soil to be lifted up
For the earth to rise heavenward
Or for heaven to come to earth
And for all of us
The stuff of this world
To be as seeds and grains of wheat
Becoming what we always were
And yet still are yet to be.

-------

love,
luke

The End

2009-08-26T09:01:00.000-07:00

Full stop.
The world drops into God's lap
He turns it around slowly
Considering

There is a sequence to time
That is a mystery of Christ
The mind of God wrapping up itself
Like we who try to understand amoebas
Finding it difficult
We find our downward limit
Until a greater greatness exceeds it.

And this mysterious Sequence
Leaves me here,
At another limit
And another end
I whisper: "Kiss me Christ"
I scream: "Come quickly"
And i know somehow that these days are last
That what comes after
Will always be distant from what came before
That as in Bethlehem
(though smaller than even that blessed smallness)
That we are now after and before
That you are the last one i would ever want
Preceding the First only in time.
A strange mystery of life.

Full stop.
The world is a drop of water on your eyelash,
A yearning embrace slowly ending
Turning
Towards the last things
And what i pray will be
A poem showing what will come
When the First at last returns to us.

-------

love,
luke

Some things

2009-08-24T08:53:00.000-07:00

"Be strong and courageous, for you shall cause this people to inherit the land that I swore to their fathers to give them." Joshua 1:6

"I will tell of the decree: The LORD said to me, 'You are my Son; today I have begotten you. Ask of me and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possessions.'" Psalm 2:7

First a confession: i have returned like a defeated soldier. I have been intimidated by the size of the problems before us. I have at times lost hope for my Beloved to cover all of us and our sin with His Kingship and blood. I left in confidence and returned in fear. I left in the arrogance of my own strength and have returned knowing myself to be incapable and weak.

But Your love cries out to me to be strong and courageous. To take my weakness and my fear and let it be the vessel for your strength and gospel audacity. I am still too scared, too frail to promise You that i will obey perfectly, that i will go in Your strength, fearing You alone. But i swear by Your goodness that i want to. And i am sure that by Your grace i one day will.

And so i will start again where i should have always begun. Christ give Your Church the nations. Let Your glory spread from one end of the earth to the other. Make every idol collapse before You, every sin be swept aside. Call us Lord, and give us the grace to go. Go with us as we go with You.

"Do you not say, 'There are yet four months, then comes the harvest?' Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see that the fields are white for the harvest." John 4:35

love,
luke

Quote of the day

2009-08-17T13:04:00.000-07:00

"...[O]ne of [the brain's] functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary and turn the unusual into the usual. Because if this was not the case, then human beings, faced with the daily wondrousness of everything, would go around wearing big stupid grins.... They'd say 'Wow!' a lot. And no one would do much work.... Part of the brain exists to stop this happening. It is very efficient. It can make people experience boredom in the middle of marvels."

Terry Prachett, Small Gods

-------

love,
luke

An Apocalypse

2009-08-16T22:18:00.000-07:00

On my way into town at noon i met a
Child with bright eyes
Who looked up at mine and said,
"The world will end soon"
And the
Crow on the shoulder said,
"Praise God!"
And the
Child said,
"Praise God!"
And i went along my way,
Amazed.

And a few steps farther into town the
Child with bright eyes
Grabbed me by the hand
And danced
The way that only children can
And the
Crow on the shoulder said,
"Dance!"
And the
Child said,
"Dance!"
But i could hear no music
So i went along my way
Afraid

And the crow left the shoulder
Landed lightly in a withered tree
And looked me in the eyes
"Dance" said the bird
As the
Child still danced
"Dance" said the bird
"For the world is burning"

And i turned around and saw the
World burning the
Child crying the
Crow descending the
Dead rotting the
Sky splitting and
Grace spilling out

And i said,
"Praise God!"
And the
Child said,
"I am praised"
And the
Crow said,
"I will go my way
Amazed"
And i said
"I go mine
Afraid."

And the Child
Called the crow
And swallowed him whole
Cried out our flames
And sang a song

And the
World said,
"Dance!"
And the
World said,
"Praise!"
And the
World
Danced
And
Praised
And
Ended.

(Praise God!)

-------

love,
luke

Unknown, Unrequired

2009-08-08T09:58:00.000-07:00

Everything i once believed in
I put into a whitewashed house
Packed it carefully away for the winter
And i am happy now to say
It all burned down in Your grace

So everything is new again
You remain unchanged
And i remain on the outskirts of Your ways
Everything i thought a knew
Wasn't so much a lie as simply
Less than Your perfect truth

And all You ever do is continue
In Your vast unchanging dance
Surprising all our tiny minds
Loving, Giving, Gracing us with Life

-------

love,
luke

A Strange Problem of Geometry

2009-08-05T22:14:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to live on the edge of myself. And yet i have a hard time making it to the fringes. A strange conundrum for one so small. When i try to cover the distance between self-centeredness and self-forgetfulness i find myself unimaginably large, my arrogance stretching out to the far corners of the earth. I am utterly incapable of reaching the edge.

I'm trying to live in the center of Christ. I want to be in the middle of His heart. I want to hear it beat so loudly that i can't help but dance to the rhythm. And yet, in spite of His largeness i find myself always on the edge. I know He is infinite, that His love covers all of Creation, that the farthest i can flee in any direction takes me no farther from Him than i was when i started running.

So the dilemma is this. I am small and yet cannot find the edge of myself, He is large and yet anything but the outskirts of His ways remain ever elusive. He is a gravity i cannot resist and yet i seem to find myself always falling towards and yet never seemingly moving anywhere.

So my prayer is this, that i would ever decrease, that the distant from center to edge would decrease. That i would have the courage to move ever away from myself and ever deeper into this beautiful God i cannot but love. I know that no matter which way i run He pursues me. I can feel that He has hemmed me in, that He is the love "that does not leave us but prevents us everywhere" from stepping too far away from His will.

I want to live at the Center, not the fringe. The place where the fire burns brightest, where my fears are exposed and burned away by such a terrific love that i can't put it into words. I know such a place exists, such a place must exist. I can see it always just beyond my sight, can feel it just beyond my fingertips. Beyond the edge of myself, my self-centered concern for finding God for attaining truth. How does one forget oneself except by falling into such a Glorious Existence? How does one meet such a Being except by arriving? How does one find except by being found?

I would but cannot, i cannot and yet i will. I can feel Him drawing closer though every time i stop to check the distance between us it always seems the same. So i pray i would learn to fix my eyes on Him, ignoring the distance between us. That i would watch the eyes that stare lion-like in the night from the fires i build to keep my fears at bay, the eyes that look down Father-like when i lift mine up in desperate prayer for the small things i am desperate for, the eyes that gaze, that were captured by mine (mystery of mysteries), that call me dove and lily though i know i am dark and too much like an unkempt garden. If i can fix my eyes on His largeness, if He can fixate me upon Himself, my smallness will fade into His greatness, my edge will kiss His Center.

Oh, finally, finally, let it be soon.

love,
luke

A Defiant Nevertheless

2009-08-01T09:48:00.000-07:00

There are corners to my body,
Elbows, knees, groin, heart-
Places where things settle,
Stomach, liver, kidney, mind-

These angles dark, these edges harsh
When in the weary night i
Suddenly am set upon light
I see, briefly, the scurrying things
Settling out to places
Hard to reach, hard to clean

And how long this last night lasted
How tiresome the mornings long delay
And the moths, the mice--all
Things skittering and gibbering
That which wakes me stupidly
In the night
Filling me with anxious terror
Keeps me stillborn in bed
Not knowing what was dreamed
And what was real
This collection of errors
Drawn by the cold dry darkness
Of a soul asleep
Have gathered in the deep places
And feed off forgotten grace

But there is a morning
When the sunrise shatters the windows
Is seen through the blind
A light so terrible and bright
It makes a sound like a trumpet
A mystery more fearsome than my corners
Laying every angle straight

In the light of the day
I turn at last to my corners and gently say,
"Now i am awake and unafraid."

-------

love,
luke

An Apology

2009-07-28T11:16:00.001-07:00

Who will answer for the fundamentalists? This is our generations modern F-bomb. Just ask a group of 20-30 year old Christians if they are fundamentalists and see the indignation. It is a sentiment i understand but one that also makes me profoundly uncomfortable. See, i was raised by self-described fundamentalists. My dad introduced me to rock and roll, beer, and was perfectly alright with my taking up pipe smoking once i turned eighteen. Mom was a little less into the smoking (still is) but after every one of my band's practice sessions in high school she offered my band-mates cookies and told us we sounded great.

All of this is to say i experienced no small amount of cognitive dissonance upon leaving home. See, i grew up in a community where being a fundamentalist simply meant you thought the Bible was true (we didn't care about that word for word dictation, why should we?), and that Jesus was God. Certainly there were people in our little town who no doubt thought i was going to hell because i spiked my hair, had a long wallet chain, and listened to Nirvana. But those weren't the only fundamentalists, i mean, i was a fundamentalist. Or at least, i thought i was.

Now i'm not one to insist we keep the term fundamentalist around. Obviously it means something very different now to most people outside of the church, and my experience in small town East Texas is clearly not normative. What i will insist on is a change in the way young Christians choose to relate to fundamentalism. Granted everything they got wrong, they remain our brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers. And the more i try to save face with culture by alienating myself from members of my family in Christ the less i am helping to bring unity to the body of Christ.

Instead of 25 year-old seminarians who love to mock fundamentalists why not 25 year-old seminarians who apologize for fundamentalists? As a North American Christian it is my heritage, like it or not. And as much as me and many of my peers try to distance ourselves from it, it is in our DNA, so unless we apologize for it, no one will and the name of Christ will remain sullied. As someone who is opposed to gay-bashing, patriotic religion, and brow-beating; i am still in debt to fundamentalists, regardless of what it became in culturally understanding as well as practice.

So here it goes. I am sorry for what we have done. I am sorry for fundamentalism that marginalizes the very people Jesus came to love and form relationship. I am sorry that we have conflated middle class American culture with Christian morality. I am sorry that we have been more concerned about protecting ourselves, our families, and our livelihoods than showing Christ's love to the poor and needy. I am sorry, i hope you can forgive us.

love,
luke

27/7/2009

2009-07-26T23:54:00.001-07:00

I looked around the room
And noticed none of the beautiful
People had faces

But You came into our swearing,
Drinking, smoking--all the things
Our mothers told us wasn't nice
Polite and kind;
You entered into every last broken
Word
Before time began
And held them all
Comfortably in hand.

None of it mattered
The politics, the posturing
Everything fell empty at
Your bloody feet
And i looked up--and saw
You
Neither faceless nor nameless
But rooted deeply in time and space,
Ready to rise up
From any grave we shove You down into

For those who have already descended
So far
Can easily rise from such
A simple thing as death

And still
You are rising
And i pray you always rise
Because tonight
All of us, Your ugly children
Sat around
Drinking, smoking, swearing
Surreptitiously praying that
You would come back
Someday.

-------

love,
luke

Mission

2009-07-25T07:52:00.000-07:00

"I will multiply your offspring as the stars of the heaven and will give to your offspring all of these lands. And in your offspring all the nations of the earth shall be blessed." Genesis 26:4

Christianity makes no sense without an understanding of mission. From the very outset God's covenant with His people has been one of blessing. It was misunderstood at times, it began to be thought that as they were chosen Israel had the subjugate their neighbors by force, to exert their authority. And as the nation-state of Israel consistently failed to be the blessing they were designed to be God sent His Son in the fullness of time. Coming first to the Jew and then to the Gentile, eating with tax collectors and sinners. Healing Canaanites and talking with Samaritans. Little did the Israelites realize at the time that the long promised and looked for conquest of the nations was at last beginning.

To conquer the nations however we must first be conquered. We must go the way of the cross, and before it, Christ in the garden, "Not my will, but Thine." This is victory, this will bring healing to the nations. Salvation belongs to no one else. And salvation is more than going to heaven someday. The Kingdom is near, it is within you, it is among us. The invasion has begun and the only thing barring it's full fledged conquest of the world is how infrequently we pray "Not my will, but Thine." If we want to see the world changed, if we want to end poverty, hunger, slavery, sickness; if we would conquer death, let us go up with Christ to Gethsemane to listen to the voice of our Father.

"After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, 'Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!'" Revelation 7:3

love,
luke

Prayer

2009-07-23T14:20:00.000-07:00

There was a time when Your name
Was on our lips like breath
Your Spirit moved our fingers
Tied our bones together
We danced in fire
And fell like water
We were alive

But deep cries to deep
At the silence we now keep

Love casts out fear
For there is no fear in love
So, God above, i am afraid
I must confess
That these days i am loveless

And so i pray a day will come
That a whisper will wind its way
And Your Name will find a voice
Through the interstitial space
Gather up the dry bones
Put breath back in these lungs

And when it comes we will dance
Like a firestorm
And fall like an avalanche
And we will sing like thunderbolts
And shake the foundations of the silent earth.

So wake us from our slumber
For we have had too much of silence
And must be taught again to sing.

-------

love,
luke

Fare forward.

2009-07-19T13:43:00.000-07:00

A little over a year ago someone i hardly recognized stepped of a plane from Brussels to New York and set foot on America for what seemed like the very first time. The birth and death he had gone through in the year before was only matched by the birth and death he has gone through in the year since then. But now when they see him they say, "There is a brightness in your eyes." And they are beginning to say things like, "Welcome back" and he is beginning to realize that somehow he went somewhere, but he went there as someone who was not himself (if that makes any sense). But it is himself now, and even though these people only met him since he became that someone else they can see that somehow he is returned.

It is strange and joyous homecoming, this rebecoming one's self again in a place one has never been one's self in before. I swear that sentence makes sense. Trust me or trust the old me who wasn't for awhile but is coming back to haunt me with joy; the me who had bright eyes. I am starting to see that i am not some static still unmoving thing, and every step i take puts me in some new context and makes me into someone else and the bigger the steps the bigger the changes and the more i become an alien to myself and my history. To think anything else to assume my own eternal immutability a damned and arrogant deception that leads to a Hell of frustration.

I am inconstant, and thank God for it. I am glad to be the person living on the side beyond the last two years. I am glad that i was the person stepping off the plane who slipped into a deep darkness and is now being lifted up into an unfathomed light. I am grateful despite my inability to understand just exactly what happened there and here. I am grateful to be someone new, i am grateful for Christ re-creativity in me, His willingness to make every joy new in the morning.

So all this is to say thanks. Thank you Jesus for carrying me this far. And thanks to any and all of you who have shared this small part of the Journey with me. I couldn't have made it without you and i am glad to be still becoming and still traveling ever deeper into mysteries i really can't hope to ever comprehend.

love,
luke

Lament

2009-07-16T23:08:00.000-07:00

Your every thought a madness we can't enter
Our sanity prohibiting compassion for
This splintered world. Your wholeness looking
Mad, prophetic, terrifying like

The color red dashed across fields of poppies
Old fields salted with blood of dying boys
Old men watching their peers fertilize the soil
Their souls elsewhere waiting for home and fire.

Everything is upside down, this broken lens
These broken eyes, broken ears hearing
Disjointed melodies, harmonies sounding like dissonance
You Mad Man Christ. You dying God,
Plain Way,
Obtuse Truth,
Un-re-dying Life.

In Your simplicity You look broken,
And so we must believe our eyes
Cannot not yet see.

-------

love,
luke

To a Cloud outside of Billings at Sunset

2009-06-12T23:30:00.000-07:00

What a little wisp you are
Blowing lonely down the long Montana hills
You and i travel a space together
Driven by nature and love
I think of where you rose
The vast Pacific Ocean
Where you rose and fell as rain
Before blowing up across the beach
And then against the coastal mountains where you fell
Across the dry stretches outside of Spokane
Until again you met another decimating mountains
You are so small now
So frail against the evening sky
The wide dry plains of the continent before you

I remember when i lived on the far edge of those plains
Longing for my sister on the edge of the ocean
I remember thinking when the rains fell
That perhaps these clouds were Seattle leftovers
The ones that made it over the mountains
Across the plains
To the far edge where i say looking West

You have traveled far fair little cloud
But now
I live on the edge of the ocean
And i am driven by the wind up over the mountains
Across those wide dry endless plains
What is left of me is blowing down
These long lonely hills outside of Billings
For i left a bit of me there
On the edge of a lake on the edge of the plains
And now, like gravity
I'm falling towards a place that i can't help call home
I'll race you, little cloud, little rain
And i'll give whatever is left of me
Whenever i arrive
At wherever i find myself
To all of those whoevers in my life
That keep calling my heart on
Making the long lonely drive
Worth all the while.

-------

love,
luke

Pruning a Fern (25/5/2009)

2009-05-25T21:06:00.000-07:00

I have never pruned a fern before
But this ancient thing
Beside a more ancient stump
Is in desperate need
Neglected in its old age
Contained by a thoughtless blade
Sheered brutally into shape
New growth mingled with old
Moldering

I snip back the old woody stems
Deep into the tangled knot
Of brown and green
The rotting heart alive
With wood mites and fungi
I wonder if it is the right season
If i am making the right cuts
I regret the autumn spent indoors
Watching the rain fall
I should've been on my knees in the mud
Pruning the old growth
Trusting the roots were deep and strong enough
Knowing in spring the green would return
Bright and emerald and full
But my hands were rooted in another soil

And now my heart races, strangely
Practicing this late resurrection
Returning the old death to the older earth
Nourishing the place from which it came
Giving it life by taking away
Standing humbled, despondent
The growth of years in piles around it
While its new green arms
With their curling and unfinished hands
Stretch naked in praise to the silent sky
Unmistakably alive.

------

love,
luke

Seven Sketches for Holy Week

2009-05-23T23:26:00.000-07:00

I.

I do not want to wake up
To another morning
Without

You

I have waited long
So that i can't remember what
I'm waiting for

II.

If you are thirsty
Said the sky
If you are thirsty
Said the earth
If you are thirsty
We will thirst
With you

This our second divorce
Necessary distinction
So we could feel the need

III.

Stretched seductively to the sky
Opening her petals to the world
Reveling in the green
Swallowing up the sea
The pea blossom revealed in color
What the monks would find in numbers

IV.

Sun above us
Moon beneath us
Stars surround us
We are fixed in a dance
We could not escape

V.

Oh, Leviathan
We called you
To begin
In immensity
The singing of the sea

VI.

I do not want to wake up
To another morning
Without

You

I have waited long
And now i know
What i am waiting for

VII.

Rest, beloved
As Christ in a tomb;
Creation begins tomorrow in
This the land
Of our resurrection.

-------

love,
luke

A Prayer

2009-05-19T11:19:00.000-07:00

Save us Barack
And our blessed manufacturing
Of six cylindered fuel efficiency
All the horsepower at half the cost to the greenery
We see from our windows speeding by
Save us Henry Ford from the work of our hands
From working for the joy of it and the burden
Of having to love what we make and making things lovingly
Save us you gold standard, you parity of purchasing power
You favorable ratio of imports and exports
Save us you dead presidents and statesmen
Save us and our economy of spending
What isn't ours on things we make the world need.

We have cluttered our nest
With twine stolen from other birds
The red from a crow
The blue from a meadowlark
The white from a thrush
We have built ourselves the grandest love nest
And we shove our eggs over the ledge

Oh Hunter come and save us,
Fowler, Falconer come and flush us out
Logger and Timberman save us,
Destroy our comfortable rotting snag of a house
Our whitewashed house filled with the ghosts
Of Bosnia, Panama, Vietnam

Save us Christ save us
Even if it takes our destruction
Save us from our lying hands
Constructing falsehoods
Creating nothing but
Better credit to sacrifice
On the altar of consumption.

-------

love,
luke

Concerning defiance

2009-05-17T23:32:00.000-07:00

Barth once described joy as a "defiant 'Nevertheless!'" As a self professed contrary (as Berry might put it, a mad farmer) i find both of those words very appealing. Defiance is something i understand on a visceral level. And as i prone to find stubbornly find exceptions the second word does nicely as well. As Rich Mullins once sang, "I'd rather fight you for something I don't really want than take what you give that I need." Certainly not the easiest line to take through life, certainly not the most Christian, certainly in desperate need of some breaking.

And yet (see, here i go again), there is something immensely freeing in defiance. In open, clear, honest to God standing against the wind. As one of my theology professors at Wheaton once said, we all come out of the womb giving God the finger. In context i took this to mean we all start life rebellious to some degree. For some growing up in faith means gradually losing rebelliousness. Virtue and maturity are instilled and rebellion leaves with spiritual adolescence. For some of us the best we can hope for seems to be turning our rebellion to the right corners.

I am pretty sure i will die giving my finger to something. I hope i die giving it death, confident, as Donne was, that death is defeated and shall very shortly be done away with completely. Perhaps i will outgrow it, but it seems that life is very difficult for me when i do not have something to stand against. Or rather, let me say it is difficult for me to imagine living a life in this universe in such a way that i would not be painfully aware of something that i must stand against. Again, i confess i am a contrary.

What i have been toying with in these latter years is the idea that this standing against posture is perhaps useful to the Church. But then when i look at what the life of defiance as spiritual service looks like i find myself quite frightened and tempted towards social activism or farming or running away to a cabin in the Yukon where i would make things out of wood and trap for a living. What i mean to say is, i've been a bully of bullies since i first found out i could take a punch, you show me a bully and i am likely to pick a fight. This worked out fine in high school, i got in a few fist fights and scuffed up my knuckles a bit. But what happens when you enter the world of the church and politics.

These days it seems like everywhere i look i don't see anything but bullies. And at the end of the day i look in the mirror and realize the one bully i need to stand up against the most is staring back at me when i brush my teeth. I've never beat myself yet and not sure i know how. I am accustomed to taking care of things, especially in a fight, but what happens when i'm the one who needs to be taken care of? These days it seems like there isn't a greater enemy than me. Christ have mercy, defy and defeat me.

love,
luke

This embodies everything i believe in.

2009-05-15T11:37:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvltzwkUEEA

-------

love,
luke

On Observing the Dutch Masters

2009-05-12T22:52:00.000-07:00

I.

The needle threads a line
From my thigh to my heart
And back again. Start over
Return to center
Return

Two central lines placed in the middle
My stomach could not feel them.
It has not turned like this
In years. Compassion, you
Distant insufferable companion
You miserable wretch thing
I can only see the vacant smiles.
The things that i said
The things that went away
The things that remained
All of these things faded.
All of these and more.

II.

I am a rabid dog, confused by a virus i do not understand
I am angry because i am confused, confused because i am infected
I am the random evolution of a half-living thing
I am infecting the saliva and confusing the brain
I am teeth and claws and rabies.

My stomach hurts, mother. My heart is not beating,
I cannot feel it beat i cannot
Retreat further into myself
The space between my cells is full of atoms
I am terrified of what has become of me
I am teeth
I am claws
I am a rabid dog
Scared of what is happening

III.

Put on your black dress
You are going dancing
And i am not invited

I hide behind
Absurdist lines

(So find me.)

IV.

Return
To the center
Where the fever breaks
The stomach stills
The line threads up from the earth
Spilled out like blood
Moving upward to the treetops
Stopped by gravity, let our science
Damn our souls to unconstructed heavens
It is enough that you loved me
Even if i was still sleeping.

For now i am awake though unaware.
Silent, blind. I shall fall asleep
And let this come to be.

-------

love,
luke

The Unafraid

2009-05-12T00:33:00.000-07:00

I take your silence as a sign of having heard.

love,
luke

is/was/will

2009-04-16T20:45:00.000-07:00

The single most beautiful word in all of scripture is a third person perfect middle/passive indicative. It is a strange word, said in a strange place. In the middle of his agony the man Jesus declared it over His creation. If the context given by His life had proved to be different it could have been a horrible and unmitigated condemnation, but because of who He proved Himself to be it was the greatest word of grace the world has perhaps ever heard. Just before His death, after a night and a day of suffering and abandonment, at the point of complete desolation when everything tying Him to either heaven or earth had been stripped away He utters the most victorious word.

We might have expected the word to be in the active voice, a declaration of what our victor had accomplished or achieved. The moralizers would expect such a word to be an imperative word, a commandment made by a king to his slaves. The cynical and depressed (myself included) are somewhat surprised that the word was not in the future tense. But it wasn't, even at His moment of victory Jesus declares on behalf of the other, He declares the way things are not the way they should be, and He declares what has already been accomplished as opposed to what shall be. With the Resurrection still three days off He tells us the most beautiful thing.

There is no noun in the Greek, none is needed, Jesus looks out over His good creation which rebelled and fell away from His goodness, who could not bear to look upon Him so they had Him executed as a common criminal; He looks out and declares that everything is ended. It is all over. Surely at the moment it sounded like a despairing cry, the cry of a Man who knew He was about to die. It was this, and more, it was also the declaration of a God who had written the most beautiful story ever told and had just penned the climactic chapter with His blood. At last the Sabbath rest, the Shalom of God could descend upon Creation. There was nothing left to be done. It had been ended, everything was over, the story was penned, the book was shut. Tetelestai, it is finished.

love,
luke

Compline

2009-04-07T23:11:00.000-07:00

As is typical, when i have a dozen other things to do, i cannot stop thinking of things to say about the things i have no immediate need to say things about. So i will write this briefly and then be off to bed.

Somewhere a turn occurred. Nine months in i feel like i may finally be beginning to arrive at a semblance of home. I have way too much to do in the next two weeks and not a clue as to what i'll be doing in the three months that follow, but somehow that doesn't matter right now. The cherry trees are finally blooming, but i find myself missing the mango rains. The seemingly endless drizzle has gone and find myself missing that first smell of ozone and rain evaporating off of a hot tin roof. I, unaccountably, miss the six rainless months of dust and smoke and coming home at night and worrying if scorpions have gotten in to my kitchen.

I miss Africa. I think i have for awhile, but have been too scared to say it meaningfully. I miss the people, the people who i didn't understand and the ones that didn't understand me. I miss enjoying a shower as the only time of the day when i was really cool. I miss the baobabs the horn-bills and the termite mounds. I do NOT miss the amoebic dysentery but i do miss the fried plantains for 100cfa with hot pimente. I miss speaking bad French badly to people who are amused that i'm trying to speak it all. I miss being able to surprise people by simply saying "hello" in their native language.

I miss evenings with no electricity playing guitar by candlelight and banishing all my fears and doubts with praise. I miss the nearness i had there, i miss hearing the drums at pagan funerals wafting through the trees at night and the anger and sadness it would put in my soul. I miss emotions that connected to a world deeper than grades and papers.

So now that i miss Cote d'Ivoire, now that i miss Zanakpokaha, now that i miss what i hard a time loving while i was there; now that i miss all that, i can honestly say, i think i'm okay with being here.

love,
luke

The blossoms smell sweet,
Sweeter as they wilt away--
Memory follows.

"You are the blood flowing through my fingers."

2009-03-20T15:54:00.000-07:00

This semester is not really going like i had planned or hoped. I am way behind on my reading and writing. I have yet to start counseling. I teeter between overwhelmed and apathetic. So i spent a few hours today baking bread. Tomorrow i want to build a house in the woods. The day after i want to build a boat that can sail around the world. I don't want to have to keep sticking words together, taking them off of pages mixing them up in my brain, and then pasting them back into paragraphs. Or rather let me say, i want to always love doing that and right now it just seems like a chore.

Strange that i read more and better books when no one's looking over my shoulder telling me i need to be reading. The first time i read any Kierkegaard all the way through was when i was traveling in England and was supposed to be reading the British Romantic poets. But as soon as i got back to school and my philosophy classes i put down the Kierkegaard and picked up the Donne and Eliot. Apparently i'm contrary.

I think i might take a break from this thing for awhile and revert to writing on paper. It is more constrained and more freeing. I can make words bigger and smaller but i can't erase them. I can draw a picture of what i'm feeling but i can't edit it later. It's nice to know that the constantly changing ones and zeroes of the digital world are not all i can access. There are indelible spaces, there are private quarters that aren't password protected.

So, God bless you all. I'm sure i'll pick this up again before too long. I just don't want to have to think about it for now.

love,
luke

"Let me go..."

2009-03-12T23:10:00.001-07:00

There was a time that i woke up with a fire in my belly. When the sun could not rise fast enough. I was frightened of neither death nor pain. There were things to do, problems to solve. There were dragons to slay and i had every confidence in my ability to slay them.

These days i'm still not scared of death. But i must confess, the next sixty years terrify me. If i have to wake up every morning for the next 30,000 days and drag myself out of bed to greet a flameless dawn it will be 30,000 too many.

I have felt a hunger for the holy. And nothing will satisfy until i feel that hunger again.

love,
luke

I knew that merit badge would come in handy...

2009-03-03T23:06:00.000-08:00

This morning i found an old map of my heart. I looked at the surrounding peaks and valleys, dusted off my boy scout skills, and located myself within its topography. I admit that i'm pretty close to the edge these days, on a tiny ridge of rock labeled "Santa Ana". I've fallen off this map before (but never too far mind you). My heart is riddled with holes from the times i've taken a step too far and put my foot through the paper. It's taped up though, stronger now than it was before, but harder to read in places. It's smudged a bit and some of the place names have been scribbled over, but i think it still reads well enough to navigate .

So if any of you are wondering where i've been these past few weeks or months or years all i have to say is this: i'm a long way away from where i want to be and i'm still not sure where all my wandering has taken me, but i'm certain this road leads back Home. I just wish i knew how long its gonna take to get there.

love,
luke

A bit of encouragement on a rainy day.

2009-02-23T18:54:00.001-08:00

-------

love,
luke

Human Shield (A Love Song)

2009-02-01T17:41:00.000-08:00

If it takes a shotgun in my back
To make you feel at ease, then press it
Against my kidney. Let your finger sit
On the trigger waiting for a mistake.
Break me open if you need to, don't wait
For my permission, i'll be your victim.
I will be your human shield. Let the grim
Truth of what we've done sink in. I can't hate
What you will do to me in your rage, i'm
The same thing. The gun is mine but the rage
Is something i never wanted. The wage
Of this is death; my sins are the outcry.
So let it lie. Keep the lives you will take
I will wait for you to make your mistake.

-------

love,
luke

A Prayer of Sorts (for more than just myself)

2009-01-27T20:29:00.000-08:00

I wish i could say this all gets easier with time. But i am not sure that time is the healer we all want it to be. I know that one day i will dance again but for now my feet are broken and heavy. I am so tired, tired beyond what i know to express. It is as if every beautiful died with the setting of the African sun.

You are the only thing i have left and You terrify me. Draw near to me because i am too near to draw near to You. I have hear your voice, i have seen it shatter mountains. I have heard rumors of You in the dark when i am cold and lonely. I have whispered your name in fear, afraid to touch what i cannot see, afraid to look on what i cannot understand. But i want to love You. I am scared. I am tired. I am undone. I guess this means Your work in me is just beginning.

love,
luke

The humiliation of the Church

2009-01-23T00:38:00.000-08:00

We will start with Christ and find in Him an end worth having. We must begin with His unity with the Father, we must begin with his death and resurrection. If we start anywhere else we start nowhere.

My dear sister, we shall all be ashamed. Because Christ commanded love and we have wrecked hate upon each other, Christ commanded unity and we have multiplied division. Christ commanded obedience to the law of grace and we have proliferated doctrine and so called orthodoxy and sacrificed our brothers and sisters to do so. We shall all be ashamed.

I am eager for this our humiliation. It gives me joy to know that when we are lowest we shall be exalted. When we are so broken that the lines we have drawn across our body no longer matter and no longer be pertinent. My sister, i love you. I want you to be whole so i pray that Christ humiliates you. And from such a beginning shall come an exalted end.

love,
luke

Untitled

2009-01-21T23:04:00.000-08:00

If i apologized for all i was,
Would that make all things well?
Or would Hell still linger on the fringe
Ready to swallow up
Every sin
I commit myself to mercy

And trust that simply will suffice
In the fullness of time.

love,
luke

A Demonic Theology

2009-01-16T17:20:00.000-08:00

WARNING: The following poem contains very graphic and offensive language. This is intentional and so in one sense i do not apologize. It is meant to be read in a context of grace, even though it may not come across as very graceful.

--------

There is a hole in my spine
Where every girl i've fucked crawls in and out
In an out, like
Snakes shedding their skin
I shed them,
Then leave them behind, so
I have taking to drawing black lines
I lace them up my arms
And down my back
Into my spine
They swell and grow
Putting roots deep into my heart
I am entangled by my own laws
The rules i hedged around you.

So there are days i stand before the mirror and recite:
"Jesus i know; of Paul i've heard a rumor;
But who am i?"

--------

love,
luke

Lovesong of a Deiphobe

2008-12-31T00:56:00.001-08:00

I was broken once,
Looking up your legs towards your
Face, i hated you then
I think i love you now.

Or say i haven't learned my lesson
And i keep returning
To the place, the sirens saying
"Forsake your courage, come and play."
Their melodies screaming
Into a heart slamming blood into my face
My hands, my feet.

There is a division here, between
What came before and what comes after:

This extremity of virtue, extremity of soul
Leaping into silence, faith
Leaping into doubt in order to be born as
Hope.

Don't forget, Father, your promises
To us your bastard children.

Returning to the division,
I cannot understand the leap,
From my faithless doubt
To the doubting faithful.
I know nothing, in any language
It comes out trivial
It comes out broken like your mouth
Like a smile, like a faithless
Hopeful doubter.

Love remains:
I know that i hated you once,
But now i pray
To love you.

-------

love,
luke

What We Never Wanted

2008-12-30T00:24:00.001-08:00

There is a dove flying into the mouth
Of every beautiful girl i ever knew
And i am pulling it out
By its tail feathers, coming up empty
I am breaking it into pieces
Devouring the sound

This moment is captured in time
Each moment set into history unremembered
Memorials and monuments notwithstanding
Our memories fading
And the long history of kisses
Stretching back into the clarity

Oh, what
Did you say?
"My hapless lover lays
Buried in the future"

The past has been
And always will be
This can only be redeemed by the future
And chance to fail anew
Strange grace.

There is a dove flying towards your open mouth
You are singing, screaming, praying, whispering
You are waiting, forever immortalized in time
Open wide.

-------

love,
luke

"Knowledge that has no use for language."

2008-12-28T18:35:00.000-08:00

The curse, or perhaps the blessing, of the philosopher is that at some level there is a drive to put everything in its proper place, to have things be well ordered. In the worst cases this tends to over-simplification that does violence to the particularity inherent in the universe, or on the other hand a frustration at the universe for not fitting neatly into categories so the assertion that all is absurd and there is no meaning or purpose to be found anywhere. I would like to place myself between these poles, to assert that there is both purpose and absurdity, and that these are not always exclusive of each other.

This leads me to think about truth. What is its origin? Is it purposeful or absurd (or both)? Frequently in the Western traditions we are prone to think of truth as the sum of factual propositions. Since truth is the ultimate data it is likewise propositional. Moral truths are also propositional: Do not steal, do not lie, do not murder. There may be qualification and nuance, but the nature of truth is seen as fundamentally propositional.

While i don't want to deny the existence of propositional truths (i.e. my brother has blue eyes, it is wrong to be proud), i do not think truth is in and of itself propositional. Or rather i do not think truth is always propositional, or even mostly propositional. It seems that truth is more often relational than propositional. Truth is sometimes absurd in the same way that persons are sometimes absurd. It is sometimes irrational in the way persons exceed rationality. It is frequently unable to put into propositional form.

This reveals an inherent weakness in the way we go about our religious educations. The scientific is given an undue precedence even in religious studies. It is certainly beneficial to study ancient languages and church history. But how do we study the absurdity of God? How do we enter into the poetic grammar of the Divine Self-Revelation? It is a project for which i feel rather ill-equipped. Any suggestions are welcome.

love,
luke

A Vision of Sunlight

2008-12-13T23:34:00.000-08:00

It is snowing out, not too hard, but still a proper snow. We had a nice slushy mix yesterday, but it ended up raining in the afternoon so it all went away. Now it is falling, a mist like snow, coating everything evenly and smoothly. Covering all the muddy blemishes of the earth. Making the world feel quieter, more subdued. At peace.

Yesterday i finished my last final exam, tomorrow i leave for Seattle. I have finished, for better or for worse, my first semester of grad school with out major incident. I wrote, what i feel, were competent and workmanlike papers. I contributed in class a moderate amount; sometimes asking stupid questions, occasionally making intelligent comments.

It is strange but i look forward and i see something akin to the weather. I see something beautiful and obscured. Something that makes me want to sit and ponder, something i have no desire of moving out into too quickly. I feel like i never really got out of third gear this semester. I feel duly exhausted, but not significantly smarter. I rehashed a lot of old questions from my undergraduate years, i expanded my understanding of the historical church. I did, in fact glean more factual information from the great corpus on offer from the academy. But i did not contribute, i did not think anything original or meaningful. I retread very old ground, and i wonder unto what end.

So i find myself looking back. And i see something painfully vivid and unassailable. I realize there is a great deal i need to think about, meditate on, pray through. I have carried an immense amount of baggage into and through this semester. I am still, in many ways, trying to process the significance of my graduation from Wheaton. Not to mention the significance of my time in Africa. In many ways my life since then seems unreal, something i have not lived but have watch being lived. My interactions with others seems scripted, the conversations carefully planned in order to lead to some plot point, some moral, or theme.

I do not know why i am here. I know how i got here, at least i can accurately recall the progression of events that point to me sitting here with an upset stomach, tired eyes, a fear of sleep, and the insane desire to write words and stare out the window at the snow falling in the streetlights. I believe there is a purpose to this, that it is not all madness. That there are certain things wanted of me, expected of me. Or replace those "of"s with "for"s. It is the same, really.

There is a tension humming through my life, it has been growing in slow crescendo ever since my years at Wheaton, perhaps it was there before, i just couldn't hear it. I cannot tell how loud it will get before it breaks or breaks me, but it seems nigh unbearable at times. I was meant for something more than this. I just cannot seem to decipher what.

It would be nice to have a few weeks alone. A few weeks of solitude, in a cabin perhaps. With a wood stove and plenty of wood that needed splitting. A comfortable chair, a warm quilt, a stack of books. Books that i didn't have to read, or understand. Books that could be read or not read. Books that were like very old friends, books that one could sit with comfortably and not be forced to work too hard at yet had a warm richness that invited the reader to go ever deeper.

I wish that Jesus would come and visit me in that cabin. That he would sit down by the fire and warm his hands, that he would help me cook a stew. That we could eat it together, that we could sit among the books, reading or not reading. That he would encourage me, with his words or his presence to keep going. That he would tell me what direction to head, that he would tell me to slow down, to dig in, to work harder, to not take life so seriously all the time. We could sit in silence, or we could laugh loud and long at stories. We could cry together over Africa, or he could explain Aristotle to me so that i finally really understand it. Maybe we would just sit and think, furrow our brows, smoke pipes, drink tea. I don't think it would matter much what we did. Just so he was there with me.

All of this is simply to say. My mind is full, but fuller still is my heart. It is full of love, love i do not understand. Love for things and places and people that i do not know well enough, that i do not do justice to. Things that i am only beginning to love. Life is abundant with an abundance that is overwhelming me at presence. I would like some time to sit and chew the fat of life, to ruminate it, to digest it, to not simply taste this and that, but to actually feast upon it slowly.

love,
luke

The Tearing of the First Veil

2008-12-09T21:04:00.000-08:00

The color of blood is vibrant
Only in small doses, but when
One has a pint or a liter
It quickly loses its gleam
And the stink of it fills the room
While the color fades
To a dull brown
Looking more like health-less shit
Than anything life giving.

So when Christ was crowned with blood
When Christ was first crowned with blood
When He split His mother open
When she in her agony
Was seized in the fullness of time
Filled and then split
Like a grain of wheat, a seed
Falling to a stable floor
Reeking of manure
Her poor virginity taken and
Her body broken backwards

When Christ was first crowned with blood
And blood brown afterbirth
The Word becoming flesh and bone
Blood and hair and feces
Breaking into the world
Through the crucible of birth
The beautiful curse given to Eve
To be redeemed in thirty three years
As He would be crowned again with blood

When Christ entered our reek
Fell headlong into the stink of earth
His mother in her pain sweat and fatigue
Pulled Him up from between her legs
And looking into His blood covered face,
She saw, like all mothers
The most beautiful thing.

-------

love,
luke

Like a Widow Before Her Wedding

2008-12-08T01:56:00.000-08:00

Your heart went missing sometime in the recent months
I think i saw it
Lift off like an albatross leaving
A trail of blood.
There are roots digging deep beneath
Your skin, tearing your heart into pieces
Whether stone or flesh
All that longing
Will rush over and destroy you again.
Because your heart isn't in your chest
And when i look in your eyes
I can't see anything but pain,
And you look like a widow
But i know you are a virgin bride
Just waiting to fall
In love and die again.

--------

love,
luke

Last November

2008-12-03T23:31:00.000-08:00

"Sunset never really lasts long enough,"
He says as he walks down the hill to bed.
He is wisdom and truth, alive though dead.
Tangled in his hair he finds the wind rough
And the summer gone. Sunset has faded;
The warmth has fled. Autumn has come. Winter
Chasing on its heels, marching down, splinters
Of ice creep down the valleys. "We hated
The cold when we were young." He sighs, "We loved
Hockey though," and smiles. The stars shimmer
And sigh. His eyes are old, cold and dimmer
Than they were last winter, while up above
Sunset has faded from the sky. Tonight
He'll make a cup of tea and wait for light.

-------

love,
luke

Concerning the new year and all its resolve:

2008-12-01T23:48:00.000-08:00

I am putting the pieces back together:
The ocean and the glacier
The river and the lake,
I am taking up the raindrops
Gathering them together, praying
Over them and throwing them into my eyes
Entangling them into my hair i
Am failing at even this.

Kiss me sky, kiss me moon,
Kiss me clouds, kiss me rain,
On my mouth, my hands, my heart, my face
Kiss me Christ, on my feet,
In my filth kiss me clean.

I am gathering pieces
That i once knew
I am collecting Your mind
Are you satisfied, can this ever
Satisfy?

Kiss me beneath the sky
Beneath the Presence
Under the cross kiss me hard
Wood splintered thorns
Kiss my back
Shattered children
Kiss me and forgive me
Mothers and sons and lovers all
Kiss me and betray me
To a better Nature.

Glacier and ocean,
Lake and river.
I am bringing you back together
I have grasped you in my baptism
I am always in your memory
I have died in your embrace
I am drowning through prayer
I have been born at last through flames.

Kiss me Christ, kiss me, kiss
Gently, like a whore
Not used to tenderness.

-------

love,
luke

Another Sonnet

2008-11-27T23:49:00.000-08:00

My arms are antennas, i stretch them wide
Searching the skies for signals--a current
Streaming like a river into my mind.
I am watching this collapse, obdurate
Gods mocking us as we struggle forward.
I cannot fathom Your silence tonight.
The stars are out; the sky is backward
Shining black as the sun shines brilliant white.
I am editing You out of my songs
I am painting You out of my photos
I am driving out Your image along
With every gracefully given note.
You are the dissonance inside my bones
You are driving and luring me back home.

-------

love,
luke

A (sort of) Sonnet

2008-11-26T00:25:00.000-08:00

There are broken bottles on the sidewalk
And chalk between your teeth grinding down your
Poor food. Where can you go you poor sparrow?
The beasts are in the woods, you know they stalk
You, hunting you with yellow eyes, waiting
To surprise you. But you are not surprised.
How could you be? You cannot be enticed
Away from the fire. You cannot be
Tempted beyond what has been borne before.
Flames lick the inside of your gut. "Enough,"
You say, "I am too young to be roughly
Treated." But you were never young. This war
Will last forever in your memory
Even if the scars heal, it will still be.

-------

love,
luke

A quick note:

2008-11-24T18:41:00.000-08:00

Dear Jesus, help me, i am gasping for breath. I have opened my eyes and the universe has flooded in. My lungs are filled with love and i don't know how to say it more plainly than this: the world is beautiful and i don't know why.

It is like holding a tiny gem in my hand, it buries itself in my skin, my blood turns to sapphire, my eyes are polished rubies. I am liquid, i am earth, i am see through and the sun is shining past me. Don't look at me, i am invisible. I am in between your eyelids when you sleep. I am warm feet on a snowy day.

For some strange reason, even though nothing is really going right, though i can't get my head on straight, though i am still overwhelmed by everything and everyone, i am waking up amazed.

So i guess this is all simply to say, that i am grateful. I am overwhelmed, sometimes i am drowning, trying to open my eyes in every direction, trying to hear and taste and smell everything, because i know all of it is fleeting. So thank You. Thank You for making the world full and not empty. I can't tell You how much it means to me.

love,
luke

Why Meeting People is Never Easy

2008-11-24T00:22:00.000-08:00

Consider the person nearest to you in space, they have a history; a reality you cannot share they are twenty, thirty, or fifty years of life that you have missed, or shared only partially. They love people you have never met.

Every life is beyond life, each one growing and touching others tangentially, meaning hardly at all a thousand moments added up equals something considerable less than a second. And if all we share is moments we share a vapor. It passes between our hands like a cloud in the sky. We reach upwards, trying to grasp heaven in the eyes of another and it blinds and chills and eludes us.

So hold my hand, touch your nose to my shoulder: but this is not a romance it is just to show you that i want to know and be known without the awful weight of history preventing the significance of every insignificant moment we share.

Fill up your hours, love with a depth and abandon. Love the unknown, unknowable others love those pasts that you can never grasp. Share a meal with someone knowing that you are stealing time from someone else. That there are some who envy your place in front of this person in this time. Realize that every word is a gift, each one is unique and only those privy to it can ever share in it. The story is not the same when retold, but every retelling is gift.

Be satisfied with glances, with the gifts we're given. With the moments when friends and siblings and parents and children and lovers share something that cannot be shared more than once. Your life, and every life you encounter, is a unique work of art, a sunset that will never be replayed, that looks slightly different from every angle. Surrender to the fact that we live lives of limited experience, and accept every moment as a gift within it.

love,
luke

Another fragment

2008-11-18T22:57:00.000-08:00

I have roots instead of feet,
I am digging deep,
Stretching myself across the sea,
My mind drinks in the aether
Between the stars i breathe
In the incalculable beauty
I am le bête a votre belle, a tree
Rooted and moving

I am unaware of what was coming
But now that it has come
I am unaware of what was
And now that it has gone
I am unaware of what
I am unaware of

(But it is gone.)

The repetition is not insignificant
As we still were learning to be religious
Fighting off the fictitious desires
Of the characters we create ourselves to play

OH, do not say it again! We can always
Add one more refrain!

But when the silence finally falls
Will we realize
That we are not the heroes of these stories
And that the only question is:
Will we become something worth being?

-------

love,
luke

The Mercy of the Lord:

2008-11-18T07:30:00.000-08:00

It is new every morning.

love,
luke

What i do when i should be writing research papers...

2008-11-14T15:27:00.000-08:00

Poetry branches out likes veins
I am being carried along within them like blood
A sentence
Then a paragraph
Then a word and
Then it stops

A branch breaks off
A new beginning
An aspen grove
Something deeply connected rooted
Inexplicably huge
A whole forest from a single seed
All offshoots from a single thought
Epiphanies growing heavenwards

Poetry is backwards
It is an inverse river
The ocean flowing upwards
The salt settling out
Freshening as it approaches the peaks
Watering the world as it leaps up
From its source

It is the curiosity of children grasping everything and holding onto nothing
A mountain standing on its head somersaulting the sky
The snow rising into flight drawing crocuses up from the ground like a song

It is silence breaking
And giving birth to sight.

-------

love,
luke

Theory Shatters (Leaving us with seven years of bad luck and a terrible mess to clean up)

2008-11-12T22:14:00.000-08:00

What happened to the stars?
I saw them last night
I put them into my mouth i
Swallowed them down
Back into the sky.

You faerie queen, you tiny angel
Collapsing my mind
Taking my thoughts, twisting them
Into rhymes without reason
You're a womb, an evisceration,
Antagonize me again
I dare you, but only if you can
Find me.

(Here the author wishes to insert the epic of Gilgamesh,
Joyce's Ulysses, as well as any obscure literary epic
That his readers will think him sufficiently profound
And sophisticated for having referenced. He wishes for
His readers to assume that he is indeed the heroic figure
Mentioned in all of these tales, remembering however that
He has a much better sense of humor, a more pleasant
Disposition, and an unrivaled grasp of a woman's heart.)

Am i collapsing into these
Solipsistic
Unremarkable ends?
The end made our beginning
Why can't we let it be?

You insanity, you surprising undeniability
You keep the universe apart in between your
Eyes
You keep me guessing
Significant other, Christ, toddler falling
Collapsing as you walk
Unable to bear the weight of your own being

I am still a child in between your eyes
As you are a child in mine
Seventeen going on eighteen
Mirrored
Undeniably alive
No longer caring
To deny.

-------

love,
luke

To the hilt:

2008-11-10T19:03:00.000-08:00

I ran across this while perusing some fragments written for a paper on Abraham on Isaac from my undergraduate years: "God does not command us to give to Him out of our abundance, but instead for us to give to Him out of our poverty. He doesn’t merely want our first fruits but also our last chance of survival."

I wish i could take my own belief and put it into practice, that i could live on the edge of my resources and abilities. I fear that i am living my life far too far within the margin.

love,
luke

For no one

2008-11-08T14:31:00.001-08:00

The universe is heavy upon us
Like a warm quilt on a winter's night
Or a tyrant's foot on the back of our necks
My feet are cold. My neck is stiff.
My hands ache from wringing them.
The quilt no longer fits, and this tyrant
Cannot rule us.

What happened to the music of the spheres,
The song beaming down from an unprecedented height?
What happened to a truth we could decipher,
Back when i was still a child
And my mind could fly through these finite seasons
And return to alight in the present, the infinite
Unknown was within us, it danced lightly on our lips,
We knew everything as a child knows its nothings
We accepted that inchworms were the unit of measure for marigolds
And we were satisfied to always question
To never be satisfied and always ask another why.

Some days i find myself screaming into seashells
Drowning out symphonies with my defiance
For i am only satisfied when i have managed to
Drown out mystery. I am only clever when
I have labeled and boxed up and categorized
That which defies me. Oh God, i am blind.

The universe is heavy upon me,
Because i do not enter into it singing
Because i do not accept that my feet are cold
That the childlike do not grow and old
That the tyrant feet aren't on my neck
But broken and bleeding and carrying me.

The universe lies heavy upon us
A quilt, a tyrant, a symphony,
It is begetting and keeping us,
It is setting us free.

-------

love,
luke

For someone

2008-11-06T23:49:00.001-08:00

Do not be afraid,
Though they come at night
Creeping beneath your eyelids
And, plucking out your desires
Leave you cynical and blind,
Lusting after lies.

I am filled with a hopeful rage
A rage imperfect that leaves
My center calm and unfazed
(I am unmoved, but i am a wall
Built with imperfection)
For we are more than the sum of
Our lost desires, our desire misplaced
The beast breathes in my chest
The quivering hungry things
The corners of things.
Things lost and gained.
And lost again.

Do not be afraid but wait
You will find your heart is kept
Safe beyond desire safe
Behind a wall
A door that only opens
In the sunlight
So when they come at night
To draw your desires out
Through the words you speak in your sleep
They will find your eyelids tight
Fluttering in the darkness
And your mouth breathing harmonies.

And your rage will be hopeful
You will wake up sweating your
House on fire your
Hair tangled your
Children grown your
Horizon split in two your
Dreams stepping out of the dark

They'll break my knees with your prayers
And you will know what comes after and
What comes last and what came first
And what was proximate and
what was close at hand.

So do not be afraid,
Because your eyelids are windows
That cannot be broken
And your desires are already lost
Within your dreams
That flee with the sunrise.
So do not be afraid.

Come with me.

-------

love,
luke

For anyone

2008-11-04T22:00:00.000-08:00

I am cultivating a garden in my heart
It is harder than i first thought it would be
The rows are frozen from
A winter of my regret
But i cannot let it stop me.

My skin is aflame with roses: their thorns
Carving letters and scars i cannot decipher in a tongue that i once spoke
Fluently.

I have taken a plow to the frozen rows
But the handles immolate in my flames
As the earth unfreezes by my feet

Mud buries the ice,
Dig deep
And you will find
Permafrost or water; a sunrise
Beneath the soil.
Infants dance beneath these toes
Unafraid of my flames
Uncaring and unaware of my regrets
They open the doors in their chests
Their hearts alight with the sun on my skin
Their eyes drinking in the scriptures
I have written on my arms.

They do not care that the snow has fallen
They are letting gardens grow.

-------

love,
luke

"Forests grow in my mothers eyes"

2008-11-04T07:32:00.000-08:00

This man is brilliant, but i must warn you he isn't always polite. But he fills me with such an optimistic rage i just thought i'd share the warmth.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugma-N0wElI

love,
luke

On the necessary arrogance of praying for one's soul

2008-11-02T23:25:00.000-08:00

Salvation is strange. I am more and more convinced that the thing i most need saving from is myself. Perhaps even the things i pray for myself. The things i beg God for in the quiet of the night, when the little jackals wail in the desert places of my mind. That is a more than a touch melodramatic, but strangely fitting.

I pray for a good many things too small, for comfort, for a purpose i can see, for a measure of self-satisfaction. For job-fulfillment. For self-actualization. But these are never enough.

So i have asked for humility to see that see only in part. I've asked for patience to wait for the fullness of vision. I've asked for wisdom and discernment to know when it is that i see and when i am blind. And i have asked that my prayers may become like rain that falls far from the ocean and waters many fields before returning to the sea.

love,
luke

For my brother still in Afrika

2008-10-30T18:49:00.000-07:00

I.

One day, a voice came whispering through the bush,
"Rest assured, Guebessongele
All of this will one day burn."

II.

There is a woman on a street
Handing out business cards
While my brother is in Afrika
As she speaks, i hear
His voice in hers,
"We are so tired."
And he smiles as she smiles
And i say "thank you",
Remembering

We do not believe
In rape or torture
We may believe in AIDS
As it happens to a continent
But we do not believe in the hateful word
"Infected"
That heart stopping moment
When a mother knows
That this is how
Her life is
Over

Tonight i can still see her emaciated face
A child of three kilos and five months
"She has SIDA" he says,
And can say no more
For what can we do?
Her ribcage, translucent skin,
Three kilos at five months,
She is already a spirit,
Already dead,
What can we do?

III.

It is now October, my brother,
So the rains must be ending
But here beginning as the sun
Sets early and rises late
And you are tired there while
I am weary here with
Your memory within me
Of rains that never came
And children dying for their
Father's sins
And a war that simply
Cannot end because
Every man and woman and child
Fights it
But cannot win.

You are weary and i am weary
For the blood of Afrika is heavy

IV.

One day, the wind will spring up
The kind that comes when the mangoes bloom
That shakes down the blossoms
Pink and yellow,
The kind that comes from the west
Bringing rain.

A voice will speak,
I cannot say when or how,
If it will be in the wind, or
In the rain, or
Behind you saying,
"I have borne your blood
And bled for you.
And behold I have made
All things new."

-------

As usual, it could stand for further revision, but unfortunately the time i have to spend on poetry these days is limited.

love,
luke

Hysterical and useless

2008-10-26T20:20:00.000-07:00

What is it with us 20-something year old liberal arts majors? Why are we such a terrible conglomeration of cynicism and skepticism? I am feeling subversive these days. I want to paint beautiful pictures across gang graffiti. I want write love poetry backwards on the windows of offices so that the cubicle dwellers can read something beautiful if they only take time to look outside. I want to build love into the foundations of the world, even if it means breaking the law.

My skepticism does not serve me well. My cynicism even less. I could be blameless, i could be joyful, i could be beautiful, if only i would leave the adolescent things behind and embrace the childlike. I miss marveling at the world, instead of grieving over it. But how does one view it all with honest eyes and not become old and weary?

love,
luke

A Brief Foray Into the Political (or why i'm slowly becoming an anarchist)

2008-10-22T14:26:00.000-07:00

Management has decided to remove this post, not because of any change of heart, but rather because it is believed the last thing anyone needs to do is read more about politics. Go fly a kite, or play with a child. Cheers.

Turns out the foray was pretty stinking brief.

Also, funnily enough, i started calling myself an anarcho-pacifist mostly to annoy or puzzle people. Strangely though i think it actually fits pretty well. I'm wondering if this will work in other areas, like if i start saying, "I am the single most desirable male" or "I am not only a genius but also empathetic and a good listener" that these things will become true.

love,
luke

A reminder

2008-10-20T02:02:00.000-07:00

I was reminded tonight of how much i need humility. I am so arrogant, so proud. Christ have mercy, teach me your humility. I cannot hope to stand except on your mercy.

Addendum: I hear a voice behind me, following me, saying, "It can't last." And another within me asking me to choose, "Hardship or slavery?" and yet another, somewhere unattainably elsewhere saying, "That which was, and is, and will be..." and the voice following me, reminding me, chooses elegant futures for me, futures that i can hardly believe in, because i am so very small.

love,
luke

Thoughts on Africa

2008-10-18T01:34:00.000-07:00

For a few weeks i thought i was whole. I was functioning the way i remembered young, well educated, students were supposed to function. But several millimeters beneath the surface there is the dust of Africa, her clay giving color to my blood. It is difficult knowing that a part of me is there, and always will be. It is difficult to know that i am planting a part of myself here. I may never return to her, but she is always in me; i have breathed in dry season, i have drunk deeply of the rain, i can no more escape her than i can shed my skin and bleed my veins dry.

I cannot tell what is coming. But i think perhaps i am finally ready, now that i am in medias res. I feel like i woke up here, that i was in Africa sleeping in the heat and humidity and i am waking up in Canada in the mist and rain. I have fallen into this strange story and can't make heads or tails of it. Where does one go after one has been to the end of the earth? How does one return to the strange center of things? There are edges beyond our perception, beyond our science and economy.

It is such a fiction, such a twisted and distorted story we tell ourselves, about what it means to live and breathe. There are nights i wish i could just look death in the eyes and tell him that there are things i am not afraid to bleed for, that i am not so weak that i will go willingly into this sanitized and emasculated life. I would hold suffering as a child if it only meant i could drink the rain again.

There are moments i am painfully aware that i will never be able to go home.

love,
luke

A thought to perhaps develop later:

2008-10-11T03:13:00.001-07:00

Love's referent is always the other, but its fulfillment is always found with itself. Not the self of the one loving, but within the love. We are told love is consummated in marriage, sex, or committed relationship; and while these are all good things and, in their proper place and context, necessary steps towards the deepening and growth of certain types of love, love itself can only be fulfilled in the Self that is Love, and its fulfillment is found by itself. It is singular existence, unpredicated, needing no other fulfillment than its own existence. The Romantic version of "unrequited love" is not love, not because love is always equitable but because love has no requirement other than itself: Christ does not need the Church to love Him in order to truly love the Church, the fulfillment comes in the act of love, it requires nothing else.

love,
luke

Brick wall

2008-10-10T00:24:00.001-07:00

I realized tonight, that everyone is a brick wall. And this is good. Because if it all came too easily we would be even bigger whores than we all already are. So i am glad that we fend each other off at arms length, and that the moments when souls touch are few and far between. Because the deprivation makes us grateful for the moments of plenitude.

We must not live too richly lest we are overwhelmed. Deprivation keeps us grateful, discipline keeps us ready. The joy we take in every moment is not the dizzying heights of first kisses but the unavoidable gravity and staid exultation of faith, hope, and love. So even though every dream i ever had is disproved by every sunrise. But i wouldn't trade a single dream for a day spent beneath the sun.

I realize that i can never know you, and you can never know me. But i can learn you over time and you can learn me. And with the increasing honesty of the slow and hard earned love of faithful and devoted authenticity the truth shall become us even as we try to become it. The distance will never be crossed, but the gap will bring us closer to each other. And now i am learning to take immense joy in that.

Sleep easy, all of you brick walls. You unknowable beauties, you well-loved and well-learned truths burning bright in a world of mere and inconsequential fact.

love,
luke

Concerning metaphysics

2008-10-08T21:32:00.000-07:00

Dreams of mountain peaks only take me so far. One day i am going to have to strap wings on the soles of my shoes and fly up into the rain shrouded desolation. I can feel myself losing touch with the earth beneath my feet. I need to get soil under my nails and into my blood.

My head is full of big and unimportant ideas, ideas about Greek and Celtic and Chinese cosmology, trying to wrap it all up into a little package, explain how Christ is bigger than it all. But Christ is found in cups of cold water streams. The meaning of the wilderness is this: it is bigger than us, and no matter how big and unimportant the thoughts in your head, the desolate peaks can kill you in a sudden unexpected storm. And no power of man could save you.

We live too much of our lives unafraid or afraid of things too small. We fear a sliding economy or the wrong political candidate being in office but we do not fear the shadows under our feet that take us away from the doorsteps of the hurting and into places of false comfort and security.

We need to find the edge of our own reality and spend our lives trying to cross it into the Kingdom of Heaven. Let us forget the princes of this world, forget they have power and they will cease to be powerful. Let us fear the living, breathing, embodied Christ and despair of comfort and place and security. Let travel upwards into the desolate wilderness where He will speak tenderly to us. Let us tremble before the mountain peaks that surround us, knowing one day we will be called to cast them all into the sea.

We must stop being afraid of nothing and learn to live out the fear of the awesome reality we have been given.

love,
luke

For those who like pretty music:

2008-10-08T21:27:00.000-07:00

Maybe you should check out this artist, if you haven't already.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKfDwChOoHI

-------

love,
luke

On the coming of autumn

2008-10-06T21:16:00.000-07:00

I caught the first scent of snow off the high peaks a few days ago. I wonder how far that wind had come when it finally reached me. Clouds have begun to obscure the mountains on my morning commute, the ephemeral blurring the eternal. Like the leaves of the trees; the transient clothing the permanent in evanescent splendor. But the autumn is coming and while the mountains are putting on their winter clothes the trees must prepare to be stripped bare.

It is hard to tell you all how long i have waited for this, though now that it is on the brink i cannot decide which one is more representative of the season. Nor can i say for which i share a greater affinity. I am putting on and taking off, i am both the mountain and the cloud. I am the transient beauty made eternal by some strange grace: a cloud rooted to the bedrock of the world, made substantial, redefined. Or say it this way: i am a mountain set free to ascend to heaven on the Spirit's breath. I am both and neither. I am suspended between earth and heaven, sometimes falling and sometimes rising, waiting for autumn and the serenity it always promises to bring.

May peace surpass understanding, may strength be found in weakness, may silence give way to quiet singing. And let us rise to our rootedness in the joy and brightness of the Almighty.

love,
luke

This morning, moments after sunrise:

2008-10-03T21:56:00.000-07:00

The mountain, now hooded in blood,
is become the fulfillment
here with the mist burning
and the ragged clouds
purple and scarlet and blue ripped asunder,
as at the moment of Christ's passing,
the world is denuded, revealed, apocalypsed
for what it is.

But we are not prepared.

There is blood on these trees,
blood in the water we drink,
blood on our hands and in our eyes,
our money printed with blood.
blood befouling us or making us clean.
drowning us and/or atoning
for our murderous histories. And
as we swam in our mothers' wombs waiting
the baptism of water and blood we were
already there, mirrored in His eyes,
remembered before our time,
sanctified.

Broken eyes, broken hands, broken mountain;
broken and unbroken Christ:
reveal us for what we are
and the sanctify the mountains
in our memory that we might see
and bleed aright.

-------

As a note: This is NOT a poem. This is just a free written nothing thinking about the sunrise this morning over Mt. Baker. It is not edited, not intentional, it just happened. It is broken into lines because it looks better that way, and because sometimes it rhymes, but only sort of. I have a feeling the sort of beautiful things i see on my drives down to Washington at dawn happen all the time and i wish i could see them all and from every angle.

love,
luke

Listening to the waves; longing for a storm

2008-09-28T21:46:00.000-07:00

So, i'm starting to sink into this. I am starting to see this as normal. It drives me to the edge of myself, but it seems to be right. I've had a pretty okay weekend. I didn't work on Friday so i had twice the amount of time to do homework which made for a less intense weekend. And this afternoon i played a little footie and apparently didn't do too horribly as i was asked if i would be joining the indoor team in November. So, that's fun. Now my legs have that wonderful post-football feeling which is only rivaled by a post-rugby feeling in terms of delightful exhaustion.

I worry sometimes that i live too much in my head. I end up spending too much of my time in abstraction, exploring the realms of the metaphysical. Yet i am coming to believe that God is not found in the great out there. God is found only as He comes to us. Certainly we need to search for Him, but in searching we shall find Him nearer than we thought. He is not to be found in a metaphysically sound understanding of the Trinity, He is found as we worship Him, as we love others and accept love from others. He is found as we push the limits of our physical reality, as we become dependent, as we come to know that we do not know and that perhaps He is quite unknowable. Then the miracle occurs and He makes Himself known in ways that, while not wholly irrational, cannot be taught.

Sometimes i just feel like numbers and letters, being slowly deciphered by everyone around me. And then i get lost in the complexity of the Lord, and i realize i was made larger than i think i am, because i was made to live in relationship with the Eternal. And each iteration, each expression, each action springing from that endless well has significance i can never fully comprehend.

Again, i find myself dipping my toes into the ocean of the glory of God, looking out at the waves, and knowing how little i know. But i want to walk deeper into that ocean, as dangerous as it may be. I want to be chest deep, my feet struggling to gain purchase. I need to be overwhelmed, because i feel my smallness grown large within me. I know that i am perishing and the only hope i have is You.

love,
luke

99 Red Tails

2008-09-24T17:20:00.000-07:00

I am being hunted by
Ninety-nine red tailed hawks
They wait for me, hovering
Over every highway

Red in the morning sun
Like dried blood or glowing embers
Ancient and untamed, just
Waiting for me to slip my cover

Oh, you yellow eyed flames
You Spirit of God falling upon your prey
From a terrible height
Your terrific heart screaming mercy
Into our paralyzed lives.

And it is hard to tell sometimes
If the blood on your face
Is theirs or mine
And if the blood dried on the roadside
Is from your murder or mine

And still i feel them hovering

The sun shines through
This blood red truth
And the world is laid clear
As i begin to slip my cover.

-------

love,
luke

Favorite Things

2008-09-24T16:28:00.001-07:00

So maybe you should start listening to this band. Seriously, you should at least consider it.

love,
luke

Wheels within wheels

2008-09-19T21:38:00.000-07:00

So, things are coming full circle. I am returning to a state of absurdity, displaying all the non-rational tension i feel so acutely in a vain attempt to grapple with it. But this is most likely just medication. I will try to say it honestly, not hiding behind words, but using them as a vessel for truth. In other words i will be attempting the prophetic. Let us pray no one gets hurt.

I have been shown my limitation. And in it i have seen, or seemed to have seen, the limits of those around me. We all want to be named, and yet are unwilling to submit to another who can name us. We want the world to be filled with meaning, we want to love and be loved, and yet we are so seldom willing to give up our autonomy in being loved. Love that insists upon autonomy is not love, it is vain lust and unquenchable desire, its satisfaction can only result in greater and more painful hunger.

But i am a whore, chasing after a whore. And the best among us are no better. This is my confession and my call to repentance. I am a man engaged daily in the sore trial of loving others. My limitation dictates my failure. The grace of God has promised that my failure will bear fruit.

love,
luke

Last things

2008-09-17T21:41:00.000-07:00

Unending tension calls for infinite resolve and the proof of it is this: that our heart beats rest when we sleep and we find no rest until we rest in Thee. And so it is that i believe in the Kingdom come and coming and wait for the final mediation when all device and artifice at last will fail. Come Lord Jesus, and quickly.

love,
luke

A Door

2008-09-14T21:39:00.000-07:00

My heart races ahead
Into another brightness
Where i can no longer see it
Sidewalks winding into sunlight

The doors are closed
And opening

I have seen the scars
On the back of your eyelids
And i have been angry
With an anger you probably
Don't even know you feel anymore
But what was broken has never been mine

And your rage should burn at this my infidelity
Because what was broken was never mine

Your eyes are closed
And opening

I have felt the scars
On the backs of your hands
It may seem that all they hold is broken
But your paper nails remain untorn
And caked with soil, planting seeds
For another season as yet unseen

Where what is left unseen unbroken waiting to be
Is never mine.

As these hands are closed
And opening

And so my heart races ahead
To the end of winter, the end of rain
As these flowers bloom
As a grain of wheat
And i pick you a dozen every night in my mind
And leave them on your doorstep
Soaked in sunlight

Where the door is closed
And opening to see
What is left of what may be.

-------

love,
luke

Coherence, Authenticity, and Truth

2008-09-05T12:18:00.000-07:00

We create authenticity not by being true to what is within us, but by making that which is within us true. Coherence of soul is the ideal state for a person. But if that coherence is nihilistic or tending towards entropy then the situation is unsustainable. The soul will be constantly degrading. The wisdom of age will simply be a growing bitterness and obstinacy and the acquisition of knowledge through experience will simply be a gathering of trivia: useless except as small talk or for party games.

There must be growth in the soul. And growth comes when one sees a more ideal state: a state of joy or peace or generosity, and begins to act accordingly. Giving generously not because one always feels generous, but because one genuinely desires to be a generous person. One acts joyfully not because she never feels sorrow, but because she believes joy is something worth attaining. We create our inward constitution through our outward actions. It is a simple truth, and has been stated before by wiser men than i.

And so this is a confession: i have been content with expressing the factual within my soul, the turmoil, the bitterness, the anger. But i have failed to express what was true within my soul: the joy, the peace, the love. These are not things that i have attained, or can claim as being self-generated. But they are true, and they are there. They are the abiding realities of who i am. Though sorrow has been a companion these past weeks, and though suffering will by necessity remain close by, the fundamental reality is the strange redemptive truth of faith, hope, and love.

It is my desire to more accurately express this reality. I will try to be true to the tension instead of focusing on the dramatic/tragic aspects of life. These are easier to write, just as entropy is easier to attain then ascension. But i am called to exaltation and praise, i am built for generation and growth. I was made to become something greater than what i currently am. And Christ so help me, i need to start being true to that.

love
luke

Scary stuff.

2008-09-01T20:33:00.000-07:00

It is interesting how life takes on certain themes at certain times in life. As if it had been scripted in order to teach synergistically on a single topic for a time. We learn of patience not through waiting for one specific thing but through entering a season of waiting, where it seems all aspects of life are put on hold. The soul becomes sensitive to certain realities and becomes flexible and supple towards certain types of growth. This has been a regular occurrence in my recent history, that God teaches me the same lesson in several different ways at one time or in one season.

Perhaps it is beginning to happen again, but in a way i didn't really think it would ever need to. Over the past few years i've been intrigued by the question of what it means to fear God. It is a question i always found pertinent but could never really gain purchase towards. I assume it something more than mere respect, a man can have deep respect for things he does not fear. I think of my grandfather in particular. I have immense respect for the man but somehow the category fear doesn't seem to apply. I am not convinced that abject terror is out of the question, and yet my experience with God has been categorized much more by gentleness than by wrath and i feel God is more pleased when i come to Him as a son confident in his Father's love.

For many years now i've been convinced of a lack of fear on my part. I've never much feared bullies (my older brother made sure i knew what a punch in the gut felt like, and i knew it wasn't so bad). And i've never much feared pain, though i certainly prefer to avoid it. But lately i'm starting to realize that while i might lack some measure of healthy fear, in another way i fear too much. I fear obedience and righteousness. I fear the price it will demand.

Two books i've read in the past week have confirmed it. The first "Of Whom the World Was Not Worthy" by Marie Chapian is a beautiful story of faith tried by the fires of war and ethnic conflict. It shows a family committed to Christ, who draws near to Christ through what they suffered and experience the surpassing joy that nearness brings. I read it and was afraid. Afraid that my faith may lead me to such places of suffering. I am willing, but afraid. The other book was "Just Courage" by Gary Haugen. It is an exhortation to leave courageously. He makes the important point that living courageously is not living fearlessly. One simple and memorable line from the book is "Courage comes in doing a brave thing." Courage does not come before, we do not pray for courage and then have our fears removed. We pray for courage and are given opportunities to be brave.

So, lately i've been praying for courage. Courage to live my life well, to stop fearing God wrongly. Pray for me. Because i'm sure some scary things will happen.

"Forgive us, O Lord, we acknowledge ourselves as type of the common man,
Of the men and women who shut the door and sit by the fire;
Who fear the blessing of God, the loneliness of the night of God, the surrender required, the deprivation inflicted;
Who fear the injustice of men less than the justice of God;
Who fear the hand at the window, the fire in the thatch, the fist in the tavern, the push into the canal,
Less than we fear the love of God.
We acknowledge our trespass, our weakness, our fault; we acknowledge
That the sin of the world is upon our heads; that the blood of the martyrs and the agony of the saints
Is upon our heads.
Lord, have mercy upon us.
Christ, have mercy upon us.
Lord, have mercy upon us."

T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

love,
luke

Meditation on the end of the world (27/08/08)

2008-08-31T10:09:00.000-07:00

At 7:something in the morning i
Am in the garage
Listening to music on the CBC
When (during a break) i hear again
Of World War Three

And all the while i am fixing the face
Of a drawer, warped with age, humidity
Has buckled its backing over the years
And it needs to be replaced.

So with the world set to end around me
I am trying to make something of today
Trying to make something that will remain
Through another ten years of humidity

Because World War Three is always within me
The world sighing and ending and waiting for change
And if i ever stop re-creating i
Will be consumed in flames.

------

love,
luke

I can hardly see what's in front of me these days (and those days too).

2008-08-29T21:30:00.000-07:00

My iCal is already filling up with things to do. Papers, tests, pages to be read, thoughts to be thought, conversations to have, struggling with God and man and myself. I must confess i am not as excited as the situation merits. I am not as eager to get going as i was two weeks ago. It is hard to say whether i am frightened, angry, or just apathetic. I feel like i have exhausted my emotional reserves in the last six weeks. Orientation started today and the whole time i was wondering if i could really bring myself to do this all again and get involved with another set of beautiful people. People who i will one day have to leave behind.

I am becoming increasingly convinced that i cannot stay here. Not ultimately. I guess i just know, on some inexplicable level of the viscera or pneuma, that i am meant for something other than this. For some place other than here. And so every time i meet someone i think of when i'll have to say goodbye. And it makes me weary because i know i will never find that perfect piece of ground where i can build my house and marry my bride and raise my kids and spend my days growing food. Because i will never have a home here.

And so it is, that the greatest goods in this life can be a torment to us. Because we know when we experience them that if they could only last forever we would be happy. And yet we know that they can't last forever. The summer ends, children grow up and go off to college and work, best friends fall in love and get married, spouses grow old and one day die: we can cling to it all we want but we can never go back to the homes we only have in our memories. Because they were never here and they are not for this time.

When my heart aches for you to love me, when my body longs for sleep after work, when my soul yearns for permanence in a world of vapors and shadows; i am really hoping for something i can never attain. So i need Someone with no horizon, who can carry me off the edge of this world and take me someplace where time doesn't always mean losing and finding, but simply growing and becoming and ceaseless being. God has placed eternity in the heart of man, and then put that man into a world bound up by time so that man would seek Him.

Christ i need you. I need you because i am already weary, and i can't remember not being weary. I see the long years stretching ahead of me, the years of losing sleep, and loved ones, and everything i ever wanted to hold close, and sometimes i just want You to come back so i can finally get some rest, so i can stop striving and failing and finally just be alright. I am not strong enough to do this. I am not strong enough to watch everything fade. So Christ, God, be constant. I am begging You not to abandon me. Because i can feel my own death filling up the years between now and eternity, and i don't so much worry about how my heart stops beating but about all the death i'll have to die before then. So i am asking you again, please be my life. Because there is nothing else that isn't dead and fading.

love,
luke

Canadian?

2008-08-22T20:09:00.000-07:00

So, this morning i applied for and received a Study Permit from the Canadian government, granting me the right to live in Canada for four years. Weird. So i guess now i'm a legal resident of another country. Again. Hm.

This afternoon i moved into the room i will be living in until May. My worldly goods have shrunk to such a manageable size it really wasn't a stressful affair at all. Three trips to the car and back and voila. C'est finis. Tomorrow i go out hunting for a Canadian style cellular phone (for to with to get the digits of all the ladies... or something). Then head down Seattle way to hang out with the sister and brother-in-law.

The transitions are almost over, then maybe i can get back to writing real essays here. Right now my head is still to pre-occupied with figuring out what the heck is going on in my life.

love,
luke

"I caught a train for the coast..."

2008-08-11T18:57:00.000-07:00

So, tomorrow marks the beginning of another leg on this increasingly strange journey. Onward and forward to Chicago, Wisconsin, North Dakota, and Canada! I am not the same person i will be when i arrive, i will be no other man than who i am becoming. That all made sense in my head. Seriously. (?)

love,
luke

"You're too young to know that you're too old to try."

2008-08-10T20:23:00.000-07:00

I must confess I am grateful. I am weary and refreshed. I am ready and hesitant. I already miss my cousin and all my brothers and sisters in Denton. I am sorry that i do not live there. I am sorry i am leaving for Vancouver. I am excited. I am glad to go. I am eager. I am broken. I am a broken sparrow, a fallen leaf. I am ready to catch a breeze that will carry me against the wind and weather. North and west, to the mountains, to the sea. To whatever the Lord prepares.

O Christ, grant me obedience, even if i don't know which way to go.

love,
luke

Ordination, Monasticism, and the Church

2008-07-31T21:17:00.001-07:00

So, i wrote a long half-finished essay on the theme of ordination, mostly because its an issue that has been brought to bear in conversation in many spheres of my life in the recent times, especially in the last week or so. I had many thoughts written here, but it was too academic, too dry, too wordy.

What i want to say, can be said plainly, so i will say it. The Apostle Peter writes: "But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light." (I Peter 2:9) And Paul writes to the Church that we are "to aspire to live quietly, and to mind [our] own affairs, and to work with [our] hands." (I Thess. 4:11)

The disease afflicting the American church perhaps largely comes down to this: we have said some are ordained for ministry and others are not. We pretend that some are called to live simply for the sake of the gospel and others are not. This is perhaps the worst heresy the church has yet encountered. Every Christian should be a full time minister of the gospel. There is no priest class within the Church. There is no special set of persons whose job it is to make sure the gospel is being proclaimed. Everyone of us is called out for ministry. The great commission was not simply for pastors, evangelists, missionaries, and monks. Or rather, every Christian is called to pastoral, evangelical, missional, and monastic life. No ifs ors ands or buts.

Pastoral life means entering into the suffering of others. It means helping others apply gospel redemption to the most broken places in their lives. It means getting entangled, involved, messy. It means entering the worst places in others and loving them there. It is something i am terrible at, and i hate, and i must do.

Evangelical life means proclamation. It means being unashamed of Christ's person. As the passage in I Peter says, it is proclaiming Christ's excellence. It is closely tied to the pastoral vocation, but it involves those outside the Church. It is letting people know that God loves them, that Christ cares for them. It is saying that no matter how far one has fled from Christ He is still waiting with open arms. It means apologizing for the well-intentioned (and perhaps not-so-well-intentioned) brow-beating of the past. It means letting people know that the gospel is the good news. The change that everyone so desperately wants, the power of life over death.

Missional life means active participation in bringing the gospel message to all corners of the globe. For most people this will look like giving and prayer. But for many it will look like giving up the comfort of our home culture to go to those places where the gospel is not yet proclaimed and there is not yet an indigenous church to proclaim it. Our first priority should not be those places which already have an established church (though certainly we should offer them assistance), but places where the church is not yet represented or self-replicating.

Monastic life means living in humility. It means living simply. It means forgoing luxury for the sake of giving. It means conserving resources. It is knowing when we have enough and then (regardless of any raise in salary) living at that level and giving the rest. It means denying the false gods of materialism and careerism. It means giving more than we take from society. It means giving two mites if that is all we have, or selling all we have and giving it to the poor. It means we do not own anything. It means living a life unconstrained by so called material "wealth".

This is the baseball bat version. Perhaps in the coming days (or weeks) i will more fully flesh out my thoughts on these four aspects of authentic Christian life. Perhaps i realize how misguided i am i the arrogance of youth (i should seriously take my own advice on monastacism... seriously).

I suppose the primary point i'm trying to make is this: no matter what your job, or calling, remember that as a Christian you are part of the Church (the ekklesia: those called out). You cannot hide behind a division of labor scheme that lies to you and says your only duties as a Christian are regular church attendance, tithing, and being a good citizen. All of us most devote our lives to the ministry of the gospel. It is the life that is truly worth living.

love,
luke

You are the One who haunts my dreams.

2008-07-30T22:06:00.000-07:00

Sometimes You lurk, just outside of the firelight. Close enough so i can feel Your heavy footsteps fall softly in the night. But the only glimpse i see the occasional star blotted out on the horizon as You move between the trees, waiting. Old men have spent lifetimes looking out into Your Darkness, catching the occasional glint of the firelight in Your eye. And their report of what they have seen is terrifying.

We are huddled close, in our humanity, fearing Your monstrous reality. Fearing the fear of You. Fearing what will happen when You finally decide to intervene. When the night is dark enough, when we grow too weary to keep watch any longer. When the moon finally sets, just before dawn. Is that when You will make Your presence known?

I have heard of monsters in the dark. But You are more terrifying than my worst nightmare. I am frightened to death that You will take me. That there will come a time when i ripped away from the firelight, into the dusk beneath the trees. I am terrified because i know it is coming. I can feel Your breath on my neck. I can hear the low growl which is Your voice. And though i cannot make out the words the message is clear.

The time is near. You have chosen. And no man can deny.

love,
luke

"Oh my God, my God, where have you been?" - Manchester Orchestra

Metanoia

2008-07-28T21:39:00.000-07:00

All of the law; moral, ecclesiastical, political, must amount to two directives. Love the Lord, love your neighbor. To look for salvation, for change, for justice anywhere else is turn from Christ. Nothing makes sense except for this: the world is broken and the best we can do is be broken in it. To risk everything we have and enter into each other's brokenness and let the Spirit heal us.

So i do not believe in Barak Obama. I do not believe the conservative agenda. I do not believe in American values, or family values, or gay rights, or human rights, or any platform that will get me elected or thrown into Guantanamo. I do not believe that there is any good news to be had other than this: that love entered the world and did not leave us alone.

And if i want to change the world, if i believe that the world is broken, i cannot vie for power, or for a platform from which to speak. I cannot vie for relevance, or moral authority. I must have a singular vision. I must love. I must risk everything i am on it.

We are promised that such love is stronger than death, that it will be our end. Emmanuel is a person more fearful than nuclear holocaust or Islamo-fascism. But whether or not we believe in Him, He waits, broken and perfect, to fix our brokenness, by whatever means necessary.

love,
luke

"i'm so glad that every time
i try
to talk to
you your
eyes are turned down"

Jisei: mortality and morbid optimism

2008-07-26T01:00:00.000-07:00

Apparently the words to that last video i posted are actually from a Japanese death poem. Translated into english they run as follows:

"The ribs of the umbrella have fallen apart
The paper also is torn, but with bamboo tied together
Do not throw it away
Though I also am torn
Do not desert me."

The concept of a death poem intrigues me. As morbid as that may sound. There is something inspiring in the fact that someone's last words would be painstakingly constructed into something beautiful and edifying. Something that those left behind could learn from. A much more famous jisei was written by a Japanese nobleman named Asano Naganori, who due to an altercation with another noble was obliged to kill himself. His last words were as follows:

"More than the cherry blossoms inviting the wind to blow them away, I am wondering what to do with the remaining springtime."

It is an interesting thought. One i feel i can learn something from. That familiar image of the cherry blossom, symbolizing lifes beauty and brevity. It reminds me of another poem i learned several years ago. I won't quote the whole thing, but a line of it runs as such, "Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom."

I think it is important to keep in mind our common end. The grave that awaits us all. Not to despair over it, certainly not if we are people of faith. Death is swallowed up, but we must pass through it. It keeps us aware of our finitude. We bear in our bodies the curse of death. Our days are numbered, and they are not that many. I will see thousands of sunrises, but not millions. There is a finite number of days that i will live through.

I have lived 8,509 days. And one day that number will cease to grow. My personal history will be finished. Somehow, that is a comfort.

love,
luke

I will flourish again.

2008-07-22T22:36:00.000-07:00

-------

sabishisa no
ureshiku mo ari
aki no kure

-------

Oddly enough i was there.

love,
luke

Karakasa no hone

2008-07-22T20:11:00.000-07:00

I am a broken blade, not quite made of grass: i am too hard not to break and too enraged to smolder. I wonder when you will finally bend me. Finally put me back into shape. I am waiting for the winter, when the cold will creep down my collar, toward my heart, and i will be driven, in tears, back to my Father. I am waiting, because i never meant to be here.

Somewhere in the past four or five years i lost track of time, and i grew into a man, something unrecognizable, something i was unprepared for. It didn't come to pass intentionally, or at least through none of my intention. And i realize what a horrible thing it is, to grow up and never mean to. What a tragedy to not launch willingly into the life of a man, and instead slowly fall into by sheer accident of inertia, gravity, and entropy. Indeed it is tragic, because the 14 year old still looks back when i look in the mirror, and the 10 year old is still frightened when i turn out the lights at night.

In a way it is comforting to know i can still rile up a healthy measure of self-loathing, or emotive catharsis. Perhaps a catalyst for some brooding poetry, maybe a new band that will appear to the 10-16 year old demographic. But oh how i am tired of adolescence. And yet i am still becoming, i am still growing up, and i am not certain how it all is going. I've had a fair number of experiences that should've done wonders to make me more mature. And yet, i am dissatisfied, incomplete. I have attained nothing in the last ten years worth being proud of. And this reveals another layer of misunderstanding on my part. It has never been, nor will it ever be, about anything that i can acheive.

I was lead to believe, through lies and self-deception, that the measure of a man was the work of his hands. I have built a house, painted a picture, plowed a field before sunrise then ate heartily of bacon, grits, and red gravy. And i look at the work of my hands, how it has already fallen into disuse. How my many projects lie forever uncompleted and i wonder if i am an essay in the art of mankind, a study never to be completed or fleshed out, a life that will have no single plot, no story. I need a story, because i do not know what is happening.

But this is an appropriate place to be for a young man. The end is open ended (though already written, the ink is dry) and i must choose what manner of man i will be. Sailor, soldier, beggar, priest. I am something of all three, and ready for the union. So i will be called Kikuchiyo, i have no name of my own, but will take the one given to me. I will be between things, unfinished, more complicated than necessity dictates. I will find understanding within my folly. I will wait for the rain in winter. I will live as long as it takes for me to deserve my death.

Oh God, i am waiting. Because i never meant to be here.

love,
luke

Now i've got a brick house, and there's no children in it...

2008-07-20T22:28:00.001-07:00

This is my coping mechanism: to verbalize the untouchable within me.
To attempt to put down the ambiguity and tension within me in a finite
number of words with definite meanings. It is easier to hold the
internal life at a distance with words, to externalize it, present it
to the world as something disambiguated and coherent. But this is a
lie. And i am so scared to face what has been going on inside me.
Because i don't know when it began and if it will end, and what it
will require of me, and who i will become when the tension finally
finds its resolve.

love,
luke

"Pray for us, little children."

2008-07-18T15:05:00.001-07:00

This visualizes some of the tension i've been feeling in my mind the last few weeks. Enjoy(?)

love,
luke

"You hem me in, behind and before."

2008-07-18T15:02:00.000-07:00

I am scared that it will never get better. That the sickness, having grown worse, will make its completion within me. I cannot help but see myself as part of a broken system. I may grind my metal to let others know there is a problem, but what good does that accomplish? The machine rumbles on, polluted and polluting, wrecked and wrecking.

The system is broken, there is no doubting it and i am no less broken than the rest. All of us, senators, artists, sex-slaves, bankers, peasant farmers, hippy dead beats, students, and athletes. We're all broken into a thousand pieces, grinding our broken gears into each other trying to get somewhere, to be something, to produce, to experience, to become. But nothing ever happens, the world changes and people remain the same. The oceans rise and fall, we make our money and we spend it. Their is recession and rise, boom and bust. Nothing new under the sun. We wait for the next revolution, for the next idea, for the promised change, and watch our ancestors rot in their graves and know that we are nothing new.

I have lived a meager number of days and each sunrise lessens the time i have left. Our systems are broken. Politically, socially, personally, spiritually. We have failed to attain to the beauty promised us, failed to make good on our potential. And we are sadly content. We believe in bad news. We see it all around us. It is not that we need to be reminded that the system is flawed, or that we are broken. What we need is someone to show us, to remind us, that there is such a thing as being whole. We need someone to clean the blood off our hands and faces and put the broken pieces back together. Now, neither more nor less than ever, we need to be saved from ourselves, from our system, from our broken grinding.

We cannot look to politicians, activists, amnesty international, religious leaders, or within ourselves, because it's all broken, every last bit of it. It's all in shambles, ready to collapse, ready to burn. Every last atom in this universe is sick and dying. Every last bit of energy is winding down into oblivion, waiting to collapse in on itself.

But this is what makes me crazy, this is what marks me as insane: I am waiting for the sky to split open in the east. I am waiting for Jesus to enter stage right his name on his thigh. I am aching for this every moment, because i am broken and i believe, i hope, i pray, that he can make it right. Because everything inside me is so fragile and cracked and bleeding. So i pray that i can hang on to whatever faith and obedience i am given until everything is made right again, right in a way that we've never seen before and can't imagine.

I believe the bad news, i've seen it in myself. But now i am waiting on the good.

love,
luke

Like a ball of yarn

2008-07-17T10:31:00.000-07:00

"Father heal your son, for i am overwhelmed."

2008-07-10T20:17:00.000-07:00

I suppose it would be hard for everyone not to notice how incredibly esoteric these latest posts have been. It would be easy for me to say its all just reverse culture shock, or re-entry stress, or any of the other names they call it. I could blame it all on that but i'm not sure that would be entirely true. The truth is i think i spent the last year or so running away, maybe even longer. Maybe i've never quite figured out how to just be still.

But now i am here. Where it all started. Or maybe where it all ended. It doesn't much matter at this point because it has become apparent that avoidance is impossible.

I went away for a year, and it was good. I believe the Lord was behind it. But it was also an excuse for me to run away for awhile. To avoid having to face the reality of repentance and redemption. The darkness in my heart has followed me to Africa and back, and Christ has been hot on my heals the entire way. I can't understand it. Why do you want me so badly? Why do you speak so softly that i can hardly hear you? Why do you give so much and take so much and blur the line between the two?

I grieve a hundred things in a moment. All the experiences missed. All the beauty in people who will never know you. I know that we have messed things up. I know that we have spit in your face. And i can still hear your footsteps behind me, slowly gaining. And i know that you are standing in the way on the road ahead, waiting to pick up where i leave off. And i am frightened of what you will do to me if i ever stand still long enough to catch my breath. I am growing weary of the chase. I am surrounded by your fire. You are the snare beneath my feet. You are the breath that i breathe, though sometimes you feel like drowning.

Oh Christ, have mercy, on me. Stop me dead in my tracks. Lure me into the desert and speak tenderly to me, tearing and healing. I am surrendered tonight, though tomorrow morning i might wake up running. So put your yoke upon me. Save me from myself.

love,
luke