Den of Robbers

The clouds will scatter,
Yet the rain will fall.
"A known mystery will drive it all,"
I proclaim in praise.

Yet,
When I question what the skies can see
Because grace showers on my enemy,
All these words I've spoken
Return to me in silence
To remind me
Of the eucharistic promises I've enacted
And then broken.

This is Not Going to Work

(selling non-success)

What if
we fail?
What if
our selfishness,
dullness,
hurts,
foreign ideals,
cause us to turn
not to you
but upon each other?
What if
we allow
the nothing of our fears
to drive
the glorious something
of the love
that binds us
away,
until we fall
apart,
s ------c -----a ------------ t

--t-----------

--------- e-------
----------------------r--------

?

"What if?"?
is there any other way?
didn't you yourself
fail?
can we do differently
than the first
and still bear their name?
(for the point of bearing that name
is to remember and proclaim
that that name
is not the point)

if so,
then use our brokenness,
(the absence that by its non-being
praises that which is)
as you used
the scattered twelve.

Wow

This has nothing to do with poetry, but I'm just going to put it out there anyway. If you need/desire a theological deconstruction of this rubbish, ask and I'll be happy to pull out my ax. But I'm pretty sure that won't be necessary.

You may want to cover you computer in some sort of protective plastic before you click here.

Holy Saturday World

It's a nice heartache
She found there;
It's a new mistake
Done with her same old flair.
So she'll come back alive
With Christ-like scars
To pharisaical eyes
And dead mylar hearts.

She found her life on the other side of the grave.

You've been born again;
Have you ever died?
'Cuz she died more than once
Back when she killed them
With love and a clutch.
Now doubts can occupy
The same space as her faith,
Like the grave that held life.

In sacred silence we wait

In a Holy Saturday world
Where reason's crushed and uncurled
Until the holes in our systems provide
Glimpses of redemption.

It snowed the day
They lifted the lid
And found him hidden away
In the [mud and grit].
They had his friend drag him
Like Simon's cross
Across the pot-holed yard
To the furnace door.

He descended to hell. His ashes fell with the flakes

In a Holy Saturday world
Where reason's crushed and uncurled
Until the holes in our systems provide
Glimpses of redemption.

Is there any way around hell, in this foolish story we tell?


(Copyright 2008)

Poetry and Subculture

For a bit more on what I wrote about in the last post and hope to do a bit of in my next few posts, see here.

Poetry and Theology

I love theology. Yet, I am sure many are grateful (or would be, if they took to time to think about it) that God did not give us the Scriptures in the form of a systematic theology textbook. Instead God gave us a collection of stories and poetry and letters - and, often, it is difficult to tell the difference between them - that themselves are not the point but beckon us to Someone greater behind them.

I have been thinking about this quite a bit lately and what it means for my own theological exercises. I have come to the conclusion that essays, treatises, and systems simply do not cut it. They are good. Often necessary. But they themselves are a step to something greater (noticing a pattern?). I am convinced of the necessity (owing a great deal to the very types of essays and articles and books I am now proclaiming insufficient) of incorporating the arts into our theological work. Music (for a GREAT paper on the theological nature of music, see here) and poetry and sustained silence must be a central part of our reflection and spiritual discipline as they often say more than a whole library of the works of brilliant loquacious puffs ever could.

So, I am going to do something over my next handful of posts that is not easy for me. I am going to share the fruit (hopefully this is an appropriate metaphor) of my recent theological reflection: my poetry. I pray these are true to both appellations; that they are both theology and poetry. I also pray they will in some way be edifying to you, the blogging body of Christ.

I would love to engage in any conversation they may spark. And always remember that perhaps the point of our words is to allow us to articulate their inadequacy.

NOT ABOUT A GIRL (I had thought this would be obvious...)

Senses recalled in my head:
Your smell. It might drive me mad.
Soft touch upon my hand;
Sufficient strength to:
Stand me up,
Strangle me.

Dreams find you waiting there,
So far away, again.
I span the distant land
Reaching out to take that same

Offered pierced hand;

The thought of which grips my throat.
But it's your eyes that steal my breath,
And turn cool night to burning day.
As my skin begins to peel

I realize unrequited love will kill.


(Copyright 2008)

It's a Boy!

My kid has a penis! Granted, it's not very big right now, but we did see him display some amazing dexterity, picking stuff up and such with it. He's going to be trouble.

Now, I'm not going to make a habit of publicly showing off my kid's genitals, but, so everyone can wonder with us, here are my boy's boy parts:

Youtube Crystal Ball

I believe I may have been granted a glimpse into my future.

*Update* Youtube keeps trying to take this video down. Perhaps they are scared of it's mystical powers. So here she is:

Eschatology of Being Right

I hope entering into heaven (eternity, the new heaven and new earth) is a transformative, revelatory event, and does not simply afford me the opportunity to say, "I told you so."

This Really Is Our Baby

Amy and I just got back from our first ultrasound. We are told (by the Doctor herself and the caption on the pic) that this is our baby. There is only one. Which is both a relief and letdown.

We also heard the heartbeat.

It was sort of a liquid percussive sound. It was strange. And that little thud just changed my life. This whole thing just got a lot more scary and a lot more beautiful. In other words, a lot more real. This isn't life in the abstract "vote pro-life" sense. This is an actual peanut-sized life inside my wife. And I helped put it there. How ridiculuous is that?!

Father's Day

As you all probably know, this Sunday is "Father's Day." I could rant about how such holidays (holy-days) have no ontological reality, but are grounded in a secular ecclesiology, being simply manufactured by rebellious authorities in attempt to co-opt our bodies and souls into a narrative other than the Christian story.

I could. But I will not. Because I want to celebrate it. And I want you to congratulate me (or even send me presents). Because I'm going to be a dad!

Yes, my motives for celebrating and sharing are entirely selfish.

Amy and I have had our first doctors appointment. We're about seven weeks along and everything looks good. No, that is not our ultrasound. But we are having one next week to see if we're having twins, since they run in my family (sort of).

Our due date is January 29. So, we're enjoying every Friday and Saturday morning (our days off) we can between now and then, because after that, it doesn't matter what day it is, sleeping in will be a rare treat, like being moved by a Cameron Diaz movie.

Well Give You Six Bibles For Your Homes and Gardens

"When the European missionaries came (to Africa)...the Africans had the land and the Europeans had the Bible. The Europeans asked the Africans to close their eyes in prayer. When they said amen and opened their eyes, the Europeans had the land and the Africans had the Bible. But the Africans got the better end of the deal (Tutu) concluded, because the Bible then gave them the rational to ask for their land to be returned and their rights to be respected."

- Desmond Tutu, as paraphrased by Brian McLaren in The Last Word and the Word After That

From Our Cold Dead Hands

"Sometimes the value of a thing lies not in what we get by means of it, but in what we pay for it - what it costs us."
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

I have no doubt that the way I am about to use this quote is unfaithful to the way Nietzsche originally intended it. But little bones of scripture have for years been lifted from the ribcage of a lamb and used as vertabrea to build a serpent. So I am claiming this method for the lamb.

What does Jesus, what does Christian discipleship, cost us?

Nothing. It is a free gift.

No. This Jesus who requires nothing of us is indeed an idol. Nietzsche was more right than he knew. Let's get beyond the easily regurgitated Sunday School answers and the abc's of salvation. What does it cost us? What does it take from us?

Our sinfulness.

The gift of God's Son wrests this from us; and yet it is so precious to us.

Movie Meme

Wil's meme

1. One movie that made you laugh
Iron Man

2. One movie that made you cry
A Thief in the Night (I was in first grade at a Christian school in Texas when they made us watch this terrible - yet, to a first-grader, terrifying - precursor to the Left Behind dribble).

3. One movie you loved when you were a child
Raiders of the Lost Ark

4. One movie you’ve seen more than once
Pulp Fiction

5. One movie you loved, but were embarrassed to admit it
Music and Lyrics

6. One movie you hated
Almost Heroes

7. One movie that scared you
The Descent

8. One movie that bored you
Doomsday (Neil Marshall, I thought you were better than this)

9. One movie that made you happy
Tender Mercies

10. One movie that made you miserable
The Serpent's Egg

11. One movie you weren’t brave enough to see
None really...unless you count high school boys trying to sneak into Showgirls. I wasn't down with that.

12. One movie character you’ve fallen in love with
James from Ratcatcher

13. The last movie you saw
The Black Dahlia

14. The next movie you hope to see
8 1/2

15. Your favorite movie (I added this one)
Persona

Death Metal Puppy

My description line above promises some metal. So every now and then I have to come through. Enjoy. Throw your neck out.

Perception is Fickle

Velocity Meadows
by Mark Strand

I can say now that nothing was possible
But leaving the house and standing in front of it, staring
As long as I could into the valley. I knew that a train,
Trailing a scarf of smoke, would arrive, that soon it would rain.
A frieze of clouds lowered a shadow over the town,
And a driving wind flattened the meadows that swept
Beyond the olive trees and banks of hollyhock and rose.
The air smelled sweet, and a girl was waving a stick
At some crows so far away they seemed like flies.
Her mother, wearing a cape and shawl, shielded her eyes.
I wondered from what, since there was no sun. Then someone
Appeared and said, "Look at those clouds forming a wall, those crows
Falling out of the sky, those fields, pale green, green-yellow,
Rolling away, and that girl and her mother, waving goodbye."
In a moment the sky was stained with a reddish haze,
And the person beside me was running away. It was dusk,
The lights of the town were coming on, and I saw, dimly at first,
Close to the graveyard bound by rows of cypress bending down,
The girl and her mother, next to each other,
Smoking, grinding their heels into the ground

Truly Free Market

I am part of a group within my church that has recently been looking for creative, and, most importantly, fundamentally Christian, ways of sharing our faith. This led us to ask questions about what our faith truly is (or, what/who it is in). How can we share the gospel if we don't know it?

I am in no way claiming to exhaustively "know" the gospel. But we did quite a bit of hard reading, discussing and praying and came to appreciate that the gospel is so much more than being able to recite the four spiritual laws or walk someone down the "Roman's Road." The gospel is about the inbreaking of the Kingdom. Christ ushered in a new rule that is now mixed in with the here and now. It is about allegiance to a King, and this is about a total way of life.

This King is an entirely different kind of King, so, as his subjects, we are called to live an entirely different kind of life. Sharing the gospel is living in such a way that it invites others to come and participate in the Kingdom of God, in the here and now, in the ordinary parts of everyday life, as we wait for the Kingdom to come in its fullness.

This is a big task. So, again, I am in now way claiming that we have figured out how to do this perfectly. But I think we're headed in the right direction.

We realized all this means that the gospel even has something to do with economics. How we value, buy, use and get rid of stuff. So we came up with something we decided to call the "Truly Free Market."

Here's how it worked/works: First we asked our congregation to go out and buy some new clothes for us to give away. We didn't ask for anything ridiculous, simply that when people went out to buy something for themselves, that they think of someone else as well. We also asked for new stuff because we wanted to show people we loved them, and old underwear full of holes says, "here, you throw this away," not, "we love you."

Our congregation responded with incredible generosity. We received hundreds of articles of (good) clothes and over $1,000 in monetary donations we used to buy more clothes (Old Navy clearance rack is awesome for kids clothes, by the way) and diapers, toothbrushes, bottles etc. We then took all this stuff down to a pre-school and set it all up like a garage sale. Except nothing was for sale. We gave it all away.

I was a little surprised how reluctant people can be to receive a gift. We are so conditioned to think something must be earned. One lady even started yelling at one of our girls, saying "Liar! Nothing is ever free!"

She said, "Except maybe this stuff?"

However, not all had such a hard time realizing what this was all about. Once people accepted that we simply wanted to give gifts the responses were as much a gift to us, perhaps more so, that what we gave them.

Especially the kids. You could tell they were used to getting second-hand crap. My wife, Amy, would begin to walk them around to "shop" and they would be all detached and jaded, until she would hold something up and they saw that it really was cool stuff. At those moments, the looks on their faces were worth more than all the stuff we gave away combined. They then went into a funny little exercise of picking up just about everything and asking, "How much for this? How about this? Is this free too?"

Now, I'm not saying that everyone there thought about the event in terms of economics. But, whether they realize it or not, everyone involved learned something about the economics of the Kingdom. It is one based not in shortage or supply and demand and the "freedom" to use this for one's own benefit, but in abundance and grace and therefore in the exchange of gifts for the good of another. Our Lord is one who gives amazing gifts, so we desire to be a people who give gifts too. I pray that as we do this people will come into the sphere of the Kingdom.

UPDATE:
If you're interested, Eric has a nice little post with some good links that deal with the economics of the Kingdom and gift giving here. There is also an insightful little comment that links economies of gift with sustained relationships. You know, FYI.

Not Really Funny Anymore, But I'm Going For It Anyway

You were cool again, in a David Hasselhoff sort of way, about two years ago, for about 6 months (don't worry, all those qualifiers don't diminish your former coolness a bit). And while the rest of the world may have moved on, I have not forgotten you. Happy 68th birthday Chuck!

That is all.

Rapture

Have you ever heard me go, "WEEEEEEEEEE!!!!" in delight like a 3 year-old girl? No? Sorry. Had you been with me three minutes ago when I first watched this you would have...in fact, if you want to hear it, give me a call before you hit play and we'll watch it together. That would be fun.

Lenten Prayer

I waffled a bit as to whether or not I should post something about my lenten prayers. After all, isn't this supposed to be a time of repentance and humility? And couldn't this be seen as the type of boastful praying on the street corners that Jesus warned us about? But then I got embarrassed and didn't really want to share anyway. So now I am, because now it is an act of self-mortification.

I have recently taken to praying the rosary, tough in a slightly tailored fashion. Instead of saying the Hail Mary on the smaller beads I say the Jesus Prayer and I change the focus of some of the Mysteries (mainly just the last two Glorious Mysteries - I understand that the Catholic veneration of Mary is more nuanced that most people think and I believe we need to rediscover more female heroes of our Faith, but there are still some things I am just not comfortable with). If you are unfamiliar with the rosary and all I'm talking about, here is a good summary of the whole thing.

During Lent the Sorrowful Mysteries are said every day (the agony of Jesus in the garden, Jesus scourged on the pillar, Jesus crowned with thorns, Jesus carries his cross, the crucifixion of Jesus). The other day, while meditating on Jesus being crowned with thorns, I thought about how at this point, when the world was mocking his Lordship, he was more Lord than ever. He was as much Lord then as he is now at the right hand of the Father and as much as he will be at his second coming. At this stage, in this type of humiliation, we see what type of Lord rules the Kingdom we have been called to be a part of. Here, crowned with thorns, is our King; this crown of thorns is indeed a crown. He is a different kind of King, so we are to be a different kind of subjects.

This expanded what had been a pretty self-centered prayer time into the corporate realm. Almost without realizing what I was doing I changed the Christ Prayer on the following beads to "Lord have mercy on us."

Indeed he has.

Just Good Writing...In A Way

You may have already seen these on another blog or in an email, but that is ok. It's no trouble for me to write these things to you again, because they're funny. I'm not too sure how true the story is, but is goes that these were all taken from High School creative writing assignments.

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.



2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.



3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse, without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.



4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.



5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.



6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.



7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.



8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.



9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.



10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.



11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.



12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.



14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.



15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan's teeth.



16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.



17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.



18. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.



19. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.



20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work .



21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.



22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.



23. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.



24. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.



25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.