What's On My Mind?

Sleep Over and Dream with Me

If you don't mind, I am going to write freely today without worrying too much about how my words fall.

My thoughts are raw, like runny eggs that threaten salmonella.  I usually try to pretty myself up for you, but today I don't feel like putting on makeup or brushing my teeth.

​So this will be fun!  I have no idea what's going to come out of my cluttered mind.  We'll be reckless and drink straight from the milk carton; we will forget to flush; we will run around the house and turn on all the lights, wasting electricity like irresponsible millionaires.

So come on over.  We will microwave smores; with our chocolate-covered fingers we will spin the bottle, and play truth-or-dare in pajamas, and tell each other secrets, not wanting the night to end.

So brace yourselves!  Let us dive into this spiritual stream-of-consciousness, and see if there's any reason to randomness.

   Double-dog-dare you!

"So they chanted in the darkness, and there cometh a victory now"

Recently I was wrapped in a blanket in my basement study, reading about early British history during the time of Roman occupation.  I was captivated by the uprising of the British Queen Boudica who defied Caesar and marched on Londinium.  She became a symbol for future generations of justice and freedom.

According to the Roman historian Tacitus, after Boudica's husband died, Rome made a show of power by flogging her and raping her two daughters and emptying her treasury.  In response, Boudica led the British tribes in revolt and burned the countryside in her grief and rage.

Boudica had brief success before being subdued by the Roman general Suetonius Paulinus, who famously massacred the druids at Anglesey.

Here's a poem that describes the Celtic prophecy a druid sage spoke to Boudica when she sought divine favor:

Rome shall perish—write that word
   In the blood that she has spilt;
Perish, hopeless and abhorr’d,
   Deep in ruin as in guilt.
 
Rome, for empire far renown’d,
   Tramples on a thousand states;
Soon her pride shall kiss the ground―
   Hark! the Gaul is at her gates!
 
(William Cowper, excerpts from "Boadicea")
 
Well, that sounds quite noble.  But then Alfred Lord Tennyson took up his pen and his portrayal of Boudica, half-mad and raving for vengeance, was not well received by the public.

Published in 1864 while England was still a colonial superpower, Tennyson's poem did not reflect Britain's imperial glory in a flattering light.

You see, Tennyson subversively used Boudica as an image of Britain, her bloodthirstiness and violence an indictment of the Empire's wrongs.

   Burst the gates, and burn the palaces, break the works of the statuary,
   Take the hoary Roman head and shatter it, hold it abominable,
   Cut the Roman boy to pieces in his lust and voluptuousness,
   Lash the maiden into swooning, me they lash'd and humiliated,
   Chop the breasts from off the mother, dash the brains of the little one out,
   Up my Britons, on my chariot, on my chargers, trample them under us.

(Excerpts from Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Boadicea")

It didn't help that Tennyson's version is a mouthful, written in galliambic meter (it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue). 

But in this Tennyson was a true prophet, for empire-building (such as see in churches) requires patriotic pride, or what we call in a religious context, sectarianism.

Usually the more a person attests to the truth of what they are saying, the less true it is.  So it is with religion.  Truth has its own appeal, and needs no adornment.  But falsehood?  She lawyers up, hires a PR team, sends out the calvary.  The adulteress, not the virgin, hires others to vouch for her chastity. 

But there is no honor in slaughter.  There is no pride in priestcraft.  There is no glory in the gleaming gem-encrusted walls of a temple built with spiritual blood diamonds.

Catch the Wave

Armies march on their stomach, not their heart.  Empires have little use for love.  Churches need tithing more than wisdom, and employ more lawyers than mystics.

But here we are.  In the catacombs of Christianity, seeing if we can make these bones speak.  

Yes, I know it stinks, here, in the bowels of a compassionate faith.  Few people want to crawl through God's intestines to find this place.  We've gone through a lot of crap to get here.

Sure, it smells bad.  So we hold our breath: for in holding one's breath we feel our pulse beat louder.  It is the restriction that reveals.  A man placed before a buffet needs no discernment.  We have become judicious by necessity.

But we don't need more; 'more' is not always better (as in the case of double-stuffed Oreos).

We don't need more money, or temples, or family history group sheets filled out, or firesides, or anything.  We seem to always be so busy packing that we never start out.  We wait by the window for more favorable conditions to get started, as if the weather were in charge.

It's time we travel.  We have glories to explore and gods to greet.  

People think we first fall in love and then get married.  But really, we get married and then we must learn to fall in love each day.

Marriage is choosing our partner ― not the one we married at the altar, but I mean the one we wake up to, next to us in bed, each morning.

So it is with our spiritual partner, our shepherds and religious leaders.  We are not the same people we were 20 years ago as newlyweds.  We have grown and changed.  So do organizations and cultures.

So we must choose our bedfellows, and whether we can go on being faithful to a spouse who has been unfaithful, sleeping around with Mammon and who-knows-what-else.

We must each choose, as Hosea.  Some can love Gomer, others will seek marital bliss elsewhere.

Don't look to me to save you.  I am not a lifeguard.  I am not a captain.  I am a surfer chasing the big wave.  I wipeout more often than not; I can hardly get the taste of seawater out of my mouth.  But I love the thrill of it all, and wouldn't trade this life, the life of a beach bum, a wanderer, a lover.

I live an ordinary life and yet have had the most fantastical experiences!  We are transitioning into a new phase.

Now we're in the kitchen chopping veggies and sautéing them in the pan with butter.  I may not be the best cook, but I'm tired of talking about recipes; I want hands-on experience in the kitchen.

My stomach craves something other than the same rote fare the cafeteria serves each day.  No offense to the lunch ladies, but the government has given them so many restrictions and nutritional guidelines, the food tastes pretty poor.

Have religions sold their birthright for a mess of pottage?  I suppose I would rather cook with fresh ingredients I grow in my own garden, and on protein I've slaughtered myself.

And while I appreciate Grandma's old recipes, I like to put my own twist on things.  Add a little squeeze of lemon here, a pinch of tarragon there.  Make it my own.

The aroma spreads through the house.  The children upstairs smell the baking bread in the oven and begin to feel their tummies rumble.

We go to Church and talk about heaven, and boast of how great our church programs are, when in fact we've many forms of godliness, but so little power.

If we dine on what others offer, we're limited to what they serve, their palate, their preferences.  There is freedom in taking charge of one's own menu.

Step 1: Know Thyself

Has the children's meat gone to the dogs (Matt. 15:26)?

Ilia Delio said:

"Social media ensures constant exposure to global suffering. The result is 'compassion fatigue' — the inability to continue feeling and responding to endless emergencies. This exhaustion manifests as numbing—people shut down, stop paying attention, focus on private concerns because the public sphere has become overwhelming.

"Institutional inertia [in the Church] is powerful; vested interests resist change; genuine reform threatens comfortable arrangements. But the alternative—institutional Christianity that fails to feed humanity’s zest when that zest is most desperately needed—is unacceptable. The stakes are too high, the mission too urgent, the gospel too important to allow institutional dysfunction to continue unchallenged.

"Christians are sent into the world to enkindle collective will for evolutionary advance, to channel energies of love that drive cosmic convergence. But we cannot fulfill this mission through institutions that betray it."

Where can we find creative solutions?  I watched General Conference and was disappointed, as if the messages had been poured from old bottles, even brittle wineskins.

The Family Proclamation and declining birthrate?  Hmm.  Where are new bottles to be found?  Where are the visionaries?

Where is the spiritual creativity in the Church? We are not assembly-line workers, but artists.  We are not machinists, but living, growing, organisms.

If we want to be like God, then let's be creative like Him.  And what, exactly, is at the heart of divine creativity?

    Play.

The way to become a Creator is to play around with the universe in new ways.  Perhaps this is why the kingdom of heaven is filled with little children, playing ― whereas hell is comprised of TV reruns and stale root beer that has lost its fizz.

​Saida Mirsadri, a Muslim woman drawing upon the teachings of the Quran, calls God "the Poet of the world."  I loved how she said, "[God’s] divine creative power, far from being unilateral, is relational and interactive, with God and creation intertwined, cooperating in the ongoing process of brining the universe into being."

We have this idea of God creating the universe long ago, way back when, by knocking planets around.  But God does not create that way.  He is creating the universe now, as we speak, with us.  He creates by putting Himself into the creation, as a co-Participant, so that everything is an expression of Him.

Step 2: Accept Thyself

Maps clutter our lives.  We surround ourselves with directions, making life dull.  Better to explore uncharted territory than to follow the maps of other men.  All begins and ends in mystery.  That is the magic!  What I have learned is there are aspects and faces of God that cannot be depicted on maps, that we will miss if our nose is stuck to paper.

Now it's true that maps help us get to our destination quicker.  But what's the hurry?  

If we sat down at the computer and typed out 20 pages on what we think heaven is like (make it double-spaced if you want), we will find we have little idea.  We have maybe one-or-two-pages-worth of material.  Heaven is half-baked in our hearts. 

Let us dream, and then create, the heaven waiting to be born.

Anything that remains the same, and static, becomes a bore.  The first principle of creation, then, is change.  Change is heavenly.

Are we footnotes in our own story?  Is our life a mere endnote found at the back of the appendix, in a book no one will ever read?  Do our lives matter?

Yes!  For we are part of the greatest story, the main story, the only story that truly means anything: the story of love being co-authored by us and God, weaving a new world into Being.

Tamara explained that creation is messy, so relax (it's not going to be 'perfect' and 'tidy'):

"Human relationships are not spreadsheets where cells line up neatly once the formula is right. They spill over margins, they miscalculate, they resist tidy balancing. They demand something that feels embarrassing in our age of self-management and curated composure: vulnerability. The willingness to say, I need you! And forget the generic Hallmark sense, think of the terrifyingly specific sense that without your presence, my world contracts. 

​"I cannot promise your need will be fulfilled. Most of the time, it won’t. But I can promise that denying it will turn you into a ghost inside your own life. Better to risk the embarrassment of hunger than the sterile pride of starvation. Better to admit you want, yes, too much, too soon, too raw than to live embalmed in cool detachment. Need is not weakness. It is the pulse that proves you are still alive."

You see, we need each other.  We are caught in God's web, and as a fishing net being drawn, the web is being gathered.

The world is exploding with spiritual seekers; the potential overwhelms me.  The web is coalescing into something remarkable.  We are seeing, I think, the sheepfold of God materialize as never before.

I look for God working at the frontier of things, where light and outer darkness collide.  Where do we find God working among us, now?  In our churches?  Well, um, yes, He's there.  He is everywhere.  But where is His Spirit really active, hot as red coal in the refiner's fire?

Actually, on Substack.  You think I'm joking, but I witness more spiritual voltage being channeled and poured out from some of these unlikely spaces, where people are reaching across the globe and connecting in a deeply spiritual way, forming something we've rarely seen before, getting away from their computers and church-labels, and meeting up in person, in the flesh, to dissolve boundaries in love, erasing the doctrines of separation ― it almost feels paradisiacal.

Step 3: Become the Creator

We've found each other . . . so now what?  What does God want us to do?  Better yet, what do we want to do?

That's the big question, isn't it?  I have always been a bit of a spiritual stray, a surf bum, waiting for someone to come and adopt me, giving me a name like I was a three-legged cat, or Cabbage Patch doll, and dress me and love me, take me home with them.

Not anymore.  While the angels serve an important role in performing divine investiture, they cannot save us.  I am no longer waiting for Enoch's City to start the party.   

Remember, by being who we are (who we truly are), we evoke all we-are-not by implication.  If we wish to do good, our shadow will spread over evil.

Matt Segall said:

"If we remember that possibilities require the agential decisions of actualities to enter into history, then we preserve the creative tension driving cosmic evolution.

"Organisms do not unfold according to rigid templates; they dip into a structured but evolving open field of potential, actualizing new patterns through their own activity."

Are you seeking a Utopia?  Zion?  The New Jerusalem?  Then stop trying to escape the world that we have!  You know, the one right here in front of us.  For heaven is now; the Kingdom is here.

All we need to do is love purely, universally, unconditionally.  It's that simple!

The thing I care very much about is not imposing upon the agency of others.  The reasons organizations crumble, and communities fall apart, and churches become corrupt, is because people want to be in charge, thinking they know "best."  When such people get a little money, and a little authority, how much worse things become.  

It's like at some point the tonsils, thrilled in their tonsilhood, incorrectly assumed that because they felt the fruits of the Spirit, doing as tonsils do, then all of us should be tonsils, too.

And so the tonsils tried to convert the liver and lungs to behave like tonsils. The liver and lung were convinced, and deceived, and stopped acting like the liver and lungs they were, doing as the tonsils counseled.

And the body died, for where was the liver?  What of the lungs?

Jesus’s gospel is His own.  He did the will of His Father.  But I am not going to be crucified.  The Father's will for me is not the same as for you. 

In this way, we must each embody our own gospel, for in following Christ we pursue the path our spiritual DNA was divinely encoded to express.  The greatest error is trying to get someone to act against their divine DNA code, rewriting their guanine and thymine genes to look more like, well, wolves in sheep's clothing.

This is why I love to encourage others, even when their walk with God does not resemble my own.  What unites us is not what we believe (my beliefs continue to evolve, and I hope yours are, too) or how we behave — what unites us is faith, hope, and charity. 

We are creatures of concreteness, and yet faith draws us towards the Unseen.

And so what is on my mind?  Shall we burn and wage war like Boudica?  Shall we pull down the pillars of priestcraft?  Shall we retreat to our hermitages and retire from the world? 

How strange, isn't it, that everyone seems to be bursting at the seams, wanting to do something, but what that is, they do not know.​

Wrestle with God
a poem

​​     And the hollow of Jacob's thigh
     was out of joint as he wrestled
     with God.
 
     And Jacob called the place ‘Peniel’:
     for I have seen God face to face.
 
          ― Genesis 32:25, 30
 
              "The pelvis is a bony girdle
fused from the ilium, ischium,    and
pubis bones"             They call Latin
a dead language    but here we are
                  Where was I
the grocery store is a     summation
of civilization                   the sacrum
temple                 my PIN wont work
oh bananas                remembering
the pelvis holds              the bladder
a reservoir of memories     flooding
memories descended           pooled
inward                between hip bones
the coccyx is                     in the end
the thing we outgrew           no one
                     remembers
bones are full of holes               
yesterdays                            nerves
need    .   .   .   .                      somewhere to go
sacral foramina                 for veins
           congregate in the groin
          
 
     Jacob wrestled          with
     hollow heart     wrenched
     thigh         Thy          Israel
     wrestled                  socket
                       hole
     looked within   ―the hole
     the whole                 holds             
                       Peniel