All posts tagged: Heaven

Heaven’s Front Yard

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Christ / Poetry

Staggering through the dim light of Heaven’s front yard, slinking into the greenish shadows of distant outdoor halogens as if to hide forever, and ranting silently about the burden of makeshift woes and ramshackle postulates with which I’d saddled myself– including my favorite one about the  pending arrival of something hellish but indeterminate in nature that no being should ever have to face– why wouldn’t I accept the cocktail napkin and the nice sandwich offered to me […]

The Trail Up the Mountain

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Christ

This post was written in response to the Inner Child Blog Challenge that Ka sent my way…  Thank you, Ka, for the prompt… As children, what happens swallows us whole.  We occupy slices of heaven easily.  They’re what we expect to find.  There are no beliefs to suspend in order to gain access, for our minds have yet to form them.  Our physical brains are malleable potentials, taking in light and sound with curiosity, measuring […]

A Day I Remember

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Poetry

On that summer day, that I still remember… doorways beckoned from every direction, hovering near stacked horizons as if the Beloved had hung wreaths of heat and time along our world’s borders. There were voices you could see occasionally, ribbons of them wafting up from the ends to mix with the sky like jugs of clear sap poured into whiskey, swirling and touching noses and everything at once… merging. And the air, too. The air….! […]

A Few Policy Changes

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Poetry

There’s a new policy in heaven I wish to discuss. Instead of a life review, they set you out in a meadow full of this special grass that tickles your feet incessantly— a meadow with songbirds full of mirth and wit that line up in the sky to land on your shoulder one after another and offer a joke or a poem before disappearing altogether… Oh—! …and of tornadoes that swoop through sporadically, thunderous, crashing […]

States of Stress and Their Undoings

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Christ / Course Ideas

When I stepped out of the building in which I work this evening, my head seemed to have been pressed into a perfect, steaming cube– a polished alloy ingot of ordered rectilinear thoughts.  You could have bounced a laser off it.  My normally fluid mind had been sintered by the heat of prolonged concentration into a dazed ceramic.  Even my cells had conformed to the geometric demands of the day’s efforts, having tugged their cytoskeletons […]

A Question We All Must Answer

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Christ / Course Ideas

When I sit down to write, I try to put forth a fresh take on what is.  The result may not always be top shelf, but I find you can always find a way of expressing yourself that is authentic to who you are in that moment.  When you do, it is delicious.  It is revealing, at least to you.  It is awesome. Sometimes you have to dig for it, sure.  You have to get […]

Symptoms of the Perfection That Is

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Christ / Course Ideas

The question in my heart today is this: what is possible? That is actually a poor translation of what is in my heart, because this simple question is so abstract it permits responses like, what is possible… ever?  And the answer then is… well… anything, I suppose… This is not the question.  I am not filled with a question about what might happen in places and times so remote from where we stand today as […]

Boyhood Ontology and the Promise of Salvation

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Christ / Course Ideas

Time capsules are intriguing.  Your elementary school teacher encourages you to round up some receipts, a few movie tickets, maybe a back-of-the-envelope journal entry with your favorite candy bar or song written on it, along with a note of encouragement to your future self, and then you and your classmates shove all these notions into a box or a tube and bury it.  Kickball, the old standby, would probably have been a more thrilling recess […]

Beyond Ethics. Beyond Temptation. Beyond Suffering. (Part 2)

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Course Ideas

One of the aspects of reading A Course of Love that I really enjoyed, aside from the feeling it evoked of having Love itself shovel coal into the furnace of my heart deep into the night, was the string of observations Jesus made about this experience we’re having as personal beings.  Paragraph after paragraph, Jesus tells us about who we are, in ways he couldn’t have known, unless he’s been in there…  through doubt, through […]

Anything Could Happen

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Course Ideas

Early on in A Course of Love, Jesus assures us that we are not alone in our experience of shock and dismay at what the world we see seems to offer.  He says, “There is not a soul that walks this earth that does not weep at what it sees.”  (CoL, 2.10)  Recognizing that we might be reluctant to accept this sweeping statement at face value, he also says, “Think not that those who seem […]