I’ve been thinking lately about things I have no business thinking about, like how to reconcile the capital-‘S’ Self from A Course of Love with what I’ve glimpsed of the Buddhist teaching of anatta, or no-self. Let me say right at the outset that this is not purely an intellectual exercise. One of the great miracles of starting this blog has been the dialogue with people whose words, and possibly (though it remains hard to […]
I Jesus is my breath. He is the blood in my veins, the white of my bones, and the thoughts of my heart. He is the stones in the ground, the birds in the field, and the wood drifting down the river. Behind the wincing in thieves, the sighs of politicians, and the crackling static of the sherriff’s radio when no one is near, you will find him. He is the root, the marrow, the […]
I haven’t picked up A Course of Love for a while, but picked it up again the other day and flipped to a “random” section. I ended up opening to a page that was late in the Treatise on the Personal Self, which is a section of the Course describing the way in which the personal self becomes a living representation of the True Self—the latter being the identity we all share in unity. Through […]
This is part 3 of a short fictional series. So far the posts are all in order… So far… * * * * * They’d told me about the wire probably six months ago. The jumper wire. How it grew within us from the anode to the cathode like a clever root of ivy. The fuse of a self. A short circuit. It was a strange trick: cutting eternity out of the equation. Without access […]
When I say Jesus in these poems, I hope you don’t think that I think that I know with any real precision what I’m talking about. When a stone says yes to one day returning to the shimmering heart of a star, and the star says yes to beaming that stone’s endless heart through all of space and time, and the gravity inside of every pebble, rock, and speck of sand becomes a continuum of Meaning, […]
Calculus reveals itself to be the study of my fears. The tangent to a curve is a line, a rock slung into the void of space, a cannonball flight untempered by gravity, a prognosis insulated from relationship and possibility. If we take the vector properties of this miniscule instant, extrapolate them, and play the tape, well… uh oh. When the Studebaker is whipping around a turn, an antique rocking chair strapped inadequately to the roof, once […]
See if this helps: Christ is a fisherman whose nets are cast nightly into the sea of non-existence, pulling haul after haul of shimmering beings out of the abyss. The seas are black as ink, the waves like rolling hills of liquefied obsidian, impenetrable to plain sight, but the nets emerge from the deep full of wriggling, unspeakable colors. We were each caught like that, scooped out of the darkness in nets woven by angels, hauled […]
For a time it was vitally important that I witness the sunset, that I look up from whatever act of commerce or gastronomy had caught my attention that day and look west, to pause and listen to far away places that seemed, for just a moment, to pour through the offices of my heart in fleeting snippets of a cosmic dialect. That was the moment, the precise time to say it: whatever this is… I […]
Since the invention of night vision goggles, you kind of have to wonder if the whole “Thief in the night theory” will hold up. I mean, we’ll see Him coming from a mile away. That could never work. Can you imagine? A safe cracker with a bootleg copy of the Plans to your Heart strolling down your front walk in clear darkness? Ha! What’s He going to do? Knock on the door and ask to […]
Let us begin. The room is dark and empty, and filled with silence. Keep in mind: this is not the type of silence to which we’re accustomed, a silence that is the inverse of noise, the silence that pervades space like a Propensity For Action lying in ambush. No. This is before that type of silence. This is emptiness. It is not even a room actually. It is not even space. Space, you see, has […]
Embracing Forever 