We rejoice.
We have glimpsed victory and have the assurance of the reconciliation of all things.
And so we dance. But as we move across the floor the tears of others are drawn to us and wrap around us like a blanket. Until all things are made new our dance reveals a world full of hurt and dying. Without missing a beat we find ourselves weeping. Our joy and sorrow weave together as the music swells and fades.
One day we will dance freely. Free in a way we cannot completely understand right now. One day we will know laughter that has fully triumphed over sorrow. Laughter that is pure, that is sure, laughter that is whole. Beauty untouched by brokenness. Or rather, beauty that runs deeper than brokenness, beauty that is victorious. Then the dance will truly begin. The crowd will shift, a space will open, and you will see her there. Uninhibited, joyful and whole.
Then we all will echo the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. “Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”
Maranatha. Come quickly, Lord Jesus, come quickly.
Hands
And the friends that he has are all bleeding.
They’re addicts, and perverts, and thieves.
The story of beauty once broken,
The lonely that nobody grieves.
But in sharing a smile on the corner,
In comparing holes in their shoes,
He’s wishing the best for the other,
Even if the rest of them lose.
Though the room he returns to is empty
And the bedsheets are always cold,
He’s still singing songs in the shower,
A witness to weakness made bold.
He is treating his friends like his lovers
And smiling when no one can see.
His hands jumping out of his pockets,
Now touching, now telling, now free.
Disclaimer
He said:
Hey man, can you help me, I can't reach it.
Pointed at the camera in the ceiling.
I climbed up, blocked it so they could not see.
Turned to find you out of bed and kneeling.
Before the nurses came, took you away,
I stood there on a chair and watched you pray.
– The Weakerthans
This is a journal.
That means I'm struggling with the things I write about – not claiming to have discovered absolute truth.
Please do not go and base your life or faith solely on anything written here (or on your interpretation of anything written here).
~
Naturally, if you speak to enough people about enough subjects, particularly subjects that are deeply personal or deeply controversial, misunderstandings will inevitably result. So let me clarify a few things:
When I write about remembering suffering at Christmas I'm writing to comfortable middle-class Christians, not those who have suffered. I'm writing to Christians who have made emotional happiness and instant pleasure the be-all-end-all of their Christian existence instead of responding to the call and example of Jesus.
When I write about universalism I'm not claiming that all religions (or lacks thereof) lead to the same God. I'm not surrendering terms that the Bible dictates nor am I adopting a laissez-faire approach.
And I'd like to think that when I write angrily I'm not writing (too) arrogantly.
And that, my friends, is my disclaimer. Read critically.
Celebrating Torture?
It's coming on christmas
They're cutting down trees
They're putting up reindeer
And singing songs of joy and peace
Oh I wish I had a river
I could skate away on
– Joni Mitchell, River
You know, more and more, I have trouble viewing Christmas as a celebratory time of year. I mean, apart from all the Christian ranting about how this time of year has been co-opted by contemporary cultural paganism (“Jesus is the reason for the season!”), I'm not convinced that a Christian approach to Christmas – that of remembering the birth of Jesus – should be a cause of so much frivolous joy.
Certainly there is a joyous element to it. Jesus' birth signals God becoming human, God entering into our world, coming alongside of us to redeem us. God with a face. God we can know and love and hold and be held by. That surely inspires awe and celebration.
And yet how can we unrestrainedly celebrate that event when we know what it leads to? The birth of Jesus was just the first step of a journey of humiliation and suffering. God humbled. God made vulnerable. God as a child. A child destined for abandonment, torture, shame and death. Surely a cause of awe, that God should love us so dearly as to endure such things for us, but not so much a cause of frivolous joy. Christmas is the first step to a journey that culminates in the cross.
I wonder how much those who celebrate Christmas really understand suffering. I wonder how much those who sing the words, “Thank you for the cross” really understand what it entails. Saying thank you for the cross is like saying thank you for the rape of a loved one. Celebrating Christmas so lavishly and thoughtlessly is like celebrating the first step that leads to that loved one's rape.
~
Only in light of the resurrection can we thank God for the cross. And even then it is a thank you that we whisper, that we speak with tears on our cheeks. It is not a thank you for forms of torture but rather a thank you for a love so deep that it was willing to be tortured, and by being tortured set us free.
That's why I think Easter Sunday is the truly celebratory moment of the Christian calendar. New creation bursts into the old. Life is brought out of death and hope out of hopelessness. Humanity is reconciled to God and God is shown to triumph over even the most brutal forms of forsakenness.
This Christmas season, while the world celebrates and feasts, I think Christians would do well to step back and remember a child held by a breathless mother in a barn in Bethlehem. Awed by the miracle of birth, his tiny fingers clutching her thumb. Christians would do well to remember how that same mother would come to see her son beaten beyond recognition and hung naked before a crowd that mocked him as he died. His weathered hands outstretched and pierced. Christians would do well to remember that while the world celebrates we are called to mourn, and while the world feasts we are called to fast. During Christmas we need to remember the God who identified so deeply with those who are oppressed and forsaken that he entered into their forsakenness with them. This Christmas season let us remember that we are called to do the same.
Dinner for Sixty
For the first time since moving out here I felt like I was home. Home in the way that usually only those who have been homeless can understand it. Yes, this is where I belong. I felt like I was with family. These are my people. These are my kids. I was glowing. Those who know me well would have recognised the look in my eyes, “Uh-oh… Dan’s in love.”
And I am. I love these kids. These gutter-punks, thugs, queers, loners, trannies, junkies, prostitutes, and crack-heads. I love ’em. They burst through the door decked out in chains and trench-coats, bandannas and diamond earrings. A flash of leather and teeth, steel and skin. Bruises, pock-marks, scars and unwashed hair. I think to myself, “how can so much beauty fit into this room? God, these kids are beautiful.”
So I wait on them, I bring food to their tables and clean their dirty dishes. I laugh at their jokes, not politely but like a lover – it doesn’t seem to matter how funny the joke is, it’s just a delight to be in the presence of your beloved and any excuse to laugh will do. It’s good to laugh with these kids. God knows they’ve spent enough time crying.
You know, when all is said and done, I think that love is all that I have to give. I used to read stories from the Bible about all sorts of miracles. I used to long see those things happen in my own life, you know, some dynamic in-breaking of God’s power to heal the sick, to restore the down-trodden. I’m not really looking for the miraculous anymore. I’m just looking to journey in love relationships with the down-trodden. I am content to only have my love to offer, as imperfect as it is.
The funny thing is that, in the end, it is through love that the truly miraculous occurs. It’s this strange paradox of surrendering to powerlessness and, in doing so, discovering the power that truly transforms the world. It’s a hard line to walk and an even harder line to describe to others. To embrace love as the only thing I have to offer is to recognise weakness. It highlights all sorts of limitations. Yet, at the same time, I am convinced that love will triumph over all else. It’s victory, but not in the way we are accustomed to thinking of it. It is the victory we discover in the character of the God who loves us deeply enough to come alongside of us. The God who embraces weakness and suffers with us… so that we will be set free.
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
– Paul, 1 Corinthians 13.13
Conversations with my eyes closed and the candle burning Low
“You know it's got to be this personal relationship thing that you talk about because that's the only chance I have. I can't count on others, I just can't. The man who abused me was the holiest man I knew. I just can't bow my head, I can't cross my hands, I can't even listen to the kind of language. It triggers me. When I talk about God it's like something deep inside of my chest doesn't even want to say the word. It's like something tearing, weighing on me, I can barely talk about it. No, the only chance I have is what you're talking about.”
…
“Prayer, it's more about a conversation, more about just talking openly with somebody, it's not about formulas or right words. It's like talking to a person.”
“So when I yell at God and say, “Why the fuck did you let all this happen to me?” that's more of a real prayer?”
“Yes! Exactly, that's the most genuine kind of prayer.”
Old Friend
Oh we drink and we smoke and we fight and we fuck
And we bleed and we’ll die when we run out of luck.
– Anonymous
Part of the problem was that I was one of the one’s who actually fell for it. I actually believed punk rock was about unity. I actually believed that it was about standing together regardless of the way we looked. It was about honesty. It was about letting people know who you are. Nobody needed to hide the fact that they were fucked up. This is me, this is my heart on my sleeve. Punk rock was about coming together. It was about accepting one another as fucked up. It was about finding strength in weakness, getting through things together.
I don’t know when everything changed. Punk rockers “pimpin’ their rides” and Tim and Lars singing about “bitches and hos”. Maybe things were always the way they are now. Broken kids crying out, lashing out, searching for something to soothe the fire, to put the pieces back together. But the only community you discover is your own loneliness reflected in the faces around you.
She left home cuz daddy beat her
Out on the street they say they love her
So what if they hit her when they’re not sober
Their parents beat them too
Then when she went home daddy said he loved her
And when mom went out he started to kiss her
And when it was over part of her died
So she don’t go home no more
Run to the shelter the streets are your friend
Situation at home won’t ever end
Here are your brothers your sisters your lovers
We can empathise
She started turning tricks so her daddy wouldn’t touch her again
She started smoking crack to numb the pain
She likes the stupor induced by liquor
Her daddy wouldn’t recognise her
Run to the shelter the streets are your friend
Situation at home won’t ever end
Here are your brothers your sisters your lovers
We can empathise
She slit her wrists when she was twenty-one
And let her broken heart bleed out
Before I could bridge the distance between us the scalper had already busted the kid’s face up pretty good. His lips were split, his nose was gushing. I jumped between them. “Okay, enough. That’s enough,” pulling the kid away. Fifty punk rockers looked on without moving. Fuck you, this scene isn’t about unity.
~
I don’t know why I’m the only one who really made it out. We used to walk the streets all night together. Curling up on park benches in quiet suburbs watching the sun come up over the trees. Sleeping in industrial parks on the edge of town in tents that would always collapse. They problem wasn’t that they loved too little, the problem was that they loved too much. I’ve never seen somebody love their mother as deeply as Critch did. Even after she kicked him out when her boyfriend moved in… and then again with the next one, and the next one. JP loved his mom and she died. Years later he woke up in a hospital with bandages wrapped around his wrists and a daughter of his own. Curty – Curty could have been anything. Breaking walls, breaking doors, breaking faces, until he too was broken. I sit and share a beer with him and wonder how we drifted so far apart. I remember when I was jumped by six guys. They were serious, spitting in my hair and pulling out brass knuckles. Curty was the only friend that didn’t turn tail and run. He stuck by me – not because he thought we’d win but, fuck, he wasn’t going to let me go down alone. Now we barely have the words to say so we sip our drinks and cigarettes and silently wonder how we can miss each other so much when we get together.
Children's Letters to God II
I trace the scars on your hands that never fully healed. I push back your hair and memorise the lines on your brow. Lifting your shirt I see the tree with forty branches on your back and the mark on your side that others have felt before me.
I don’t understand how you still bear these.
What is the wisdom that carries the scars of the old upon the new?
Who is this god that loves so deeply as to be forever wounded?
When we are finally restored, when all things are made new, will you also find your hands are healed? Will you then walk without limping and finally be able to straighten your back? Yes, it must be so. You will be made new alongside of us. Your tears too will be dried.
Children's Letters to God
ruach
A sigh, soft, but I know it well.
Your arms flung over my shoulders, your body against my back.
That is to say
You enfold me with your breath.
Hovering.
~
These meetings, once so unexpected, have not lost any of their wonder now that I have come to know that you will always be here.
~
No, this does not grow old. Such words are formless here. Shadows without voice or substance. Here is the presence of the creative. Not simply the imaginative but that which brings something out of nothing.
kaine ktisis
Overwhelmings
It is love who mixed the mortar, it is love who stacked these stones, it is love who made the stage here, though it looks like we're alone.
In this scene set in shadows, like the night is here to stay, there is evil cast around us, but it's love that wrote the play.
– David Wilcox, Show the Way
David Ford, a theologian with the heart of a poet, says that our lives are shaped by our interaction with the overwhelming. I tend to think of things that overwhelm us as negative things. Ford does well to speak of “overwhelmings”, a multiplicity of things that overwhelm us – things both positive and negative. Thus, I can be overwhelmed by horror but also by peace, by ugliness but also by beauty.
So which overwhelming becomes the most formative? Which of these shapes our lives most dramatically? Ford argues that the solution is found in living in the midst of overwhelmings in a way that lets one of them be the overwhelming that shapes the others.
Here we face a crucial decision about the way in which we choose to perceive the world. Whether we choose to see the world as a brute (and brutal) fact or as made by love for love determines whether a negative or positive overwhelming becomes the one which shapes the others. There is no absolutely convincing argument one way or the other and so all of us engage in an act of faith when we make this decision.
Ultimately, Ford asserts being overwhelmed by God is the overwhelming that should shape all the others.
I love Ford's words, his insights and his gentle strength. I resonate with this. It is because I have been overwhelmed by God that I can move amongst so many other overwhelmings and remain hopeful. It is because I have discovered the tenderness and passion of God that I can continually love and be tender to the people I journey with without hardening or breaking.
We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh.
– Paul, 2 Corinthians 4.8ff