giving up the ghost of the material

in my struggles with faith, i have come to a conclusion, albeit a progressive conclusion and not a stagnant one. that conclusion is that the call of faith, the call of discipleship, is not to obey a certain set of rules or believe a certain set of dogmas. the call on our lives is for us to give up the temporal for the eternal. physical for spiritual. delusion for reality.

you see, most of the things we hold dearly to are things that do not really even exist. we cherish our precious money, but our money has no basis in reality. it only exists because we created it. it has meaning only because we've assigned meaning to it. if one were to take a million dollars to a deserted island, the money would lose all meaning and would exist only as paper in a giant sack. the only way it would ever be of use is if someone came from a culture that assigned value to that particular form of currency.

the same can be said about our bodies. one of the few things we know most about is ourselves, and this includes our bodies. however, we have fooled ourselves into believing that we are our bodies, and this simply is not true. our bodies, while i believe are very attached to our spirits, are not who we are. as c.s. lewis said, "you do not have a spirit; you are a spirit. you have a body." but onward we plunge through life as if we were the sum of dust and water, which allows us to treat those around us in the same way. and so we do not love our neighbor because we do not believe him or her to be anymore than an earthly competitor who will consume the resources we think we need to survive if we allow them to. thus we store up our treasures on earth, guard them with locks, gates, walls, guns, tanks, and most deadly, cold indifference, if not outright hostility, towards the suffering of those without.

if we were willing to give up this delusion of the material, this fascination with all that we assign value to but which we can show no innate value other than that which we give; if we were willing to live like spiritual beings, then it is my belief that we would, in turn, learn to be more human and less animal.

20,000 more is 150,000 too many

presidential address, return to sender, you won't be coming home
so march to your tombs, you fresh faced youth of the new rome,
march to the drums of war, ask not, doubt not, have faith
the new gods, progress, democracy, profit, demand your lives

"we cringe paying taxes because our money goes to pave new trade-routes with blankets of blood" [decahedron]

Lately, I have been in what you could call a spiritually dark place. Whereas I used to feel strong and confident in my faith, I've lately had a hard time believing even the simplest of principles of faith. There have been a lot of changes and crazy things in my life over the past year, and a lot of that has added to some confusion in my mind and spirit. It's like driving through a thick fog for an hour, then coming out of the fog and not really knowing where you are. My hope is that with time, I will begin to gather my bearings and become aware of where I am and what's around me.

One thing I have learned (and still am learning) is that it is okay to question, even to doubt, our faith and even our God. Too often, Christians are afraid to ask questions; afraid to raise serious doubts about the existence of God. We become quickly defensive, either with other people or with ourselves, and are quick to judge our questioning as sinful and unfaithful. But is that really true? I don't think so. As Thomas Jefferson said, "Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear." I believe God is more interested in our honest inquiry into the nature of God than our blind faith that never questions or challenges what we've been taught. If we honestly seek truth and come away with our faith still intact, we will come away with a stronger faith.

And this is where I am; In the midst of asking more questions about my faith than I ever have. I am doubting more about my faith than I ever have. Some days it is hard to believe that my questioning is productive or fruitful. There are days that I feel so far removed from God that I'm not sure how I got here or how to get back. But I have confidence that if i earnestly seek God, if I pursue truth with vigor, then I will discover some hidden truth or beauty that I've yet to see and my faith will become all the more alive and real to me. In many ways, it is as if my current faith is not just in God, but in the promise that if I seek I will find.

a glow fading in the dark

photo by jonah jones


i watched my Ghost just walk away into the Dark
it left me here alone and naked in the park
with the foggy streetlight paleness of my soul
i felt a cold indifference i'd never known

a strangeness from the thing i had been
an unseen Thing i wasn't sure was there to begin
and yet a fading glow in the Dark served to peak
desire to quench the thirst that is my curiosity

the tv glowing in the next room late that night
i can hear the cards are up by two top of the ninth
it makes me wonder which feeling means more
the feeling of the actual win or the one right before

i haven't been feeling either in quite some time
the Darkness overwhelms my tired and heavy mind
but in the stillness of the night i feel a prod
from the glow fading in the Dark i know to be my G-d

a glass can only spill what it contains

i would love to write something, but i just cannot summon anything to mind at the moment. so i leave you with a quote from g.k. chesterton that i have come to love:

"The sane person always cares more for truth than consistency. If he sees two truths that seem to contradict each other, he accepts both truths and the contradiction along with them. His intellectual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that."

and while i'm at it, here's some artwork:

yet another death we could avoid..

The State of North Carolina is planning on killing Samuel Flippen this Friday morning at 2 a.m. Here is a copy of something I posted on a web-forum about the whole ordeal:

As a Christian, I firmly believe in the power of the life, death and resurrection of Christ. Those things have brought salvation to this earth and all that is in it. Our salvation was bought at a price, and that price was the blood of Christ. Christ died for our sins so that we don't have to.

This alone is enough reason for me to support the abolition of the death penalty. I believe it makes a mockery out of God and of Christ's death. The state is telling us that Christ's sacrifice wasn't enough and that we must shed the blood of humans in order to make sin right. This is simply idolatry. To execute Sam Flippen or any other human being is to offer blood sacrifices to the god of Vengeance. How dare we presume that Christ's blood was not enough? How dare we take the life of another human when God strictly forbids this? What about Jesus' instruction to love our enemies? Jesus himself refused the death penalty for a woman who had been caught in an act that the law of the time required a death sentence for. If God is for the death penalty, then Jesus should have been the first to hit her upside the head with a rock and kill her. The law required it. Jesus resisted. In fact, he forgave her and released her with the instruction to sin no more.

To execute Sam Flippen is for the state of North Carolina (and by the state I mean all of us: the citizens of NC, lawmakers, government officials, prison guards, etc.) to cast the first stone, to say to Jesus "step aside, foolish man, and let us do what we believe is right." If any of you wish to tell the Executed and Risen Lord to step aside, please go right ahead. As for me, I will obey him and work for mercy and compassion.