*
The paradox that struck this wretched creature was the fusion of the need to pray and the inability to pray.
The devil opened the door of her condo and was greeted by a migraine of stupendous width and depth and emptiness. It was not a creation of the bright sun. It was not the wheeling configuration of planets in her head. It was not something she had eaten. It was a thing wedged inside her, it was definitional, intrinsic, basic. It was *her*.
When she managed to open her eyes again, she saw the Zen warrior, a different person now, zooming past her on his bike. From the boom box slung behind him came the sound of praise songs. they said the name over and over.
She was nauseated and unable to vomit.
Make this a dream, please, she said. But who was she speaking to?
The door handle moved. The world was real. She was not dreaming -- at least not more than usual.
The plight was that she knew the name. She knew the one from whom she might have begged relief. But to beg she would have had to release this person she held, this person full of pain, this self. She would have had to cease to be herself.
Thus there was a redemption offered but it was offered to another person. And this other person she flatly refused to become. Or simply could not become.
*
She heard it like music through a closed door. Redemption through a closed door. The sound of a person taking heart and opening a door. The fact of it, the fact that the change was there and was on offer. All through that muffled door, the ear itself muffled. And she could not, would not, open the door.
*
Sunday, July 31, 2005
Saturday, July 23, 2005
Death's feet
*
Her decline continued. One night Duessa dreamed that her bedroom was a thing falling on her head. It was not a space open for a soul to occupy, not a carved space with an openness. It was like a block of wood. Duessa's pillow was a damp and lumpy heap, it did not give to the head. The light-fixtures were inert, the light itself was nothing but a thing. One stubbed one's toe against the wall and discovered that toe and wall were of a single texture bereft of all life. The light was a thing, the chair was a thing, the air lying loose on the chair was just a thing. The ache in her toe was a dead thing, just like her toe. All the bones were torpid. The skin was a used-up cloth. The face repelled the fingers, the cranium was a dead item and what was inside the cranium, only another thing. Her soul was a thing, not worth thinking about or being inside. And everything about her was just used up. Such was her dream.
She woke with a mixed feeling of relief and dread. But no, the feelings were there but they did not mix. And the dread dominated everything. When she went to the window there was no view otside, neither air nor no air. There wasn't gray, there wasn't blue. There wasn't not-gray either. There wasn't anything. Nor was there nothing.
She placed her dead feet on the matty edge of the rug and slid over to the door but the handle wouldn't turn. It had no grip on anything. The sound of panic in her throat died for lack of a medium to carry it. The room began to fold upon her like a cardboard box. And then she woke up for a second time, lying there for some hours, unable to move. There was no thought to move to that would be different.
*
Her decline continued. One night Duessa dreamed that her bedroom was a thing falling on her head. It was not a space open for a soul to occupy, not a carved space with an openness. It was like a block of wood. Duessa's pillow was a damp and lumpy heap, it did not give to the head. The light-fixtures were inert, the light itself was nothing but a thing. One stubbed one's toe against the wall and discovered that toe and wall were of a single texture bereft of all life. The light was a thing, the chair was a thing, the air lying loose on the chair was just a thing. The ache in her toe was a dead thing, just like her toe. All the bones were torpid. The skin was a used-up cloth. The face repelled the fingers, the cranium was a dead item and what was inside the cranium, only another thing. Her soul was a thing, not worth thinking about or being inside. And everything about her was just used up. Such was her dream.
She woke with a mixed feeling of relief and dread. But no, the feelings were there but they did not mix. And the dread dominated everything. When she went to the window there was no view otside, neither air nor no air. There wasn't gray, there wasn't blue. There wasn't not-gray either. There wasn't anything. Nor was there nothing.
She placed her dead feet on the matty edge of the rug and slid over to the door but the handle wouldn't turn. It had no grip on anything. The sound of panic in her throat died for lack of a medium to carry it. The room began to fold upon her like a cardboard box. And then she woke up for a second time, lying there for some hours, unable to move. There was no thought to move to that would be different.
*
Sunstroke continued
*
So Dave lay down his burden, lay it down, that heavy burden -- took the armor off. One nudge and it clattered down to the ground.
Duessa lay like a fossil embedded in the ground, pterodactyl boneship, unutterably pitiful, so wedged in that she could hardly move. She somehow managed to shift into supine mode. Dave, Dave.
Dave, my good man, dig me out of the ground so that I can die with a little dignity.
Reaching toward light she bent herself into one of those impossible yoga position that her daughter would toss off almost apologetically in class. With the mother it looked innate, natural. Dave shook his ugly bald head but the vision didn't clear.
If they'd just left me with my old sunstroke I could tell whether you were lying to me. I would not guess, I would know. But they shot me with these drugs that have restored my common sense and taken away my discernment. God's voice is but a whisper.
Dave, that's what they did to me too, Duessa said. That's why I was so bad, she said.
Our bad deeds are imposed on us by something we don't even know.
Dave knew she was lying, really, he knew, he absolutely knew. She was at just the point of depravity where one not only cannot play innocent but can't remember why another simpler being might want to. In a word she was lost. This he knew, this he caught even from her words; nevertheless, there he was already reaching forward to loosen the dirt around her. Of course she took him by the neck, of course she fastened her teeth on his lips. And era obvio, it was obvious, that she didn't even want to! She was like the dog who found himself lungeing before he'd even decided to do so. Her thrashing tore the man like a piece of paper. His lips bled as she pulled him bodily into cast off dirt and took away his ability to breathe, and now he wasn't even surprised. He'd known what she was going to do because this was just her -- the way of her -- what her definition entailed. And as he began sinking into rocks, swallowing them and assimilating himself to them, he heard a sort of discontinuous pop that released him from her power. Elf had crushed her mother's head in with a rock. She hadn't killed her but at least she had knocked her, like a croquet ball, into some other continuum.
So the devil sank into the earth, not to die -- not yet -- but to flutter and expand into some other part of the planet that was ready for her.
*
So Dave lay down his burden, lay it down, that heavy burden -- took the armor off. One nudge and it clattered down to the ground.
Duessa lay like a fossil embedded in the ground, pterodactyl boneship, unutterably pitiful, so wedged in that she could hardly move. She somehow managed to shift into supine mode. Dave, Dave.
Dave, my good man, dig me out of the ground so that I can die with a little dignity.
Reaching toward light she bent herself into one of those impossible yoga position that her daughter would toss off almost apologetically in class. With the mother it looked innate, natural. Dave shook his ugly bald head but the vision didn't clear.
If they'd just left me with my old sunstroke I could tell whether you were lying to me. I would not guess, I would know. But they shot me with these drugs that have restored my common sense and taken away my discernment. God's voice is but a whisper.
Dave, that's what they did to me too, Duessa said. That's why I was so bad, she said.
Our bad deeds are imposed on us by something we don't even know.
Dave knew she was lying, really, he knew, he absolutely knew. She was at just the point of depravity where one not only cannot play innocent but can't remember why another simpler being might want to. In a word she was lost. This he knew, this he caught even from her words; nevertheless, there he was already reaching forward to loosen the dirt around her. Of course she took him by the neck, of course she fastened her teeth on his lips. And era obvio, it was obvious, that she didn't even want to! She was like the dog who found himself lungeing before he'd even decided to do so. Her thrashing tore the man like a piece of paper. His lips bled as she pulled him bodily into cast off dirt and took away his ability to breathe, and now he wasn't even surprised. He'd known what she was going to do because this was just her -- the way of her -- what her definition entailed. And as he began sinking into rocks, swallowing them and assimilating himself to them, he heard a sort of discontinuous pop that released him from her power. Elf had crushed her mother's head in with a rock. She hadn't killed her but at least she had knocked her, like a croquet ball, into some other continuum.
So the devil sank into the earth, not to die -- not yet -- but to flutter and expand into some other part of the planet that was ready for her.
*
Thursday, July 21, 2005
Sunstroke in the garden
*
The warrior only met God via sunstroke.
If given water and shade, the warrior recovered, became an ordinary human, lost contact with God.
Sometimes the warrior refused food and water and shade.
Foolish person, they said. Foolish person, they said.
Yes but sustenance had a cost. Food masked his own true nature as a creature dying and almost dead, almost alive again.
I would like to be alive, not just fed. Foolish person, they said and shook their heads, blurry in his no longer functioning vision. Foolish -- the word swishing like a weak whip.
Why would anyone wear a mask? Why would anyone want to be anything other than what he was?
If you craved salvation, and that he did, if you craved, how could you expect your craving to be, no, how could you ever expect a creature with your name to gain it, to gain salvation, any creature other than the one single creature that you actually were? The creature that your one name called? How would you expect a mask or fantasy to win what only a naked creature could have?
Why then mask that same nakedness and pain?
At least that was one argument.
So the warrior turned down water and hallucinated, or that was what the onlookers said. The word foolish lay coiled and waiting upon their tongues.
No, this vision is real, he said, but the onlookers laughed. That is just exactly what he *would* say.
*
But isn't this your true self? Calm and washed, sober, able to speak about what you see? You aren't saying that this is a mask?
*
The warrior said that he walked with God but the world saw his thrashing on the park bench, acting up. So they took him to the hospital and medicated him and he complained about the flatness.
The drug is like a door that has closed between me and God.
No, Elf said. It's more like the door to a room with other people.
Solitude won't do. God is meant to be worshipped with other people. He is God of the living, not of the dead.
The man named Dave became a human again, most reluctantly. He talked earnestly to the priest and to Elf in the eating room while the others -- "addicts" people called them -- huddled in a line to get their own cross. When they got their own cross they found a corner and huddled, holding it close to them, risking of course ridicule, no no, braving ridicule, enjoying it -- such were the ones we called "addicts". The one they called the knight of the Red Cross babbled to himself by the altar and, I don't know, made sense in a way, but people looked at his furry-shouldered girth and took care not to come too close. Foolish person, foolish person. But Elf, Dave said, won't you at least let me tell you what I saw?
To ease this rapture from my craw -- like a little dachsund spitting up the Snickers wrapper, slowly.
Let me tell you what I saw when I wandered alone. I saw the witch, I saw the devil. Her body lay disorganized like a decayed landfill, cans strewn everywhere, a piece of junk in the garden. Rejected recycling. When I gave her water she wouldn't swallow. Foolish body, lacking reason.
Whose body was it? Elf asked. Whose body?
It's so hard to remember -- you've medicated me and now I don't see so well -- you've made me human again. Now I don't see that other place as I did. I no longer quite know when I am reporting as opposed to making up what I say.
I think that body was your mother's -- it was the devil or at least like the devil -- but what is the devil's shape without a body to feed on? Isn't the devil qua diabolus nothing but a virus without a host? What is evil when it has to live on itself? What if not short term? Nothing to speak of, right? I wouldn't think destruction has much of an independent essence to describe.
But it seemed to me that she was giving up and dying, the man said.
She was shriveling and ceasing to take much notice.
If only that were true, it would mean that the new time that has been coming and coming might finally just come.
*
The broken ones -- the ones who could not call themselves Christians but only would-be Christians -- they could not stop pondering the meaning of orthodoxy, this structure that contained them and that they themselves could not contain. What for you is orthodoxy? A set of decreed beliefs? Dead beliefs? Are you sure that's what it is?
People object to being ordered what to think. Yet the spell is very strong. It needs to be defined a different way.
For the warrior, orthodoxy was not a code but a place. To this place he brought his considerable doubts, which is just to say that he brought himself. He did not bring a mask of someone else, behind which one might hide from whatever was to come. It couldn't just be the tongue that walked this aisle. The whole body had to follow.
Name this place. I cannot, will not. Not yet.
In the safety that was this place -- both garden and hallowed building and still but the precinct of a building -- hanging like the shadow of a raised shield -- doubt itself became protected and so faith flourished, beyond all expectation. The warrior rested. People walked here together, awkwardly, like cripples approaching their Sunday cup.
Name this place. Name this place. Say the name.
After the meal with his friends, Dave walked unsteadily to the stable behind the garden. His armor clanked against his thigh. There was a bruise that led to a wound that led to a pool of blood beneath his belly where the soul lay, face up, mouth open, desperately hungry. The metal clanked, it was foolish to wear.
There was a compost heap by the garden and, some feet further away, a dried-up place filled with things that were unable even to be treated as compost. There she lay, breathing but only barely.
Dave turned to cry out to his companions but his head -- only half sticking out from the cotton wadding of the drugs -- felt too dizzy even to judge its position and his throat was too dry to speak.
He felt alone. But alone with God. Orthodoxy extended even here. That is, if you wished it to. If you acknowledged its scope and its power.
Salute the sun in the name of the one you are afraid to name.
*
Lord, save us from even the wickedness we have triumphed over. Save us from feeling triumph.
*
The warrior only met God via sunstroke.
If given water and shade, the warrior recovered, became an ordinary human, lost contact with God.
Sometimes the warrior refused food and water and shade.
Foolish person, they said. Foolish person, they said.
Yes but sustenance had a cost. Food masked his own true nature as a creature dying and almost dead, almost alive again.
I would like to be alive, not just fed. Foolish person, they said and shook their heads, blurry in his no longer functioning vision. Foolish -- the word swishing like a weak whip.
Why would anyone wear a mask? Why would anyone want to be anything other than what he was?
If you craved salvation, and that he did, if you craved, how could you expect your craving to be, no, how could you ever expect a creature with your name to gain it, to gain salvation, any creature other than the one single creature that you actually were? The creature that your one name called? How would you expect a mask or fantasy to win what only a naked creature could have?
Why then mask that same nakedness and pain?
At least that was one argument.
So the warrior turned down water and hallucinated, or that was what the onlookers said. The word foolish lay coiled and waiting upon their tongues.
No, this vision is real, he said, but the onlookers laughed. That is just exactly what he *would* say.
*
But isn't this your true self? Calm and washed, sober, able to speak about what you see? You aren't saying that this is a mask?
*
The warrior said that he walked with God but the world saw his thrashing on the park bench, acting up. So they took him to the hospital and medicated him and he complained about the flatness.
The drug is like a door that has closed between me and God.
No, Elf said. It's more like the door to a room with other people.
Solitude won't do. God is meant to be worshipped with other people. He is God of the living, not of the dead.
The man named Dave became a human again, most reluctantly. He talked earnestly to the priest and to Elf in the eating room while the others -- "addicts" people called them -- huddled in a line to get their own cross. When they got their own cross they found a corner and huddled, holding it close to them, risking of course ridicule, no no, braving ridicule, enjoying it -- such were the ones we called "addicts". The one they called the knight of the Red Cross babbled to himself by the altar and, I don't know, made sense in a way, but people looked at his furry-shouldered girth and took care not to come too close. Foolish person, foolish person. But Elf, Dave said, won't you at least let me tell you what I saw?
To ease this rapture from my craw -- like a little dachsund spitting up the Snickers wrapper, slowly.
Let me tell you what I saw when I wandered alone. I saw the witch, I saw the devil. Her body lay disorganized like a decayed landfill, cans strewn everywhere, a piece of junk in the garden. Rejected recycling. When I gave her water she wouldn't swallow. Foolish body, lacking reason.
Whose body was it? Elf asked. Whose body?
It's so hard to remember -- you've medicated me and now I don't see so well -- you've made me human again. Now I don't see that other place as I did. I no longer quite know when I am reporting as opposed to making up what I say.
I think that body was your mother's -- it was the devil or at least like the devil -- but what is the devil's shape without a body to feed on? Isn't the devil qua diabolus nothing but a virus without a host? What is evil when it has to live on itself? What if not short term? Nothing to speak of, right? I wouldn't think destruction has much of an independent essence to describe.
But it seemed to me that she was giving up and dying, the man said.
She was shriveling and ceasing to take much notice.
If only that were true, it would mean that the new time that has been coming and coming might finally just come.
*
The broken ones -- the ones who could not call themselves Christians but only would-be Christians -- they could not stop pondering the meaning of orthodoxy, this structure that contained them and that they themselves could not contain. What for you is orthodoxy? A set of decreed beliefs? Dead beliefs? Are you sure that's what it is?
People object to being ordered what to think. Yet the spell is very strong. It needs to be defined a different way.
For the warrior, orthodoxy was not a code but a place. To this place he brought his considerable doubts, which is just to say that he brought himself. He did not bring a mask of someone else, behind which one might hide from whatever was to come. It couldn't just be the tongue that walked this aisle. The whole body had to follow.
Name this place. I cannot, will not. Not yet.
In the safety that was this place -- both garden and hallowed building and still but the precinct of a building -- hanging like the shadow of a raised shield -- doubt itself became protected and so faith flourished, beyond all expectation. The warrior rested. People walked here together, awkwardly, like cripples approaching their Sunday cup.
Name this place. Name this place. Say the name.
After the meal with his friends, Dave walked unsteadily to the stable behind the garden. His armor clanked against his thigh. There was a bruise that led to a wound that led to a pool of blood beneath his belly where the soul lay, face up, mouth open, desperately hungry. The metal clanked, it was foolish to wear.
There was a compost heap by the garden and, some feet further away, a dried-up place filled with things that were unable even to be treated as compost. There she lay, breathing but only barely.
Dave turned to cry out to his companions but his head -- only half sticking out from the cotton wadding of the drugs -- felt too dizzy even to judge its position and his throat was too dry to speak.
He felt alone. But alone with God. Orthodoxy extended even here. That is, if you wished it to. If you acknowledged its scope and its power.
Salute the sun in the name of the one you are afraid to name.
*
Lord, save us from even the wickedness we have triumphed over. Save us from feeling triumph.
*
Sunday, July 17, 2005
Even the devil
*
Can the Devil be saved? Can even the Devil be saved? Origen the great and incautious theologian thought such a thing was possible, and Jerome attacked him for saying so.
The problem is not merely that this notion upgrades a parasitic virus into the status of an independent entity, a *being*. Because, after all, even a virus might evolve into something else with a definable will of its own. But the problem is deeper and worse.
The problem is that when a truly evil being -- Hitler, let's say, to make it easy -- is thought of as saved, then it follows that the most basic cord has been cut. The cord of things happening. Suddenly the evil was a phase, thus not quite real. And the life that the evil destroyed is now turned into a joke. What happened didn't really happen, after all.
Or say that Hitler, a mere human, after all, might repent and yet somehow remain himself (something I can't imagine but perhaps for God somehow imaginable). Then you must turn and go back to the example of the devil. Because evil is part of the devil's definition. If the devil were saved he would no longer be the devil. Were such an entity saved, would that turn all the evil into a joke? Would it all be a silly reversal out of Aristotle? If the evil were not a joke, then in what sense would the entity saved not be some limp skin of blessedness hanging in a void? In what sense could that saved one still be Hitler or whoever it was? Or Saddam Hussein? What real thing would have been saved? How would history itself not be scandalized and debased?
So, in this case at least, Origen's forgiveness sucks the soul, and its very meaning, out of the world.
The devil cannot be saved.
*
Can the Devil be saved? Can even the Devil be saved? Origen the great and incautious theologian thought such a thing was possible, and Jerome attacked him for saying so.
The problem is not merely that this notion upgrades a parasitic virus into the status of an independent entity, a *being*. Because, after all, even a virus might evolve into something else with a definable will of its own. But the problem is deeper and worse.
The problem is that when a truly evil being -- Hitler, let's say, to make it easy -- is thought of as saved, then it follows that the most basic cord has been cut. The cord of things happening. Suddenly the evil was a phase, thus not quite real. And the life that the evil destroyed is now turned into a joke. What happened didn't really happen, after all.
Or say that Hitler, a mere human, after all, might repent and yet somehow remain himself (something I can't imagine but perhaps for God somehow imaginable). Then you must turn and go back to the example of the devil. Because evil is part of the devil's definition. If the devil were saved he would no longer be the devil. Were such an entity saved, would that turn all the evil into a joke? Would it all be a silly reversal out of Aristotle? If the evil were not a joke, then in what sense would the entity saved not be some limp skin of blessedness hanging in a void? In what sense could that saved one still be Hitler or whoever it was? Or Saddam Hussein? What real thing would have been saved? How would history itself not be scandalized and debased?
So, in this case at least, Origen's forgiveness sucks the soul, and its very meaning, out of the world.
The devil cannot be saved.
*
Thursday, July 14, 2005
The Death of the Devil - begun
*
Did Duessa reconcile herself to the loss of her daughter? She did not.
Did she want her daughter as a husk to feed on? That is what she wanted.
Did she have millions of other souls in her grasp? Indeed she did.
Did she find a shortage of lost souls as she winged through the night, long past curfew? She never found a shortage.
Did the death of a stranger have the same satisfying taste as the death of one's own daughter? Oh, the witch moaned, how could it?
My darling, you are my own flesh. How I need you! The mother's lament floated through the night like a ballad -- echoed like the legendary ladies of the canyon in the old folk song, reverberated in sentimental ears and became heard and misinterpreted by singers all across the land: the cry of a mother for her child.
*
In the same way that, in cheap movies, a psychopathic killer is seen as all but invincible, breaking locks and entering private houses with ease, always creeping just behind the heroine, as if invulnerable in sheer badness -- never leaving tracks or prints, flowing this malice everywhere -- in the very same way, the common imagination will picture the devil as impossibly slick, impervious to all misfortune and unhappiness. People seem to think that every evil plot succeeds. And every plotter happy. But how could a life that is founded upon evil be so grounded in happiness? How could such a parasite -- feeding on goodness and happiness without even feeling them or having them -- how could such a thing summon your envy?
If you believe in God, why allot to the devil so much power? Why do you give the devil a happiness so inappropriate and impossible?
The parasitical figure is the weakest in the world.
She is a virus, she is not even alive. She only comes to life -- or pseudolife really -- when your own will is invaded and you let her drab capsid enter your own warm cell. She does not exist until you let her exist or make her exist.
*
Did Duessa reconcile herself to the loss of her daughter? She did not.
Did she want her daughter as a husk to feed on? That is what she wanted.
Did she have millions of other souls in her grasp? Indeed she did.
Did she find a shortage of lost souls as she winged through the night, long past curfew? She never found a shortage.
Did the death of a stranger have the same satisfying taste as the death of one's own daughter? Oh, the witch moaned, how could it?
My darling, you are my own flesh. How I need you! The mother's lament floated through the night like a ballad -- echoed like the legendary ladies of the canyon in the old folk song, reverberated in sentimental ears and became heard and misinterpreted by singers all across the land: the cry of a mother for her child.
*
In the same way that, in cheap movies, a psychopathic killer is seen as all but invincible, breaking locks and entering private houses with ease, always creeping just behind the heroine, as if invulnerable in sheer badness -- never leaving tracks or prints, flowing this malice everywhere -- in the very same way, the common imagination will picture the devil as impossibly slick, impervious to all misfortune and unhappiness. People seem to think that every evil plot succeeds. And every plotter happy. But how could a life that is founded upon evil be so grounded in happiness? How could such a parasite -- feeding on goodness and happiness without even feeling them or having them -- how could such a thing summon your envy?
If you believe in God, why allot to the devil so much power? Why do you give the devil a happiness so inappropriate and impossible?
The parasitical figure is the weakest in the world.
She is a virus, she is not even alive. She only comes to life -- or pseudolife really -- when your own will is invaded and you let her drab capsid enter your own warm cell. She does not exist until you let her exist or make her exist.
*
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
In the church forgiven
*
Why is it that I need the institutional church, the institution and not just a prayer book?
*
Well look, Elf said, sometimes I feel ready to explode. I feel so full of God's love I'm ready to explode. And then what? What follows?
What do I do when I feel this love?
Commit a crime in the name of Jesus? No, I don't think so!
*
When I take off all my blotters and my masks, when I feel God's power or some sliver of it, what keeps me from imploding with my joy and terror?
*
I need the church to hold me in and keep me human. In solidarity with other humans. Let's say that their own imploding tendency pulls me out of my own dangerous place. Okay. No prophet, thank you, no cult figure, no indeed. I don't want no human blocking my access to God. Let the institution -- laws not men -- sustain my walking into these arms I have.
Tradition keeps me honest. It holds me close. I hunger for orthodoxy as a place to walk and explore.
If you find a truth and then you want to sustain it and want it to *persist*, well, then you too want those walls. Why expect another broken person to sustain your brokenness.
You too are going to institutionalize, to walk inside. You too. Then maybe you will have to wait for your own Luther to free you from what you have done. But first, do it.
*
The van full of disciples became raucous with prayer. An upright rational onlooker would have been deeply offended, scandalized. The Zen warrior sat humbled in prayer, the queer sat with his eyes closed. The dancer stood arrested in mid step. The van slowed down, it stopped. The people lay down and feel asleep, ragged scripture clutched to their breast. Let be not be so haughty that I ever pretend not to need this. As for myself, I really don't know a thing.
Less each day.
Praise, thanksgiving, seal me off from my own silly penchant to wander in despair.
*
The devil knew they were there and longed to kill them off -- "one well placed bomb, really" -- but the wakeful ones wouldn't stop singing hymns -- those corny antiquated hymns. Duessa heard the hymns and her stomach turned. Commonplace thoughts, voices out of tune! Somehow she lost heart to pursue them and teach them new sorrows. She became depressed, disconsolate. And the people were all suddenly and provisionally free. They sat in a circle in the garden of prayer -- the place where a eucharist could happen for them and within them. A protected space -- at least for now.
*
Why is it that I need the institutional church, the institution and not just a prayer book?
*
Well look, Elf said, sometimes I feel ready to explode. I feel so full of God's love I'm ready to explode. And then what? What follows?
What do I do when I feel this love?
Commit a crime in the name of Jesus? No, I don't think so!
*
When I take off all my blotters and my masks, when I feel God's power or some sliver of it, what keeps me from imploding with my joy and terror?
*
I need the church to hold me in and keep me human. In solidarity with other humans. Let's say that their own imploding tendency pulls me out of my own dangerous place. Okay. No prophet, thank you, no cult figure, no indeed. I don't want no human blocking my access to God. Let the institution -- laws not men -- sustain my walking into these arms I have.
Tradition keeps me honest. It holds me close. I hunger for orthodoxy as a place to walk and explore.
If you find a truth and then you want to sustain it and want it to *persist*, well, then you too want those walls. Why expect another broken person to sustain your brokenness.
You too are going to institutionalize, to walk inside. You too. Then maybe you will have to wait for your own Luther to free you from what you have done. But first, do it.
*
The van full of disciples became raucous with prayer. An upright rational onlooker would have been deeply offended, scandalized. The Zen warrior sat humbled in prayer, the queer sat with his eyes closed. The dancer stood arrested in mid step. The van slowed down, it stopped. The people lay down and feel asleep, ragged scripture clutched to their breast. Let be not be so haughty that I ever pretend not to need this. As for myself, I really don't know a thing.
Less each day.
Praise, thanksgiving, seal me off from my own silly penchant to wander in despair.
*
The devil knew they were there and longed to kill them off -- "one well placed bomb, really" -- but the wakeful ones wouldn't stop singing hymns -- those corny antiquated hymns. Duessa heard the hymns and her stomach turned. Commonplace thoughts, voices out of tune! Somehow she lost heart to pursue them and teach them new sorrows. She became depressed, disconsolate. And the people were all suddenly and provisionally free. They sat in a circle in the garden of prayer -- the place where a eucharist could happen for them and within them. A protected space -- at least for now.
*
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
Monday, July 11, 2005
The back of the van
*
And in the back of the van was none other than Balaam's ass, a demure creature. But Balaam himself was not there.
And in the back of the van sat the Nazi Kommandant's wife. But there was not much left of her.
Not far from her Don and Dave sat next to each other, not saying anything. In peace, although, my God! no one is ever really in peace, in a site such as earth, what in the world would peace be here? Here everything is turmoil but still there is such a thing as a peaceful turmoil. Where the tongue lies at rest and accepts the turmoil, as it were, as it can.
And in the back of the van....
*
In the back of the van sat Body and Soul, and the two of them weren't talking much anymore. Soul had not a bone that could be described as unbroken -- his ethereal carapace of thought was now one big bruise. Does that still need to be explained or do the soulful ones finally understand where the devastation comes from? Meanwhile Body propped her husband up and held him wherever it didn't hurt. If she was submissive, if Soul found her pathetic to be so submissive, nevertheless, when the moment of need came and came and came, he found himself welcoming her submission and feeding on it to keep himself alive. For indeed the fools of the world are a kind of medication and not the over the counter kind either, their foolishness is necessary and what you laugh about is what also keeps you in one piece, once the laughing has stopped.
Soul lay in the van as one enormous bruise. Soul had had his long fling with the devil, while friends had urged Body to leave him for good, to leave him for *her* good, but Body couldn't do it, she knew so very little and one of the many things she did *not* know was how to be unfaithful to the small bare pledge that she had made. So she stuck around and was branded as a fool -- not so different in nature from Balaam's sweet natured ass next to her -- they were sisters. Body and Soul did make a part of the van, took up space in it, but he was only suffered to be there because she was. Meanwhile the anchoress lay in the very back, cancer ridden, her inner passages knotted and congested by strokes and clots, but she was not ready to be counted out, after all.
There were families with kids but they were strangely subdued and quiet.
There were animals of various persuasions. There were broken items of every type, the rejected items of a spiritual garage sale, waiting to be -- waiting to be taken?
Teddy bears with bent ears and broken legs. Old dolls who'd served their time. Lots of faithful people, bruised and damaged.
Wherever we are going, Elf said, it will be a good place and I will be happy. Because *she* will not be there.
*
"The lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice."
*
And in the back of the van was none other than Balaam's ass, a demure creature. But Balaam himself was not there.
And in the back of the van sat the Nazi Kommandant's wife. But there was not much left of her.
Not far from her Don and Dave sat next to each other, not saying anything. In peace, although, my God! no one is ever really in peace, in a site such as earth, what in the world would peace be here? Here everything is turmoil but still there is such a thing as a peaceful turmoil. Where the tongue lies at rest and accepts the turmoil, as it were, as it can.
And in the back of the van....
*
In the back of the van sat Body and Soul, and the two of them weren't talking much anymore. Soul had not a bone that could be described as unbroken -- his ethereal carapace of thought was now one big bruise. Does that still need to be explained or do the soulful ones finally understand where the devastation comes from? Meanwhile Body propped her husband up and held him wherever it didn't hurt. If she was submissive, if Soul found her pathetic to be so submissive, nevertheless, when the moment of need came and came and came, he found himself welcoming her submission and feeding on it to keep himself alive. For indeed the fools of the world are a kind of medication and not the over the counter kind either, their foolishness is necessary and what you laugh about is what also keeps you in one piece, once the laughing has stopped.
Soul lay in the van as one enormous bruise. Soul had had his long fling with the devil, while friends had urged Body to leave him for good, to leave him for *her* good, but Body couldn't do it, she knew so very little and one of the many things she did *not* know was how to be unfaithful to the small bare pledge that she had made. So she stuck around and was branded as a fool -- not so different in nature from Balaam's sweet natured ass next to her -- they were sisters. Body and Soul did make a part of the van, took up space in it, but he was only suffered to be there because she was. Meanwhile the anchoress lay in the very back, cancer ridden, her inner passages knotted and congested by strokes and clots, but she was not ready to be counted out, after all.
There were families with kids but they were strangely subdued and quiet.
There were animals of various persuasions. There were broken items of every type, the rejected items of a spiritual garage sale, waiting to be -- waiting to be taken?
Teddy bears with bent ears and broken legs. Old dolls who'd served their time. Lots of faithful people, bruised and damaged.
Wherever we are going, Elf said, it will be a good place and I will be happy. Because *she* will not be there.
*
"The lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice."
*
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