Spirit Gives Birth To Spirit

God of failure, God of light Dim in the distance Hushed in the night. Living this pain These trifles, they bruise. Is life lived in vain In this game, I lose. Hearts speak comfort Then scream obscenity And the retort Is the blood of entropy. Bodies burning and heaving Aching in pain and disgust And the angels they sing Over men of dust. Is this heaven I demand, so lost. I cannot, a man Fathom the cost. I ask the question - So human and perverse Do you exist In this, my desolate universe? And the silence closes in So the years pass by And the planets, they spin Until I give in and die. Can you redeem alone This bottomless soul This skin and bones Surrounding a hole? Save me by small chances To grasp the light In bitter circumstances Before the coming of night. And in the silence of my request In the bowels of pain A voice repressed Comes to me again. "You don't even have to brea...

I know that God loves so deeply it will crumple your weakened knees. I know this because yesterday I had an experience of closeness to God that I have never had before.  I wrote a poem while it was happening.  See my previous blog post titled enraptured:  http://spiritgivesbirth.blogspot.com/2015/12/enraptured.html I kissed the face of the divine, and he (or she) kissed me back. I think that God has deep emotions for us, not just because I have experienced it, but because it is written in scripture.  God created Adam AND Eve in his own image.  That means he has all the strength of man and the spirit of doing and fighting for justice but also the gentle relational spirit of Eve.  Eve who loves deeply and cries and rejoices for her lover.  God, in the Christian tradition, is three in one.  The father, spirit and son - in eternal relationship with each other. He is a relational being.  He is a friend, a father, and a lover. ...

Soft warm rays of light Breaking through the mighty black clouds above Fall softly onto my face And wrap me in heat. Electric impulses shoot down my synapses From my muscles into my limbs And up to my brain Baking in the mix of good feeling transmitters I swoon in the infinite Steadying myself Against the weight Of the eternal. Love flows freely Heaven to earth And then earth to heaven In a joyful exchange of souls. The cycle is complete, My purpose is fulfilled. Gravity fails to hold down My heart and feet to the soil. The air is singing, The rocks cry out And all creation sighs And breaths deeply. The sound of music Coming from my ear buds Is drowned out  By the silent delight in my heart.

     Men, most of us, have a deep father wound.  A wound from a perceived or concrete injustice inflicted upon us, usually unknowingly, by our fathers.  It is part of our spiritual journey from boyhood to manhood to go through the healing of this wound.  Our fathers were human.  They were not perfect.  And they suffered their own wounds. There is no perfect father but God.  And God, or another man fathering us, can heal this wound.      My father left the family when I was 5. As a child of that crucial age, I perceived that he was leaving ME.  I was left alone to be raised by my mother and two sisters.  I could not get from them the kind of validation I needed from a man.  I had no one to show me, on a day to day basis, what I was meant to become.  I spent my entire young life impersonating the people I looked up to.  And mirroring back to people the kind of person I perceived they wanted me to be....

A limited muffled rupture And peace slips through my fingers I notice my breathing In and out.   Brown trees bloody with sticky sap Thrust sharp into the side of the sky The ground spins and heaves And the wind screams.   Lightening flashes behind my eyes: The searing pain of knowing As the storms rage At the edges of my vision.   The dead leaves fall away From the dry trees And settle on the floor Of the dead brown earth.   Death waits at the door And I try to stretch in this coffin But the muscles are weak And they do not respond.   I notice my breathing In and out Sweeter than heaven And hotter than hell.   In and out Each breath a footstep On the path Away from pain.   In and out My chest follows the rhythm Written on the universe And in my heart.   I curl up on the couch In the hands of God And sigh in the silence As the peace flows into my heart.   Lum...

Wrote this during my fast from food after the Paris attacks      A lot of people aren't going to understand this.  But I am fasting from food in the wake of the Paris attacks. I am fasting for peace.  I am a writer so I am going to try to explain what this means. I am fasting for peace. I am fasting for the hearts and minds of the young men who have joined ISIS.   Young men - brothers and sons - who have gotten so lost in their anger and hatred that they felt compelled to take human lives.  Young men, who are joining ISIS in droves - who feel so powerless that they joined a movement that saw fit to crucify people, including two children, in Syria in June for not fasting during Ramadan.  Powerlessness begets anger begets hate.  Hate begets hate in response.  I am fasting to take back fasting and let them know that all is not lost.  It is what I can do as a spiritual man praying for them.  Love will end the cycle of violen...

I drag my hand down the bumpy bark The lines in it, veins Coursing with green fertile sap beneath Burning beneath the life all around me. Fall flowers detonate and burn In the gardens at the edge of the grasses Houses line up neatly In rows - straight and narrow. I meander down the paved black street Towards the holy woods Hemmed in on all sides By the fading green trimmed lawns. There life grows in jagged brown lines In fits and starts, now sleeping It strains and sleepily reaches out In stark lines against the frozen blue sky. My soul, it stirs deep in its fleshy tomb The fiber of my being warms And the heart flows to the surface Of my skin, cold in the fall sun. The leaves scattered about the wooded floor Crackle and crunch under my feet As I place one in front of the other Already arrived and still going. The one to whom the blessings belong Sits quietly by the lake under the naked trees He engages me with loving eyes...

The wind bends the green trees whipping up waves of grasses on the desolate brown-grey prairie. And I am standing here In the fast fading evening sun A dog That has stepped on his leash. Syrians turned away at the border By guns in schools, and hands That don't have a soul to hold them Down in our pockets. Love peace and harmony Very nice Very nice Very nice But I don't want to Get involved. Break of the waves Crashing on the beach Levels are rising And the ice floats down from the north. Love, peace and harmony Very nice Very nice  Very nice But I don't want to Get involved. The whisper crescendos In a scream In my heart, a wildfire That burns bright in the dark. Burn and spread In this silent sleeping nation.

I cannot deny I screamed out into the void And the whisper came back "I love you" It never ends This time here Even when our bones Are buried In the ground. We yet persist. We persist In the way we were From now on So how do you exist? How do you run When you cannot stand And all is lost? What love Do you call on In the deep, dark, cold Watches of the night? Or do you live In perpetual sunshine Denying the decay Of your heart? On the walls Of this prison  I scrawl This is heaven. And so it is Sweet explosions Of life and joy Are now mine And I will love this way Until eternity Because, you see I have found heaven in me. Love, Sweet love, Mercy has set me free To find thee.

Beech trees And soft grass I stretch out  On a rolling green hill Beneath the sun Out of the shadows There is no desolation To trouble my soul. Leaves and branches Undulate In the warm Spring wind. And I sink deep  In this invisible river that runs Through it all. Just for a minute I have stopped running. Stitched up the wrists And headed for home. Give me sleep Give me myself Give me my neighbor, The stranger To welcome him in. But most of all Fill me with the sweet Sweet sweet succulent scent Of love. Water the root And send the sweet sap Running to the ends Of the soft green leaves. Fill me Remake me Engorge this heart With life-giving, giving-love.

Henry David Thoreau wrote, "When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor; and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not.  In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post office (modern readers could read Facebook, instagram or twitter or email).  You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters (read likes or reads or emails) proud of his extensive correspondence has not heard from himself in a long while." I am reading a book about solitude, hospitality, and prayer by Henri Nouwen called "Reaching Out" and two other books including Walden by Henry David Thoreau.  Walden keeps coming up in all the books I have read lately, ...

I think that we are living a primarily spiritual existence.  Our bodies are just a byproduct of a spiritual life.  Jew, Christian, Buddhist, agnostic, atheist, Universalist, Muslim, Hindu - we cannot escape this. Our bodies are not static.  We are actually more like waterfalls of molecules.  We are skin cells and organ cells that are constantly falling away and being replaced.  We are not solid. Besides being physically not solid, our genes read the environment and switch on or switch off to change our bodies' response to the environment. The only thing that stays constant is our soul. Our soul gives us identity and carries through the waterfall of our bodies cells changing out.  As our soul grows and changes, so do our bodies as they age, following the prompts from our soul.  To make this concrete, I'll take an example from my life. I have an addiction to smoking.  It is a soul disease.  My body, as I age, ...

Everything I ever needed to know about life, I learned from watching my dog.  You think that is a silly statement, but once you have eyes to see it, I think you'll agree.  Let me give you an example. Today I came home from the hospital.  I have my life.  I have a beautiful wife who loves me very much.  And I have a best friend and faithful companion that depends on me to come home every day and love on her.  She is my four legged spiritual reminder and comrade who has been at my side for 9 years.  9 years of pain and joy and finding myself enough that I could be there for my wonderful wife when the time was right. When I came home from the hospital, she was at the window wagging her tail.  I had been gone a few days.  She greeted me at the door, my week of necessary possessions in brown paper bags in my arms.  I walked into the bedroom that my wife had cleaned for us.  I set the brown pap...

I am writing this as I watch a situation unfolding in Paris where many people have died due to terrorist attacks. The news and controversy we get piped to our living rooms is a cause for despair.  There is only one hope for man, I believe - that each individual person begins to focus on positive action.  Positive action, I believe comes from a well that we need to choose to fill daily with positive input.  I get this positive input from positive news feeds in facebook and from reading scripture and devotionals and from meditation. I have learned through hard lessons, that if I fill myself up with positive news and meditate on positive things in my spiritual life, I do not subject myself to the negative influence of controversy and negativity that pervades our culture and is especially noticeable on facebook.  For me this is a journey and it starts every day with spending time meditating on scripture and the things of God.  I am a Christian and in my...

 When I was a young child, my parents poured endless love into me.  I soaked it up and asked for more and more.  I was an empty vessel asking to be filled. As I grew older, slights from circumstances in my life caused cracks, so that love poured into me would run out.  I looked for love anywhere I could find it, and could never get enough because all that was poured into me, more or less, ran right out. Personally, I looked for approval from my peers.  I had a particular affinity for finding people who would constantly build me up.  This is not a bad thing in itself.  But I began rejecting positive praise - writing it off.  This progressed in my life and I came to a point in my late teens and twenties when I would actually counter positive affirmation with negative thoughts about myself.      This progressed. It wasn't until I found myself heavily addicted to nicotine by the time I was 40 that I began looking for a way out. ...

The empty tomb cannot be proven.  It must be believed.  For me, the experience I have of God is the inherent proof. God exists for me because I experience Him. But I have to get the ball rolling.  I must choose to believe for the belief to prove itself in the relationship with God.  The relationship becomes available to me when I believe. If I believe Jesus' tomb was empty, then for me, it was empty.  No one can refute that. The disciples believed it was, and so their experience led them out into the world with a fierce belief in love.  And that belief then spread because it was true for them and, because of their experience, their transformation was proof for others.  Others then had their own experience of the living Christ because of their relationship with Him (that transcends time and space).  The proof comes for me in my personal experience of relationship with God. And so personal experience confirmed my, and the disciples' belief...

I think everyone has some addiction, more or less. Something they value to the detriment of all else. Addiction runs the gamut: food, TV, drama, caffeine, sex, love, nicotine, attention, money, technology, entertainment, acquisition, pot, alcohol, hard drugs, control.  I believe that the seriousness of it - how much it impacts peoples' daily functioning - varies in direct proportion to the level of self-loathing the person has.      I have a very strong addiction to nicotine.  It impacts my family, my wife, my friends, even my dog.  It impacts my health and my career.  What is the salvation for a socially acceptable, but no less contemptible, junkie?  It is only in the 12 steps and God that I personally have any hope of being free...  Whatever I (or you) believe "God" is, and however well I (or you) knows the 12 steps, though we may have no formal knowledge of either actual thing.      What can I do to earn my freedom? ...

Why do we pray for people who are experiencing pain?  And why do people experience pain in this world if God is such a wonderful God?  Isn't it better for God to save people from pain without the experience of it?  Here is my attempt to answer those questions from the Christian perspective.  We will start, "in the beginning..." In Genesis, scripture says that God did originally design existence without pain and evil, but like the Matrix, man would not "accept the program" as the agent says in the movie.  The story of Adam and Eve is that story. Man  eats from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  "Whole batches," they say in the matrix, "were LOST."  Lost to an existence that was unaware of spiritual life.   The "revised" rules of the universe were set up in collaboration with man. Man did not want utopia. So God set the rules up that way, out of respect for man's wishes and with the input of man's relationsh...

I wanted to say a little about the God I know - my God as I know him.  I know him from personal experience, reading scripture and studying at seminary.  I know him, at least in part, because I believe I have been communing with him for 20 years and from following Jesus, the great revealer of God, for many of those years. I had my first encounter with God reading Native American literature.  And now that I know God better, I see a lot of him in the accounts of the Native Americans deep respectful relationship with the Great Father Spirit.  Their love for nature and life culminated in a love for the creator and protector of it all. He was the creator of all the beauty and bounty available for us small humans living in a world of wonders.  I am sure this ruffles some feathers, but I think God meets people where they are. The boundaries of religion are man made - I don't think God need respect human constructs.  But if you are wondering, I identify as a Jesu...

I want to vent some personal revelations: You see, I have realized that my relationship with God is a lie. I only worship him when I am not worshiping cigarettes. He is a secondary God. He is a god that I am only aware of when I am not praying to the god of nicotine. I have realized that I don't trust God because I didn' t  trust my father.  This is because I thought that he was never there to warrant that trust. But no human father is capable of absolute trust.  Inevitably, they will all let us down.. our expectations of them can be anywhere from low to superhuman, and no man can live up to them. And I haven't spent time trusting God, allowing him to work - to come through, like the "just in time" God that he is. It's hard when you've been a Christian for 20 years and you figure out you have been worshiping another god: a drug.      I pray to this God upon waking in the morning, several times during the day, at meals, and to put me to bed ...

No longer a worm, I stretch out incandescent wings And take to the breeze. Undulating on the currents Of life and loss, Love and labor. In a sky So deep and blue and vast  It stretches to the heavens - In and around and inbetween Their glowing gates. So those great, strong doors come One soul closer To present on this earth - Here In the muck and the mire With the wandering and tender Lost in the fields of bright wild wonder.