and i was thirsty….and you gave me something to drink – Jesus
may we learn…
September 9, 2011 By Leave a Comment
poem: same word…
July 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment
it peers at me from below
whispering to me words i
don’t want to know
in the gap between the silence and
the word
i am the anxiety sweating through your
pores
like the raven: no more, no more, no more
i taste the lethargic betrayal in your tone
and cant seem to run away from the gold
hiding in your bones
you are the system that tries to hide
the home that no one can seem to deny
and there is more to you and me
then meets the eye
if only i could kiss that which i cannot see
would i be more me
more me?
erase all the words that hide me true
and walk into the darkness of a forest
beyond the truth
may i be ruthless in my disdain
and allow breathing room for grace
to rain
and let the water fall on me out into
the drain
i will get up the courage one day
and all will be well
once i rescue myself from this
need to believe in that which
believes for me
release, redemption & betrayal
they all seem the same word
america is gadhafi’s love child
June 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment
all of this focus on gadhafi increases the longevity of war. in fact, i no longer think america has a global voice. especially in the case of gadhafi. if anything i think america has become nothing more than the perverse love-child of gadhafi and the media.
but its not just with gadhafi though, its the presumptions that inhabit america. and when i refer to america i do not refer to the individuals who populate the nation called america, but the shadow of america that represents itself, something other than america. its the system of america, the doppelganger. the evil underbelly that has somehow assumed its role as the universal father-figure who needs to run everything and walk with a big stick. the institution of america better said.
the more wars and globa disagreements america gets involved in the more obscene its reputation becomes and is received by the rest of the global competitors. the more gadhafi is pursued and the more blood that is let, the more america becomes the ultimate terrorist and tyrant. although gadhafi is and has participated in atrocious acts, the worst acts have come from western retaliation.
let’s use another example to strengthen that point. look at how reacted to saddam hussein, a known terrorist, what did america do, they reacted to a terrorist with terrorism (by hanging him publicly) – what did we do with osama, we killed him and some of his family. but the collateral damage was justified because he was brought to ‘justice’. this un-accountability of america has put the reputation of the world at stake. are we barbarians that we should need to destroy each other and find ways to justify it by using over-politicized rhetoric??
Vienna Doesn’t Mean That Much To Me…
May 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment
The parallel existence of two concepts of perfection, one strict (“perfection,” as such) and the other loose (“excellence”), has given rise — perhaps since antiquity but certainly since the Renaissance — to a singular paradox: that the greatest perfection is imperfection
so the apostle paul is meeting up some people in the middle of this square called the areopagus in athens. this was a place known by the locals as the place where philosophers went to talk about the latest fad. it was the center of popular beliefs and gossip, even spiritual fads too. one of the known features of this particular geographic was this pantheon or hall of gods. just to be safe these greek followers of zeus placed this one statue right amongst the others and gave it a name: the unknown god.
the god who is a mystery, to the greeks has a name. irony? i think so. in fact, i think this whole episode is dripping with greek irony so much so that shakespeare might have wished he would have written this encounter. because i don’t think paul is attempting to change their beliefs, i also don’t think he is attempting to convert them in any way. i think that view trivializes the apparent sarcasm that is prevalent throughout the narrator’s explanation along with the nuances of this supposed conversation. take for example, when paul over-emphatically proclaims to his audience that they are ‘very religious’ (another translation uses the word superstitious).
i don’t think paul is being a door-to-door salesman here and trying to manipulate them with nice rhetoric, which christians have been blamed for doing in the past. rather i think he is doing something even more subversive, he is taking them to the end of their conclusions. he is sarcastically leading them through their belief system, again, not condemning it, but rather demonstrating the weakness of causality. he is saying: if you are this religious, then this ultimately is where it will lead you. in a sense, i think he is defending their unknown god. the greek word here for unknown is the same word we use for agnosticism.
a tear in the natural order of knowing. a gap. a wound. a scar. a place where we cannot know.
then he starts to quote their philosophers, who in turn were speaking about zeus (EX: …’we live and move and have our being’…) but he uses the term God as we have it recorded to be. but he never once condemns their belief. he simply uses the term/title that he understands god as. his audience would have caught onto this. another reason why i think he was being sarcastic is the undercurrent of greco irony which displaces not only the character (the hall of gods;truth;knowledge – in this narrative) but the idea of fluidity or the militant claim that perfection has only one definition.
and so in this conversation we see paul pushing the boundaries of belief so far that he begins challenging his audience with their own beliefs. which again this wasn’t foreign to the greek philosophers. they would been more than okay with this approach. and so his over-identification of God (saying god has created everything and etc.) although it might be true in theory is more of an ideological catch-22. and in this moment is when the wheels begin turning, because paul is indirectly speaking back into the belief of this unknown god.
paul is speaking of this gap. this unknown.
and for me, this is the centerpiece of his conversation, not the god itself but rather the need for the unknown. for agnosticism. this is why he also says god cant be a statue. god is fluid. god is untouchable (this is different from claiming that god isn’t relatable). this is why ultimately things like theology, doctrine, dogma and etc. don’t work, because taken to the end of our conclusion we are left with nothing more than a system of beliefs and no god left to worship. paul i think is claiming the same thing. that they can believe in all kinds of different things and be into the latest fads (for christians, it might be the emergent church or open theism and so on), but ultimately we don’t know. and the irony that i think he is playing on here is that the unknown is the closest we get to faith. that unbelief is belief. that denial is acceptance. i am not naive enough to think that we can simply get away with absolving ourselves from community. for it is in the evolutionary development of religion that we find beliefs are created to pose a sense of community. i posit we don’t need beliefs to create community, but rather we need each other to create community.
we need to believe in each other to solidify this community. before i get called a heretic. let’s talk about hegel for a second. he once thought that the holy spirit was God emptying his/herself into humanity. the human bond. let’s go with this for this discussion. if hegel was right, then once we create ‘knowns’ we create distance between us and the holy spirit (remember, this is hegels’: human bond) and so ultimately beliefs actually don’t create community, they distance us from community.
they dismantle it.they destroy it. i am not saying we don’t need beliefs, but i am saying that if we truly desire community (some people term this church and etc.) then we must be willing to walk away from beliefs, no matter what side of the fence we’re on….
think about this on a social level…it is our superstitions that keep us from knowing each other. it is those things that create to keep ourselves safe from the unknown – the other stands in the place of the unknown. and represents that thing we fear the most. and so to dissociate ourselves from the other we are forced to betray the notion of loving our neighbour (the other) by including ideological barriers that keep us from connecting with the one we are meant to love. beliefs are violent. they separate us from the object of our desire.
dissolving chaos.
June 17, 2010 By Leave a Comment
In every whirlwind hides a potential for form, just as in chaos there is a potential cosmos. Let me possess an infinite number of unrealized, potential forms! Let everything vibrate in me with the universal anxiety of the beginning, just awakening from nothingness!
inconsistency, uncohesion, confusion, chaos these are all necessary in the world. all of these things allow space for creation to happen. war*, pain, abuse, hatred, injustice, darkness, sin, death are all necessary so the opportunity of creation can exist. if we lived in paradise we would never have the opportunity to create.
without chaos we couldn’t live out our god-embedded responsibility to create.
it’s because of our need to be in control that we have become demi-gods of structure. it’s because of our need to make sense of inconsistency that we have become kings and gods of a world we do not own. its because of our fear of the other that we need structures, labels, and names that categorize those who don’t fit into social structures. these labels make us feel more powerful than we really are, and more powerful than we really should be.
when we become disciples of chaosmos (chaosmos: where structures form and dissolve) we begin to see that killing our neighbour isn’t just metaphorically killing a piece of ourselves, it is ontologically destroying a deep part of our humanity. we become less human when we deny that we are not connected or don’t have a symbiotic connection to the child who has just needlessly shot thousands of miles away.
because of our fences, our labels, our need to control our world, we word-by-word, label-by-label dissolve the world around us. in the hope of healing the world, through our labels, we have a hand in dissolving it.
we have a hand in making something complicated rather than the opposite.
we need more dissolution between another, so we can people who see the divine spark in all people which can empower us to do something about inustice, death, war, pain, abuse and all the other atrocious acts that are bortn out of someone’s need to control their world. think about that, most of the globally tragic things (not all) tend to stem from our need to be kings of our domain.
dominionism needs to be dissolved. olympus must fall. kingdom of god rhetoric must find become unspekable. the more language we have that empowers us to be the very things we are against, the more become the tyrrants we despise so much. the more we go beyond labels and see each other as God has made us, the world slowly becomes a better and better place to be.
when we remove the need for structures or systems, we have a world at ease. this doesn’t mean we don’t need them, it means we don’t look to them to lead us. this doesn’t mean that without these things our world would fall apart. what we have to understand is that god who holds all the chaos together, calls that creation. he is suspending the chaos in the middle of the universal expanse and while we are suspended he calls that ‘good’. our beliefs, our bible, truths, philosophies, inventions, sciences and religions need to be held in suspension (rather than solid deities) held in the tension between valuable and invaluable are where our worlds should lie.
when we try to ground the things we think we need, we then bring those things from suspension (‘creation’) back into chaos, and when we do this, than we become the one’s who think we are capable of being god enough to re-suspend them. we need to learn to live in chaos so that god sustains his divinity. having said that, he invites us all to creat with him. its a partnership that begins in the dissolution of our belief systems. if god is a universal being than he is both inside and outside of our worldviews; so, we must be willing to go inside and outside of our own beliefs to find him.
think about this on all levels, in all subjects.
if we began to see that our role isn’t about invading other contexts, but first dissolving our contexts to see that contexts are really a context. that peace isnt pluralized. that hope isn’t hopes. that love isn’t loves, but love. that we all seek love to steer the shipp. that love can really change everything. when we see this, we can begin creating in the midst of chaos.
* i am in no way endorsing any of these atrocious events or behaviours
the rabbi who teaches about hate.
June 17, 2010 By Leave a Comment
In Jewish history and tradition, the family is considered to be the most important institution for shaping ethnic and religious identity and transmitting Judaism’s basic norms and values.! Indeed, the family and the synagogue are the only two institutions referred to in traditional Jewish literature as mikdash me ‘at, or “sanctuary in miniature,” sharing the responsibility for handing down both Jewish law and Jewish values. The family has been the setting, if not the focal point, for much of Jewish religious tradition. And, in the view of many present-day observers, it is the institution primarily responsible for Jewish continuity.
the father in the first-century jewish world was the go-to person. he was the hierarchy within the family system, the person in charge, and also the person to blame if any of his children got out of hand. his role was to keep order in his family. his role was one of the most important in the jewish community. it was a role of status. and jesus says to hate him – well, not him but the role, what he stands for. he essentially tells those who want to be just like him to violently divorce themselves from a need for hierarchy. hierarchy is also how rome ran their country. even other tribes during that period had hierarchies. had roles and status. he was challenging the cultural structures. he was pushing the boundaries of the status quo into this deep non-existence. a family gives you status. gives you a name and even influence.
jesus is saying to give it up.
become nameless.
become a person who isn’t driven by success or by what gives you status. in fact it he says to hate it. if you hate something you distance yourself from it. you don’t associate yourself with it or anything that is related to it. that is the metaphor of hating your father, mother, daughter and etc. hate anything that is associated with status. become status-less. jesus is attempting to restore a spirit of nonduality. he is being counter-culturally counter-cultural. he is also denigrating familial convention.
to hear a rabbi tell you that you must hate your family wouldn’t have been a nice thing to hear, and like some of us, some of the hearers might have also heard this literally. so, this wouldn’t have set well on the tastebuds. these were sour words. they would have stung. the father was the central figure to holding tradition together. jesus invites us to ‘hate’ them. jesus is saying that to be people who can be enlightened like him, we have to be willing to disassociate ourselves with tradition, dissassociating ourselves from structure, distance ourselves from the culture that gave us a name.
jesus is also saying we must become genderless. that there are no male or female roles, there just is. we are what we are because of the person next to us, not because of anything we’ve done. we are what we are not because of status but because of who we are. nothing else gives us status other than us being us.
in a culture, where everything was inherited (even sin in some circles) jesus is inviting each person to see themselves as one yet unique. as a free person who has a right to be different; in that culture, it was expected that you would become what the father wanted you to be. jesus is inviting all to pave their own way. to strip themselves of conventional identity and see beyond the culture and see themselves as a person who has an identity to be discovered. part of this process is the willingness to be anarchic to our traditions, vices, and identity. we must become identityless to find ourselves. you might notice some dichotomies in this post. its because the role of father has dichotomy laced within its role. its paradox in its stringent form. the follower of jesus is one who is willing to find herself in the chaos of paradox. even to the point of intentionally immersing one’s identity into the eye of the storm that will strip the identity of identity. in the gap between identity and being nameless is the person you were meant to be waiting for you there. this process of divorce is is part of the journey of what it means to meet the rabbi witout a name.
the unsovereign god.
June 15, 2010 By 4 Comments
the kingdom of god does not exist. just like the word air describes something we can’t see. the kingdom of god is something ethereal. outside of time and space and yet increasingly invades time and space. the kingdom of god is without a king. because god is not sovereign. in jesus, god is weak, frail and prone to death. god, in us, is weak, evil and has potential for good. yet, god in us, is ultimately good because we are all created good. the kingdom of god resides within each of us. when jesus proclaimed that the kingdom of god is at hand, the words in aramaic mean inside of you or within. the kingdom of does not exist in terms of empire.
can the kingdom of god exist outside of sovereignty?
this is the question at hand. does god need to coerce us to desire him? is the story of torah about a god who willingly engages with his creation or a god who needs to engage with his creation? if god willingly desires contact than his kingdom isn’t sovereign in the traditional sense. so in that light the kingdom of god doesn’t exist in terms of empire/sovereignty. it exists outside of empire and sovereignty.
much like two highschool lovers, does god dysfunctionally set out to convince us of a need for him?
has god devised a plan where we have to fall in love with him or else? if he did, than God is sovereign in the traditional sense of empirical rule. but jesus shows us a different side of sovereignty. a sovereignty that doesn’t want slaves (‘i no longer call you slaves, but friends), but desires that its followers become the lowest of the population (‘i have come to serve’) – it desires people who are willing to put their desires on hold for the person standing next to them. think of this visually, each of us standing next to the other, shoulder-to-shoulder.
if i have come to serve you and you are here to serve me and we are here to serve those around us, than everyone wins. no one is in need. this is so much more than an early church dynamic, this is way more graphic than socialism and even more treacherous than communism. this is the belief that in the gap between what you need and what i need is where we each stand. the gap between what is and what isn’t, that’s where we are compelled to serve. the gap between the seen and unseen, this is where the kingdom dwells. the kingdom is a place devoid of any traditional sovereignty. there isnt a need for rule, because everyone is voluntarily serving another.
there isn’t a need for ‘the kingdom’ because we are all kings and slaves, yet,we are also not kings and slaves. we are in and beyond the titles we proclaim for ourselves. the kingdom is about radical equality that calls us to an equality beyond equality. the kingom inspires into a non-kingdom reality where all exist as one. where all are what they are, but that all fit cohesively. the kingdom is about voluntarily servitude for the betterment of humanity, rather coerced empirical rule a shown in the streets of ancient rome and other places. the kingdom isn’t a kingdom of tyranny, but one of shalom and willfull transformation.
God lies in the space between our knowing and unknowing this is where he rules. not with an iron scepter. gender or book. god rules without those things because he does not need them. god is reliant on nothing. god doesn’t want to take over the world. god exists in and beyond it. god doesn’t want to oppress us. god is pro-human. yet, humans express their understanding of the universal in terms of sovereignty. we all want to be loved. that is an objective statement, but for god to love everyone coercively isn’t god loving anyone at all. god loving others willfully is god loving everyone. god doesn’t force himself upon us much like we force ourselves upon one another. god isn’t sovereign in this respect. god is in the gap between sovereignty and non-sovereignty. god lies in the gap waiting for us to meet him there.
if we are for…
June 14, 2010 By 1 Comment
It’s easy not to like something. It’s easy to show disgust or disdain towards a certain group of people or behaviours we don’t agree with. Most of our reactions stem from the after-effects of our environment and culture. It’s easy to be a critic and take ‘pot-shots’, it’s easy to point the finger and say ‘its their fault!’ What’s not easy is pointing the finger back on ourselves.
I think the idea of being ‘anti’ anything demonstrates the inner need to be against something. We have been taught that if we are against something that we have purpose. Some might use the word ’cause’ to make it sound more justifiable. Being anti-something removes us from having any responsibility from the thing we might be against. It creates an unhealthy distance between us and the point we’re trying to make.
Being anti-anything isn’t really healing.
Pointing the finger doesn’t deal with issue, it just gives us someone to blame and gives us a false sense of peace that we have done something about it. But if you ever talk to someone who lost someone dear to them and ended up in court-room staring down the defendant at fault for their loss, the killer going to jail doesn’t make the loss seem any easier to bare. The loss is still there. The distance between what is and what could be seems to be an ever-widening gaping hole leaving us crying out for some repair.
What if we are for things rather than against them? What would that look like? How would that change our conversations? How would that change how we see the world?
If we are for things than we have a responsibility to provide space for those things to grow. If we are for things than it means we have hope. If we are for things than there is potential. If we are for things than God has room to still create (and so do we). If we are for peace rather anti-war than it means we can intentionally do something about rather than simply complain about it. If we are for love rather than anti-hate than it forces us to ask the necessary question of ‘what does it look like for me to love well?’; if we are for grace rather than anti-sin than it means we focus on who we are meant to be and living out of the divine spark in such a way that it extracts the very same thing out of others when we interact with them.
If we are for things, then the world can be a better place. We can have a hand in healing people, places and things. IF..
we all have condemned
May 30, 2010 By Leave a Comment
we all have condemned. we all have pointed the finger, whether verbally or mentally we have all done it at least one time or another. but condemning is even deeper than simply pointing the finger, if we condemn others we damn them. that is part of the structure of the word itself, to damn someone to hell. we may not even intend to, but sometimes with the choice of our words, body language, silence, and etc. we end up choosing the direction of one’s soul.
in some jewish circles they believed the best way to speak against something, was to do the exact opposite. so, if you disagreed with intolerance, the best way to respond to it, is by being tolerant. if you disagreed with indifferance then you would embrace diversity. if you embraced plurality than you were telling others that you have come to realize that your worldview isn’t the only one.
the hebrew word for condemn is chata. it means to be led away from a goal. or to bear the blame of one’s own choice. the condemning isn’t done by another person. the condemning is done in the aftermath of that persons’ choices. his own choices will condemn him rather than others. a person steals, he goes to jail, this is him being condemned. When we accept him, we agree that condemnation doesn’t have the last word. when we look beyond what he or she has done, we embrace them for who they meant to be and help others see that love is better than hate. when we do this, we confess that love really does change everything.
what is love in friendship?
May 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment
if jesus compares love to the act of laying down our lives, than it means we must be willing to let everything go. all of our identities (mother, father, child, employer, love, friend), all of our status, all of our physical things (house, car, phones, profiles, and etc.) – it means to truly love we give it all up. we die to it all to be people who are committed to love.
