Month: January 2010

Sigh No More & Roll Away Your Stone

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The lyrics of the following songs are a prime example of why I have become so enamoured with the music of Mumford & Sons. Their sound is incredible but their lyricism may be even better if that is possible. The lyrics speak for themselves:
 
SIGH NO MORE
 
Serve God love me and men
This is not the end
Lived unbruised we are friends
And I’m sorry
I’m sorry

Sigh no more, no more
One foot in sea, one on shore
My heart was never pure
And you know me
And you know me

And man is a giddy thing
Oh man is a giddy thing
Oh man is a giddy thing
Oh man is a giddy thing

Love that will not betray you, dismay or enslave you,
It will set you free
Be more like the man you were made to be.
There is a design,
An alignment to cry,
At my heart you see,
The beauty of love as it was made to be (x4)

 
ROLL AWAY YOUR STONE
 
Roll away your stone, I’ll roll away mine
Together we can see what we can find
Don’t leave me alone at this time,
For I am afraid of what I will discover inside
You told me that I would find a home,
Within the fragile substance of my soul
And I have filled this void with things unreal,
And all the while my character it steals
The darkness is a harsh term don’t you think?
And yet it dominates the things I seek
It seems as if all my bridges have been burned,
You say that’s exactly how this grace thing works
It’s not the long walk home that will change this heart,
But the welcome I receive at the restart
The darkness is a harsh term don’t you think?
And yet it dominates the things I seek
The darkness is a harsh term don’t you think?
And yet it dominates the things I seek
The darkness is a harsh term don’t you think?
And yet it dominates the things I seek
Stars hide your fires,
And these here are my desires
And I will give them up to you this time around
And so, I’ll be found with my steak stuck in this ground
Marking its territory of this newly impassioned soul
But you, you’ve come too far this time
You have neither reason nor rhyme
With which to take this soul that is so rightfully mine

Death of a Sun

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look bright shining living sun is caught
as tether woven of will wraps cords round
north and south and east and west
cross spotted equatorial bursting waist
a grand and heartspun party favorite
pulled here and there to empty headed cries
of ooooo and ahhhhhh and come near
trinket of the spoken Word obedient burns
for one for all
 
still only chains and bonds do break the diamond
core, while will to beat is beaten in upon this
Atlas-armed light furnace as being crushes being
till what once sent wave after wave after wave
crashing over planetary shore now starts the draw
a once proud beacon intersteller warning now
black rock black hole that pulls back every love sent out;
 
mother calls –
come back my children
come die in smothering embrace
as smotheing embrace did kill

Lust

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strange mix of skylight eye and throbbing heavy heart
becomes to starry soul some corrupt corrosive thing
this fearsome alchemy that takes two God-sent gifts
producing poison while darkness lifts leathery to take wing
what lost and broken art enfolds the golden comely curve
to mingle midst life’s earthen fleshly drumbeat
this bringing in of outside things to mesh with maker’s mark
somehow does shake and shudder seek my spirit to unseat
how stop this animus attack upon the shoreline of soft psyche
no one can seek to unshutter ever-young unblinking eye
which leaves the lonesome king of darkened  ivory hall wrapt
consumed by one life-giving lost buttress –
                                                            his ever empty sigh
exorcise then this possessed and fruitless ruler
let his force-full and filled once holy silver-ringing home
end eye’s rule that floods mind’s seat a swamp and sewer
burst forth from throne room’s windowed heavenly dome
a driven holy gaze fueled in a furnace of eternal life
ending once for all the killing world’s draining serpant strife
 

Sweet Water Given

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i find that those dried corpses
sun desert dying
argue best the sweetness
of palid sand upon parched tongue
while blood-foot wanderer
sings songs to baked pavement pain
and dry-hearted vagabonds
cry what need you of joy
again and again and again and again
 
join the cold unmoving masses
embedded in Dante’s frozen lake
come learn the piety of eternal end
live rigor-fixed forever
it is after all best for your sake
 
listen to the songs of the blind
they cry – tear out your eyes
the dark builds character
colour is the over-rated myth of a beautiful world
 
but i say
better crazy kaleidoscopic vision
then dead grey iron strength
better happiness of sweet water given
then life unlived of any length

This Tapering Hue

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there is the deepening blue
that has caught me off guard
there is this tapering hue
 
lost sun dives beneath the waves
setting my horizon aflame
while the apex moves toward black
and soon sky will wink at me
knowingly
like thousand-eyed Argus
 
wry dark distant velvet vault
sees every secret ever kept
holds every failure every fault
and every chasm ever lept
 
each life a brush immersed in ink
paints new night an obsidian stain
till sun and light spills once again
clean canvas for my hand I think
 

Frankenstein’s Monster

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i remember frankenstein’s monster
this old and new born patchwork thing
wrought from broken hollow mind
dead flesh still dead for all the stirring
move shamble as if on newborn legs
while every piece-part past its prime
no song to stir within this sorry soul
a lost one wandering out of time
one would think cold beatless heart
is empty of all but shades stone-gray
while there is furious fire yet beneath
pure passion full to crush the day
show the fear-filled and the fell
no maker’s hand carves devil’s tool
this craven beast – this, of all, the least
more adam than every son
                                      and every son a fool

Elijah the Prophet

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I love this mixed media artwork by Lilya Ratner (and her other stuff as well). Check out her stuff at: http://voyager.smugmug.com/Religion/Lilya-Ratner/9335678_tFy6R#624438261_ptAfK
 

Gray

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Snow is falling. I can see it out my window. It is falling so slowly that it seems almost to be not falling at all but rather painstakingly and intentionally making its way toward earth as if on a journey or mission of some sort. Small crystalline packages of white dropped from the unknown heights. Everything is a whitish gray (or a grayish white) depending upon your perspective.
 
I have been thinking about gray lately. The colour (and perhaps the state) and wondering about its make-up. Gray fascinates me because in some ways it seems as close to the human condition as one can get on the colour wheel…not quite white and not quite black but some enmeshment of the two. But of course when speaking of the human condition one recognizes that even with gray their is a spectrum that one is dealing with…we are many things we humans but one of them is not simple.
 
I think of gray this way – take a glass of black and shine a bright white light behind it…one sees the white bleeding through and creating this washed out gray. Now take a piece of white glass and place behind it a source of black…nothing happens to the white. Black in and of itself has no power. It does not cast photons into the universe. Black is nothing. In the realm of colour black is a non-entity. It is absence and emptiness. White on the other hand, white is everything, all-colour blended together to make one of brilliance. White is the light cast from the purest of sources. White is active…it goes out and is variously absorbed and reflected giving other things and surfaces their identity. Where black creates hiddeness white creates revelation sweeping aside all shadows and showing things for what they are.
 
When I see gray what I imagine I am seeing is the impending defeat of black by white. When I see people, I see the impending defeat of black by white. I see the not-yet-but-soon-to-come. I used to dread the gray southern Ontario winter days where sky and horizon met who-knows-where because the two had become one endless monotonous sea, but in the most latest of days gray is no longer the encroaching black but rather the approaching white.
 
The Approaching White
================
 
Gray falls the day
that swims in crystalline manna
as stars bow down from heaven
blended earth and sky
a ticker tape parade launched
from on high
but no more do I and eye see
impending black encroach
but rather white and light
sing softly through the night
and speak of dawn’s approach
 

God, Time and Beyond the Quantum

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When I have just woken up my brain works in funny ways. I was laying in bed listening to Maiden on the iPod and I began wondering about sacrifice and the nature of God’s for us. I am thinking of these things because I am working on a preaching series that is focused on stripping away the things that we have added to Christ, the Church and even ourselves. At any rate my thoughts were wandering and came to rest on the substitionary sacrifice (atonement) of Christ and his leaving us justified in the eyes of God. I began wondering what this looked like from the perspective of God. How does he see/comprehend these things? Does he even view His sacrifice as an action in the past (done once and for all) or is this language that works for us in our limited linear perspective?
 
It has been said before and by many that God exists outside of time…that time in some way is a device of God, no less a creation than the rocks in my yard. This being the case I have wondered if that means that God must in some way be constantly experiencing everything at once. His sacrifice, his death, his resurrection, his forgiveness, the beginning and the end…because there is no such thing as time for Him (seeing as He is without beginning and without end – one of which is required in order for time to exist).
 
Then I began wondering why we assume there is such a thing as time at all – even for us. I mean the obvious answer is that we perceive things in a linear fashion and so naturally we assume things are constructed linearly. It reveals a stubborn character attribute of humanity – we measure all things by our perceptions…and in reality our perceptions are quite fragile.  I mean eyes, eardrums, nerve endings etc…all of our receptors that tell us what is or is not…these are all about as fragile as things get – and we, we guage the nature of existance and the universe based upon these fragile devices. It does not seem wise. But back to time. We assume time exists because we have memory – a past…something that was and is no more. A time before. We exist in a present and because of the accumulation of the past in our lives we assume a future as well. In this we we have structured time and created devices to measure its passage.
 
Quite frankly most of what we assume exists (like time) only exists because our fragile senses suggest it and we, being egocentric, assume that what we perceive is reality and then develop whole systems of thought on this. Paul reminds us in the New Testament letter 1 Corinthians 13, verse 12 "For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known." Translation – all that we see is not complete; all that we experience is but a fraction of what really is and will be.
 
So why write all this down? Well – my brain started complaining about the paths I was leading it down so I consented to going out and getting it some coffee from Tim’s. On the way I turned on CBC Radio (my favorite station) and the science program Quirks and Quarks was on. Brilliantly the radio turned on catching a physicist in mid-sentance explaining how there really is no such thing as time at all and that such theories go beyond and deeper than quantum physics in their explanation.
 
The whole thing made me smile and wonder at the incalculable odds of this happening.

An Experiment

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The following was not written by me…I am curious – what do you think? Comments?
 
Eleven saintly shrouded men
Silhouettes stand against the sky
One in front with a cross held high
Come to wash my sins away

Standing alone in the wind and rain
Feeling the fear that is growing
Sensing the change in the tide again
Brought by the storm that is brewing
Feel the anxiety hold off the fear
Some of the doubts in the things you believe
Now that your faith will be put to the test
Nothing to do but await what is coming

Why then is god still protecting me
Even when I don’t deserve it
Thought I am blessed with an inner strength
Some they would call it a penance
Why am I meant to face this alone
Asking the question time and again
Praying to god won’t keep me alive
Inside my head feel the fear start to rise…

They’ll be saying their prayers when the moment comes
There’ll be penace to pay when it’s judgement day
And the guilty’ll bleed when that moment comes
They’ll be coming to claim, take your soul away

The sign of the cross
The name of the rose, a fire in the sky
The sign of the cross

They’ll be coming to bring the eternal flame
They’ll be bringing us all immortality
Holding communion so the world be blessed
My creator, my god’ll lay my soul to rest

The sign of the cross
The name of the rose, a fire in the sky
The sign of the cross

Lost the love of heaven above
Chose the lust of the earth below
Eleven saintly shrouded men
Came to wash my sins away