i am sinful
but i am not sin
i am broken
but i am not brokenness
i am corrupt
but i am not corruption
i am dark
but i am not darkness
i am hated
but i am not hate
i am pitied
but i am not pity
i am lustful
but i am not lust

i will not be defined by others

i am happy
but i am not happiness
i am joyful
but i am not joy
i am patient
but i am not patience
i am kind
but i am not kindness
i am peaceful
but i am not peace
i am strong
but i am not strength
i am loved
but i am not love

I AM.

so much is done
for the sake of doing
so much is said
for the sake of
words like bullets
sent flying to the breach
countless footfalls led
to the body of the dead
where then dread executioner
stood to point, and said
you are dead you know
to lifeless lidded grey stone eyes
you are dead you are dead
you need to know you are dead
in cold sardonic sharp-edged glee
a dancing demon with whip tongue
you fell by your own fault
let it be carved upon your tomb

in the yammering glee
the morbid curiosity
that is a life like a traffic accident
none do stop to ask a simple why
to what end this prodding pain
when the dead cannot die again

snow fills all that is
freezing all that will be
while standing in the road
lost in the anesthetic squall
i am winter
wild and cold with frost
for hoary beard and hair

while spring is the ever-dream
with her inviting green eyes
moist breath sighing ‘live’
to these frozen cracked ears
here at the end of the years
knowing that when luscious lover zephyr appears
so barren frigid old man cries as Thanatos nears

ahh but what a cry –
as the warm breeze brings the flood
to swell the tundra land till bursting
and Persephone breaks forth from the grave
singing of the passion of the dead
and bringing
life!

what perfect form
would veil luminous life
let untouched glory go
for the smell of donkey dung
for the burn of a midday sun
what God would sail to earth
to take up my dead flesh
to sing strength to my corruption
and bear my ever-broken bones
who would do what has been undone
hold this hypocrite leper’s hand

this king, this lord, this eternal lover
this Christ has come to pray
and with concerned compassion say

you are worth this world to me
worth the hammered hell
worth curse and death
to give you cleansed eternal breath
upon this Christmas day

in a dream of now
or perhaps another time
there were people
standing round the smoothest lake
not an imperfection to spoil
the sight of their reflection

then boy picked up a stone
and threw it to the water
and one would expect
a shattered surface like a mirror
hitting the floor

instead a ripple moved
centre to edge and back
again and again and again

‘my face! I cannot see my face!’

the cry went round like a chorus
disturbed and disrupted
till one spoke forth before the others

‘let us throw in another stone
to cancel the first out…’

it made sense and the stone was thrown
but perhaps it was too big
or perhaps it was too late
it’s ripple was larger than the first
and together they became greater

each one picked up stones larger
throwing them in one by one
to calm the tempestuous sea
while every wave grew greater than the first

then came the cleansing flood
one wave larger than all the rest
greater than the sum of all its parts
and it washed them all away
like they were never there at all

when they were gone
stillness reigned
and peace
and glass returned to the waters.

You sir, are an ass.

this, I said, is fine…
I like to bear burdens.
do you have a burden
that I might bear?

You misunderstand me.

I understand you well enough
and I am what I am
sure and I am certain of such…

Well said…as long as you know.

I do. I do indeed.

i wanted to know how much
the waters of earth weighed

8,989,000,000 tons
(give or take)

yet all 215 pounds of me
simply floats on top of it all
amazing
the heaviest thing in all the world
the greatest weight there is
holds me up instead of crushes

It is ironic and sad that sometime around the Christmas season when all thoughts (at least Christian ones) should be squarely on the emergence of light in the world as the Word became flesh and tabernacled in our midst, that more often than not a tidal wave of darkness floods in.

Christmas becomes a lightning rod rather than a beacon and people tend to view it is the unmet ideal rather than the message of hope that it is. Sometimes it is fairly light darkness (greyness??) such as moaning about gifts and spending and other times it is seriously deep darkness in the form of blatant cynicism.

As far as I have noticed one good way of identifying the dark trending thoughts from the light is to look at the subject of the statements being made – if you see a lot of I and me oriented commentary you will often find them attached to statements of what is lacking or what horrors are being perpetrated on said person.

Hopeful thinking tends to be other-oriented in its direction with a focus away from self and toward the community. When it does look at self it does so through the lens of its place in the world and relative to Christ.

I think it is important to work hard at where our thinking is because our attitude has gravity. Some of us must work harder than others at being hopeful because of wiring or our circumstance and sometimes we will not be strong enough to overcome the darkness on our own. A dark mind seeks to darken the minds of those around them… consciously, subconsciously and often completely unintentionally. The good news is a light mind does the same…it seeks to flood the minds of the people around them with its light.

In a world where there is always pain and darkness weighing upon us there is no benefit in giving it a foothold in our lives and the lives of those around us. Although the axim “misery loves company” is true the company does nothing to improve the state of the miserable…on the contrary two miserable people together are exponentially more miserable than one and so on.

The dark heart is the heart that seeks attention upon itself and this is understandable but not necessarily healthy. It is the heart that seeks pity and an awareness of pain for the sake of an awareness of pain. Like the Pharisees who could not pray in private and who needed to rend their robes in the public square to show the community the depth of their pain and suffering, so too the dark and weighed down mind seeks to expose itself like a flasher to the eyes of passersby.

The light heart seeks no attention for itself for it is consumed with what God has already done for it. It is focused on being and allowing God to be through it…transforming it into a beacon. Ironically the light heart is attractive and draws people to it without intending to do so while the dark heart in another sad irony pushes people away (except the like minded) and remains more lonely than before…it is a sad and vicious cycle.

The good news is that one genuinely joyful person can light up an entire cavern of darkness just as a match in the darkness of space can be seen for thousands of miles. As long as there is one light darkness ceases to truly exist.

As we move into the season there is no doubt a myriad of reasons to be sad…there is loneliness, death, hatred, envy, strife, and every kind of darkness weighing on us…but…there always is. The Gospel of Matthew 26:6-11 speaks of where our focus should be in the midst of a world broken in and around us:

While Jesus was in Bethany in the home of Simon the Leper, a woman came to him with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, which she poured on his head as he was reclining at the table. When the disciples saw this, they were indignant. “Why this waste?” they asked. “This perfume could have been sold at a high price and the money given to the poor.” Aware of this, Jesus said to them, “Why are you bothering this woman? She has done a beautiful thing to me. The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.”

Today in church the subject was joy in keeping with the chosen themes for advent this year. Joy is a subject I have thought a lot about and I appreciated the sermon from Pastor P.

The struggle of course in talking about joy is defining it appropriately and differentiating it from happiness, because yes, it is different than happiness. As always I go to the best dictionary the world has ever seen (in my opinion) – Oxford, for assistance with this.

Happy: Pronunciation:/ˈhapi/adjective (happier, happiest)

As usual, when dealing with emotions, the Oxford (and other dictionaries) become a lot like a sci-fi android like Data from Star Trek. “This thing you call happiness…it intrigues me. I cannot grasp this idea of joy- how puzzling”.

Human emotion is not easy to understand because it is either God-given (joy, happiness, pleasure, pain, anger, etc) or a broken twisting of said gifts (hate, pride, envy, lust etc). Anything from God is an enigma to us because we are not God.

As unhelpful as these dictionary definitions appear there is one thing hidden in the mix that is, in fact, incredibly helpful. Joy is first and foremost described as a noun while happy and happiness are seen as adjectives. The very nature of what a noun is as opposed to an adjective are incredibly helpful. A noun is independent of any other use of speech. It stands as a thing unto itself. An adjective is, by its nature, dependent upon an external source. An adjective has no being without a subject. I can say “I am happy” but I cannot say “I am joy” for to say “I am joy” is to suggest I am the personification of and source of – joy. This is not the same as saying “I am happy”.

When one differentiates the two this way (see grammar is helpful) than I think when has to ask where joy comes from if it is not dependent upon a subject for its existence. God. Joy, like love, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, cannot be what a person is. I cannot be faithfulness, I can only be faithful. I cannot be joy, I can only be joyous.

A noun is a person place or thing. Since these ephemeral words are neither places or things (I cannot visit joy nor can I keep it in a box) than it must be a person. Of course you see where I am heading don’t you? This list of emotions/states of being come from Galatians and are considered the fruit of the spirit of God. I believe it is perfectly appropriate to say “God is ______”  – joy, happiness, patience, kindness, faithfulness, love, peace, justice, etc. God is the source and measure of these things.

Knowing that God is the source of joy because God is joy we than come to understand how joy than can only come from God. Being happy is different. I can be happy for all sorts of reasons but those reasons are all limited, worldly reasons like good weather, great food, sex, friends, ipods, video games, books, cars, money, tools, guns, insert you source of happiness here.

If happiness is dependent upon external, worldly, transient things, than joy is a state that can exist when all of these things do not. We can in fact be extremely unhappy and filled with joy at the same time. We can be poor, in bad health, hated, friendless, tormented, tortured etc. and still have joy. The two can co-exist. How? Joy is a state of connection with God. Joy is an awareness of God in our lives and God’s action in and on our world. Joy is an eternal state because its source is eternal. Joy, in the end, is not dependent upon us and our state of being, for its existence because it stands outside of the world. It is in fact something to be tapped into.

Our feeling of joy is not dependent upon God’s nearness to us but our nearness to God. It is through joy we are able to see our outlook and attitudes change. It is through joy that we are able to see our prayers transformed away from things and to states of being.

In his latest book What Good Is God? Philip Yancey points out an interesting difference between the prayers of western Christians and the prayers of oppressed Chinese Christians. Yancey says:

“At my church, when something bad happens, people immediately ask God to fix it: get me a job, heal my aunt, whatever.  I pray those same prayers, and I see nothing wrong with them.  In China, though, I heard different prayers, not “God, take away this burden,” but “God, give me the strength to bear this burden.”

In a country like ours, which has freedom of religion, we can easily take it for granted, either by ignoring it or by going to church as a social habit.

In China, where you can be arrested and imprisoned for your faith, getting together with other Christians is a lifeline and you’ll risk anything for the privilege.  No one attends church in China casually, or for a social advantage—quite the opposite.

I once heard someone from a former Soviet country say that Christians there are praying for the return of oppression because under Communist days the church was pure and refined.”

Part of the reason our prayers here in the west tend toward selfishness is because we have confused the definitions of joy and happiness. We see the two as the same thing. Worse still we have watered down the abiding, eternal nature of joy and turned it into a temporal dependent thing. We have turned joy into happiness and in so doing we have robbed ourselves of the opportunity to live in the presence of God.

So this season, the question is, will you seek happiness or joy? Of course you can have both but one is of  such infinite value that it renders the other worthless in comparison.

i keep an iron box
locked up tight in the basement
it is full of every dark
it is full of every dismal
the envy of Pandora
sometimes in the nights
i hear its haunting howls
turn on more lights
and pull up the covers
a wool and cotton armor
against the leaking disease
from its corroded corners

there must be light
but not for me
maybe a mirror i will be
reflect the sun
to everyone
but never warm myself
only undone

cold as silver lined glass
cold as my iron box
cold as a black hole
that jets forth energy
for the rest of creation
keeping nothing for it’s empty self
never seen except for its effect
on the ones around it