sad eagle weeps on mountain top
lost in pain amidst the empty shackles
rusted and broken, forlorn on snowy peak
useless and crushed
with the knowledge of it
while far below the earth burns in joy

starved long talon’d raptor cries
as distant flames dance unfettered freedom

“I am lost and without purpose for
titan Prometheus, unbound, sings a world away”

there must be sun within
to outshine the shrouds without
an interior ever-fed lantern pulsing

love, love, love, love, love, love

an endless repeated mantra of intent
breath prayers on the morning mist
like hot heartbeats through the night

it is required for worthwhile lived life
elsewise comes corrosive hateful death
to steal it all away
leaving tears and sad shadows 

A friend recently posted an article about Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams that got me thinking. The gist of the article is essentially that Williams’ struggle to maintain unity within the Anglican communion stem from his profound view that church is community and that community overrides all else, including and especially the myth and exercise of individual power.

I believe a high Ecclesiology such as Williams had cannot be held without a high Christology, the thing is both of these perspectives are necessarily iconoclastic to worldly structures…I do not believe that a tension between these needs to be maintained…I believe the worldly needs to submit itself to Ecclesiology/Christology – every time…and that’s ultimately the problem – it is not in the world’s nature to submit.

So with the nature of the world the way it is and the nature of the church the way it is (should be) one should expect tension between the two. What happens however is that when the church co-opts worldly structures (as it sometimes necessarily must being a beachhead of the kingdom of God in the world) it brings that tension within the body itself.

While this cannot be helped because the church is in the world and the world is, by definition, worldly, it means that church must know itself that much more to resist the temptation to allow worldly strategies to win out in the end when tension arises.

Ultimately the principles of community and faith in spirit-led unity must override individualistic desires even when they seem to be the most sound from a worldly management perspective. As the article I read so eloquently expressed this belief which is held by Williams “it is the community, not the autonomous individual, that has access to truth”.

To put it another way – it is the community that is the reflection of and embodiment of the living Christ, not the autonomous individual.

This makes it difficult to be an autonomous Christian for it is somewhat of an oxymoron no matter how popular the idea is. The image of the Christian unbound from the strict constraints of a church and free to express their Godly nature through a union with the “invisible” church is more of a rationalization for individualism.

As Joseph Ratzinger recently wrote in his Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: from the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection “The invisible unity of the community is not sufficient.” It is not sufficient because unity is one of the key tools of evangelism Christ identified; the visible unity of the church is a critical witness to the power of God at work in the world.

What the average isolated Christian sadly fails to see is that the church they no longer like, no longer wish to be united with, is more likely a shell of itself that has become a wholly worldly community centre built upon modernist management principles. Rather than abandon it the duty of the follower is to work as a redeeming tool in God’s hand to reshape and reform it along the principles of patient, prayerful community.

By patient I mean humbly submitting to the possibility that the change one works for may not happen in one’s lifetime. This is difficult for the average Christian to accept having been raised in a culture of instant gratification where one gets what one wants immediately or one moves on.

It is not simply the individual that struggles here but the community as well and by community I mean the few chosen to lead, who no longer generally seek the will of the body so much as act on its behalf. This kind of community is as impatient as the prodigal Christian in that it often fails to recognize or abide the reality that change in the individual can take just as long.

Facing the long, slow reality of gradual Godly transformation the body will often cast out or allow the prodigal to cast themselves out (“emerge”) as the easier of the two options.

All this to say that both church as a whole and individual Christians could benefit from a deep and high Ecclesiology and Christology for the sake of reforming the body into what Christ continues to anticipate.

warm, she is breeze
she is racer through home
herald of spring
washing away dank darkness
bringing fresh found life
aroma of moist black earth
ready for the rains
every caress of cheek
is hope  on the wind

The past.

Like the back seat of the bus it feels safe and secure but living there means you miss everything that is happening now, before your eyes.

I have been thinking about the past lately and how it can imprison people if they are not careful and the act of writing about such a things feels fraught with irony. Nevertheless observations are worthwhile, no matter what they are about.

The past is valuable only as a foundation to the present; only as experience. To live there however; to be rooted there, suggests the present and therefore the future, have been given up upon. This is a very hopeless perspective when you think about it…when the past dominates our thinking and our actions we become relics…we become the past and ultimately we become quaint but irrelevant. Invisible.

Don’t get me wrong – I love to reminisce. I mean I spend a lot of time with some of our local oldsters and they have fantastic stories but the value in them is wisdom to me and the passing on of experience.

What I am referring to is something more insidious, the changing of a mindset from bright, hopeful, forward thinking to one buried in the darkness of the unchangeable. It is a place of rust and fatigue; a place of obsolescence and regret; it is corrosive poison on the soul.

The only antidote is the light of looking ahead at the prospects of an unwritten page. A blank sheet unencumbered with the stains of spilled ink simply awaiting the hand to illuminate it.

There is always hope when one is looking ahead and as creatures bound in time for now, that is how we are wired – to look ahead. If we were to read our stories in reverse it would be a sad depressing affair ending in oblivion but when read properly the book never ends and the brightest light lays ahead which is reflected in the exclamatory proclamation –

“Behold, I make all things new!”

Here are Jupiter (left) and Venus through my humble camera. March 12, 2012 at 10:20 p.m. You can see Jupiter’s four brightest moons here – Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. Jupiter – though massively larger its further distance combined with Venus’s white sulfuric acid cloud cover makes it MUCH brighter.

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There are hens in the sun
like burnished copper and light
walking with a sense of existence
and a little “I am here –
there is no other”

I had coffee with my good friend Ben today and another old friend joined us later on. When I say old friend I do not mean we go a long way back, I mean old…Ben and my other friend are both more than 80 years old.

I appreciate my conversations with “old” friends. There is something refreshing about their “seen it all” attitude that often softens the blow of much that they hear that would otherwise shock and dismay those of us with far less life experience.

Often we do not speak about anything profound but rather mostly mundane day to day things and memories. Today the subject turned to tinkering which left me listening as my two table companions took turns talking about the things they had made in their life. One spoke of making his own welding tools which both baffled and awed me. The other spoke of writing a letter to Ford once about how to improve the design of their vehicles. So much knowledge, so much experience.

At the same time the conversations inevitably turn to illness, pain and death. What new malaise has made an appearance and who has most recently died.

The older my friends become the more time-bound they appear and act.

I notice this more and more. As a child, adults were all one species and radically different from me. Now as a somewhat middle-aged guy I must resist the temptation to view children, youth and seniors as strange and other-worldly. I say resist because the temptation is strong to classify them as ‘other’ which then allows me to speak of them or treat them as if they were inhuman.

Time seems to be a poison to me. Something about the accumulation of time corrodes us and binds us in a way that frightens me.

I think this is because time is really a foreign thing to us…I believe we were created by God with the intent of existing outside of time. Existing in a place and way where the accumulation of experience does not threaten to overwhelm us in body and soul.

I do not like the idea that we are all vehicles moving along the linear highway of time, each at different points, some behind and some ahead, some accelerating and some decelerating. At the risk of sounding a little too touchy/feely I believe we were meant to exist outside of time.

Entropy, atrophy and the ultimate running down of things all seem like an aspect of brokenness and corruption that will one day be overthrown. In the meantime I believe we need to see them for what they are and remember that the people around us, young and old, need to be viewed with time-based biases stripped away. Not as aliens strange and unusual to us but as brethren that deserve compassion and and ear; to be heard and thus receive validation, affirmation and ultimately existence.

If time poisons, isolation rusts. I believe the antidote, the oil of life if you will, is community. First community in the world but ultimately community in Christ in preparation for the forever community we were built for. Community across ages. Not a community of many ages stratified across demographic but a true blending of age and type and character and experience.

Community is not an easy thing to find or to do. The worst thing is the longer is takes to connect or become community the harder it gets (like exercise).

How do we find it? Ideally it is selfless, loving, compassionate, forgiving, relationship but how often do we run into these things? Harder still humans tend to be all or nothing types…if we cannot find perfect, sharing community either in relationship with others, church or group, we tend to want nothing at all.

Frankly I think the best most of us can do here is to recognize that community is built like a brick house…one brick at a time, one person at a time. It is not walking into a church, bar, work, house etc. and being overwhelmed by perfect, holy, loving, community (aka our expectations). It is a wave and a smile to the stranger on the street, the frightening hello to the unknown and the expectation that other people’s fear and similar brokenness will likely mean we will have to do these things a thousand times before it sticks…but I can tell you this – it is worth it.

The pain of stepping outside of ourselves and into others is absolutely worth the effort. Which is why, once we recognize that those different from us, those older and those younger, are the same, with the same fears and preconceptions, it becomes easier to do and before you know it you have a whole network of people in your community – coworkers, your bank teller, the garbageman, your church crowd, your drinking buddies, the woman who lets her dog crap on your lawn, the waitress at your favorite restaurant etc.

Together all these strange half-relationships make up the ingredients of community. It is not neat, it is not clean, and these bozos will just as soon disappear for months on end but they come back or their space is filled with the kids on the soccer team, the coach of the hockey team or the oldsters at the local Tim Hortons you sometimes stop and talk to.

wonder
it is a wonder
a wonder in sepia tone
gold and warm
the empty space
between four walls
my space
a place of books
memory mine and others’
what a wonder
quiet treasure
of hand, and heart
and sinew sewn into it all
to live
to live in this gap
this small space in infinity
it is nothing against it
but everything
everything to me