it all runs
like water
away away
every day is liquid
going places
bending light along the way
spreading out
‘cross the delta
and into the bay
it’s an ocean, our lives
they fill an ocean

to rise up
often
happens
without the least
of efforts

sometimes
all the work
is in staying
down

Watchmen – what a great premise for a movie. A ridiculous hypothesis (the best kind) – would you kill 20 million people to save 5 billion? To coin Star Trek – do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one? Is there justice in it?

These are the most difficult of questions which is why Watchmen may one day be considered the greatest graphic novel ever written (and a not so bad movie either).

Some view these issues as black and white; some see shades of gray and some simply use sheer math to determine morality while others ignore these questions altogether.

Is it easier to consider the intentional mass murder of people compared to the intentional murder of one? Is one worse than the other? By what scale? Is morality an equation?

To put it another way – do you have to be inhuman to be able to make such decisions?

I have no answers but that is usually ok…it is in the questions I feel we learn more, not the answers.

For me everything is run through the filter of my faith…it always has been that way…we all have faith of a kind and we all view everything through it.

There are faith questions and statements that are just as important.

Questions like:

“Eloi! Eloi! Lama sabachthani?”

or

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.”

or

“Will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?”

Powerful questions…we learn from the questions.

My mum and I were talking the other day and she told me about this great saying she heard from my grandpa.

He once told her “I don’t chew my cabbage twice.”

Instantly it made sense within the context of what we were talking about. She explained to me that her brother once asked her why she chose not to re-engage in a certain circumstance and she passed it on to him.

“I don’t chew my cabbage twice.”

Wisdom passed on from my long gone Irish grandfather who may have picked it up during his boyhood in Cork, Ireland. Maybe he picked it up during his four years as a tail gunner in RAF Lancaster and Halifax bombers during WWII or maybe he picked it up in Reader’s Digest…who knows.

It is profound in its simplicity…

“I don’t chew my cabbage twice.”

I like that.

the potential for beauty
can be as attractive
as the obvious

the possibility of beauty
subtle line
curve and brightness
can be what strains the heart
for want

there is the unmasked
unashamed lingering light
of all that was intended
all that is to come
unencumbered by unnatural hope 

Now that I work in a basement with no windows I went out and bought a 200 watt fluorescent bulb for the socket that hangs above my desk. The only thing is now I feel like I have a stupendous idea all day.

I don’t think people really enjoy watching other people suffer or their misfortune, contrary to what the world often feels like. 

I just think that people don’t like it when other people are succeeding in some way, especially when they are not.

Let me qualify this. 

Success and failure are generally states of mind. For many unfortunates success and happiness are the same thing. Success is a big house filled with shiny things; a new car every four years; lots of $$$; new clothes; European cabinets; big screen televisions; vacations every year; a walk-in closet with lots of nice clothes to fill it with…you get the idea.

When one or more of these things fail to exist life becomes virtually intolerable for those who have made happiness depend on them.

I know this. I have been there. I am there from time to time. 

When we see others “succeeding” in ways we wish we were we can develop a sad sense of “why them and why not me?” which almost always leads to bitterness.

We believe they are happy because we have equated happy with stuff and they have stuff and we don’t. We are stuffless and unhappy while they, well – they are stuffed and therefore happy.

We are simple that way.

Of course it is only true if we decide it is.

So back to the idea of suffering. There are some people who actually enjoy watching others suffer but they are generally monsters. I am not talking about them but so many of the rest of us who sometimes feel good at another’s misfortune.

It is not really that we enjoy their suffering so much as we appreciate the fact that they just got a little closer to where we perceive ourselves to be…knocked down a notch as it were.

When we find ourselves secretly enjoying the trials of others we might stop and ask ourselves where exactly is our idea of happiness entangled with our idea of success. The more we disentangle the two the more likely we will find genuine happiness in the wholesomeness of life and the success of others rather than commercial gluttony and loathsome self-pity.

There is nothing better for a work of art in the internet era than to censor it. If you cannot censor it you at least try to discredit the artist. To that end Israel decided to ban German writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature Gunter Grass from the country because of his latest poem What Must Be Said, which was called disgusting.

To that end perhaps people would like to judge for themselves. Here is the poem in translation:

It’s true.

Every day is Easter.

There are 364 other days of the year that He is risen (indeed). 

Each one with the same momentum behind it as this one urging us on to the age to come which is already here and on its way at the same time.

Freedom should be a daily celebration; a daily affirmation; a daily motivation.

This thing is no past remembrance but a present reality to be breathed in and breathed out every second of the day, every day for the rest of our lives.

He is risen means more than He is risen. It means He is active and calls us to play a role in that activity.

Will the stone still be rolled away tomorrow? Will the tomb remain empty? Or will we bundle the body back up until next year?

He rose, is risen and will rise…He is always risen.

Christ is not God’s escape plan for a desperate world. 

His death and resurrection are not forerunners to a great abandoning of the earth.

It was never about going to Heaven…

It is all about the coming of Heaven and the Kingdom of God to earth. It is all about redeeming creation. It is all about participating in the unfolding of the new age here and now until it is perfected by the coming of Christ again.

“Thy kingdom come”

“Thy will be done on earth – as in Heaven”