I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.
– Bene Gesserit, from Frank Herbert’s Dune
**Truer words were never spoken**
from the hard chord-ed,
amid the dark-rooted
tectonic booming bass-ment
where
she weaves, she weaves
through tangled knotwork
’round crashing note-work
’til
she rises, breaches, lifts past
the pounding, churning morass
flying unbound above it all
an airy expressive melody
breathing high-noted light
singing our everlasting delight
it was all blue
blue as a bird’s egg
blue as my mother’s eyes
as my eyes
till the grey rolled in
a dank wet scarf
heavy and pressing down
one could get lost inside
or settle in and stoke a small fire
a huddling warm place
to wait out the sudden storm
Love.
What is it?
“Love is a many splendored thing“, “all you need is love“, etc. etc.
The Song of Solomon speaks of a man in love describing his beloved in no uncertain terms – “Your breasts are like two (Horned Mammals) fawns, twin fawns of a gazelle grazing among the lilies.” (BAZINGA!)
There’s lots of descriptive words about love that circle around the term like moons around a planet or planets around a sun but what is love itself? Objectively speaking what is it?
1 John 4-8 says “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” (Aka – love is defined and rooted in something that is utterly not human and completely outside of ourselves).
God is love…NOT…God is like love. Not – God is loving…but God IS love. It is important to understand this for what it is – this is not a comparison or an attribute but a clear definition of what God is. Nowhere else in the Bible is God defined. You find many verses that speak of what God is like…but nowhere do you find a simple definition of God except here in 1 John and in Deuteronomy 8:7 which, in simple and frustratingly confusing God-style says “God is God” a variation of the famous words of God to Moses “I am who I am“.
From a Platonic perspective God is the absolute model or archetype of love. Our love, whose source is found in God, is based on our limited perspective of God’s love which we can only perceive like a heart-shaped shadow on a cave wall that speaks of an infinitely greater and unseen source that must reach us for us to reach it.
All forms of love proceed from and are defined in comparison to God because God is love and (listen carefully here) love is God. (Usually it is at this point some will turn away in disgust with thoughts of “uggg…more God and Bible talk” to which I can only say – it is the filter through which I see the world and I will make no apologies for this).
In relation to this is another helpful verse in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 that does not describe love so much as it describes it’s nature:
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.”
Bold words (get it?).
Lately there are a lot of articles and books being written on love and endless opinions offered (IRONY ALERT) free of charge (although some charge) by endless streams of people…or more to the point…attempts to narrow the focus of love and justify adding certain attributes all of which are designed to justify or condemn feelings and actions of people in certain circumstances. Phrases that sometimes begin with “God hates…” etc.
Rather than get too detailed I would suggest the following criteria when you come across content that seems to narrow or make love somewhat exclusive – run.
Love is hard. Love is painful. Love is only for certain people. Love is a burden. Love is bondage. These all smack of rationalizations and desperate attempts to redefine and twist love into an image other than what it is based upon (see God earlier).
Love is a good thing because love is a God thing.
All bad things in the world (sin) are simply twisted versions of the good things we have been given. There is no bad thing that did not start out as a good thing. Love can be twisted into all kinds of bad things. Even hate and murder are twisted attempts at justice and judgement…but they are not justice and judgement…they are what we made them into.
Love twisted is no longer love…it is whatever we turned it into and no attempts at redefinition and rationalization can change that.
Anyhow this is my unqualified observation on love…these are words launched from the rock that I currently sit on and they are shaped by my journey so far and the view from where I’m at. These are words from my context…they are bound to change as I do but the nature of love never will. Praise God for this.
i took a few (a lot)
of punches to the head
when i was younger (no jokes)
when i boxed/fought/beat the anger out in fists on flesh
i was that kind of fighter
let me fall or fail but not before
he feels the force of this life…my life
transferred through me like a Newton’s Cradle
crashing into his fresh face…
only to come back, though less than before
and in the end i would always win
in blood and cancerous clouds of smoke
i was never a boxer…
i was a cannon the world aimed at others
in the brashness
of a new day cracked,
sprung forth
and bathed
in a certain hope
one can breathe
as the heart beats
fast to the rhythm
that only it hears
taptaptaptap
upon my glass
in the night
a song in nails
sent to press
to give insight
to live inside
an unfolding
song of sight
taptaptaptap
to send me
from the fight
I have been following with interest the unfolding photographic saga of accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzokhar Tsarnaev.
Rolling Stone magazine decided to put his image on their cover and they chose a very specific self-portrait for very specific reasons. It is no accident that the image is of a youthful, attractive young man who could be anyone really.
This is the point of course as the editors stated inside the magazine – this guy is like many of their readers, a young, somewhat aimless, university-aged kid that ended up willingly involving himself in a plot that saw people die. The magazine cover calls him a monster (something many people seem to have missed).
The cover is a play in contrasts. The editors want us to ask how such a nice looking young man could also be a monster. He should be ugly. He should be wearing a mask or be all scarred up or covered in pox. Monsters should look like monsters or else how would we ever spot them.
This is the point the editors at Rolling Stone are trying to make – monsters are not what they used to be (or maybe they never were) and we need to challenge or age-old misconceptions about good and evil; more importantly we need to challenge our understandings of what causes a person to get to a place where they can do evil in the first place.
The reaction to the cover of Rolling Stone is understandable, particularly amongst those in Boston and others directly impacted by the bombing – one of revulsion. There is a belief that Rolling Stone, either intentionally or unintentionally, is seeking to soften the face of evil and make Dzokhar Tsarnaev into something a little better than he really is.
This has directly led to a decision by a Massachusetts State Police photographer to release some more graphic and gritty photos of Dzokhar Tsarnaev at his arrest. Tired, dishevelled and bloody, in one picture resigned with the bright red dot of a sniper’s laser sight on his forehead ready to blow his brains out should he try anything.
This is the “real” Dzokhar Tsarnaev according to the officer. The old, innocence portrayed in the Rolling Stone photo was given up the day he murdered.
Of course the truth is rarely so clear cut and the reality is that both of those images reflect Dzokhar Tsarnaev.
The questions Rolling Stone are attempting to ask are very important ones. We need to understand why people do what they do, especially when their actions lead to pain and death. Why did Dzokhar Tsarnaev decide that people needed to die? One might respond “I don’t care why just kill him the way he killed others” and this will very likely happen but it does nothing to prevent the next one. It is understanding and not eradication that is the most important goal to achieve right now.
Still this runs contrary to a fairly basic human need – that to demonize the ones who hurt us.
It is an instinct of preservation to do this because it sets apart the evil one from the rest of us. It says – this person is inhuman while we are human. What this monster is capable of we are not. It tends to be retroactive. In the cases of serial killers much work has been done to show that they were always monsters, never human really, just wolves in sheep’s clothing hiding amongst the herd and waiting to attack.
No one wants to believe that Dzokhar Tsarnaev may have been a nice guy at one point; that he may have been human. No one wants to believe that somewhere in there he may still be a nice and likable young man. If he is than anybody could be Dzokhar Tsarnaev. Any one of us could have the potential to become this monster – this Frankenstein human, not human manufactured thing that scares us because it might be us to a greater degree than we are willing to admit or accept.
We can destroy the monster but more will be made in the end unless we gain a better understanding of how it came about in the first place. The problem with understanding (and another reason we fight it) is because understanding can lead to compassion and compassion can lead to forgiveness and what would a world that forgives monsters look like? We don’t really know but we know it frightens us.
Lately I have been thinking a lot about the circumstances we find ourselves in. I find the response to those circumstances very interesting as well.
Why do I find that it is easy to empathize with suffering…or at least it seems easy, in comparison to joy?
Empathy is often seen as an understanding/recognition of the pain in another’s life but of course this is a limitation of the word…in reality to empathize is to comprehend and reflect the state of another’s emotional life be it suffering or joy or the reality that life is an inextricable blending of these things.
When one suffers one often finds that the world has suffered much the same way before them…in this there is empathy. On many occasions one senses that the world not only empathizes but also sympathizes with the offer of compassion – that is a joining in the passion that one is enduring…co-passion. It is a communal impulse.
Sometimes empathy, sympathy and compassion twist and become something different within me…something very much like competition rather than compassion. Imagine the all too common tale of the elderly gathered together in the old folk’s home chattering about a variety of things when one points out a bruise on their leg. Another chimes in “that’s nothing check out my gout swollen foot” to which I would wistfully remember when I had a foot, and so on and so forth.
Empathy, sympathy and compassion have long since vanished in my mind in the race to see who will enter the grave first followed by who will do so in the most horrific fashion. My reality has become twisted and I can no longer trust if what I see and feel are real or simply distortions of a lens warped in the over-heated forge of my vigorous imagination. Where does this impulse come from?
Do I do this with joy?
“I remember the happiest moment of my life when my first child was born?”
“That’s nothing compared to how happy I was when MY first child was born.”
I do not compete in joy. There is a recognition that in doing so I will diminish the joy of the other. It is innate.
I wonder if I can offer sympathy, empathy and compassion for more than the hurt of life?
I have been thinking of the image of the suffering Christ which is often offered as a balm to our own pain…and it is. But there is something more to it – it is not simply that Christ suffered that gives me a sense of solidarity with God (or reverse as it were) so much that Christ simply was. There is the suffering Christ to be sure but there is also the joyful Christ, the indignant Christ, the hungry Christ, the thirsty Christ, the Christ who ate and drank his fill, the Christ who was alone and the Christ in community, the naked Christ and the clothed Christ, the Christ who cried and the Christ who laughed. The Christ who was tempted and the Christ who overcame. Ultimately the greatest sense of solidarity I gain from Christ and those like him is that he is the Christ who was…the Christ who was human.
If all Christ could offer me was sympathy in my suffering I should think that very soon all I would ever do was suffer or feel ashamed at my suffering in comparison to the one who suffered more. This Christ offers me no hope – but a Christ who suffered, laughed, died and rose again – here is where I find hope.
I am reading Henri Nouwen’s book The Wounded Healer again and wondering if the Peter he speaks about in the beginning is me. Of course I was four years old when he wrote it so unless I was a very complex toddler it is mere coincidence. He speaks of one disconnected from the world; disconnected from the past and the future and living a life of accidents in the present strung together one after the other. Such a life is unmotivated and apathetic.
I must anchor myself to the world and the complete Christ wherever I find him or risk floating away.
Honesty time.
I have been feeling very anxious lately. Like I carry a constant stream (raging torrent) of adrenaline in the pit of my gut everyday, all day…and I don’t know why.
I have an awesome family and kids that are the best in the world. I have a good job which I like very much. I have great co-workers who I count a privilege to work with. I am enormously blessed in innumerable ways.
So if everything is great why do I feel so bad?