Restless… it might be my constant state… so much so that I do not know anything else. I do not know how to do or be anything else.

I barely sleep… in the sense that everything wakes me. It is as if I am always poised for something; always ready and waiting. But it is only the wind. It is only the cat. It is only my own mind humming away in dreams.

but Jesus went to the Mount of Olives.

At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.

But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.

At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”

“No one, sir,” she said.

“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”

When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”

The Pharisees challenged him, “Here you are, appearing as your own witness; your testimony is not valid.”

Jesus answered, “Even if I testify on my own behalf, my testimony is valid, for I know where I came from and where I am going. But you have no idea where I come from or where I am going.

“You judge by human standards; I pass judgment on no one.”

Meditate on the following questions:

1. How many times would the woman have to be caught in the act of adultery before Christ allowed her to be stoned?

2. Where was the man and why was he not brought?

3. When we judge, by whose standard are we judging?

4. Are you Christ?

5. How should the answers to the above guide your actions?

there are times
when the notes are hit

just

right

and I can fly
for the lightness
that is my gossamer soul
laughing
as it’s carried along
by the promised breeze
that is the breath of God
sweeping me dry
above the desert sands
until the rain falls
and pins me to the earth
where I might root
and grow
in the memory of it all

she is the covering Robin’s egg blue skies
that rise like promise before my red-rimmed eyes,
and fall like forever-water behind my broken back;
sweeping robes to my black left and my weak right –
the only one to hold the blazing son in her arms
and sing all-father to sleep with lullabies as homilies

Gloria! Gloria! Gloria!

The greatest poetry often rises up out of the offal of genuine repression and brutal circumstance.

I say genuine here because I have known people who have sought to artificially repress themselves in order to create an atmosphere conducive to improving their poetry. This is ridiculous because the key to such circumstance and the poetic fuel that follows is that it is a genuinely UNWANTED circumstance.

With all of this in mind I have begun wondering about the great and sad absence of the poetry of women, slaves, homosexuals, and other repressed groups over the centuries and millennia that have failed to surface.

This is a great and empty hole from the mid-19th century or late 18th century and previous where we should be finding a dearth of poetry written by women for instance. But in comparison to men we find only a few bright stars like Sappho.

Perhaps I am not looking in the right places but I suspect there were a great many poets throughout history whom we will never hear from because of their circumstance and this is a very sad thought.

When I was younger I went on many a three-day canoe trip every summer with Boy Scouts. In the summer over a weekend we would marshal our canoes on the Saugeen River at Walkerton, Ontario and make our way to the port of Southampton and majestic Lake Huron.

This canoe trip went with the current and so, while hard work, we knew if we stopped paddling for a while we were still moving forward.

On occasion we would paddle against the current to head back upstream to visit with friends. On those occasions we could not stop paddling. We had to relentlessly work to move. If we stopped for a little to rest in a slow moving section of the river we would immediately lose ground and go backwards.

Life can be a lot like this…we are moving along this river at varying speeds but there is always a little resistance…a little current against which we must press. When we stop to rest we start sliding backwards.

At this point I will stop to say that there isn’t anything necessarily wrong with this. What is important however is to be aware of this phenomenon that happens with individuals, groups, families, faith communities, organizations, festivals, cities, etc.

As a person or a family drifting a bit with the current to see where it will take you can be a good exercise and open up new opportunity and insight – as a business or some other mission driven entity however drifting is never a good thing because there is nothing intentional about it and you can quickly lose sight of where you are and where you were going.

There are some who believe that once they have reached their goals they can simply maintain and allow their momentum to carry them along. The problem with this is that there is no such this as maintain. The second you stop intentionally moving forward and striving to achieve goals the current begins to pull you backward. This is why new goals must always be waiting in the hopper once the old ones have been achieved.

For organizations there are real consequences for putting things on auto-pilot: customers get bored; revenue/visitation starts to flat-line and eventually drop; and increase in complaints to name a few. Staff and volunteers begin to sense stagnation and become stagnant in-kind leading to increased turn-over and loss of people. Motivation drops and attention to detail, and service levels fall as well.

As people we call this state the rut. “He’s in a rut” we say. We call it a rut because it is difficult to get out of once we are in it. It takes much more effort/energy and resources to reverse backward momentum than to slowly and constantly continue to build it forward.

Back to canoeing – when we would arrive at our destination and the awesomeness of Lake Huron would unfold before us and stretch to the horizon, we would often drift a bit out into the lake and then make our way to shore, pack up our things, load the canoes onto the trailer and head home with thoughts of coming back next year.

We can do this as well – it’s called closing the business, shutting down the organization or festival, shuttering the facility etc. It is true sometimes things do need to die so that new things can be reborn in their place…but make no mistake, you cannot put your business or organization on pause and come back in a year expecting to find it in the same shape; you cannot sit back and assume your momentum will carry you, because if you do, before you know it, there won’t be anything there.

“If the you of five years ago, doesn’t think the you of today a heretic, you’re not growing spiritually.” – Thomas Merton, (1915-1968), arguably the most influential American Catholic author of the twentieth century.”

Today I finished a month long purge of approximately 350ish books on theology and pastoral subjects. It was surprisingly easy. It may have been disturbingly too easy.

I kept the writers I most deeply value – Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Henri Nouwen, Thomas Merton, Augustine, N.T. Wright, C.S. Lewis, Karl Barth and many others as well as some quality reference works.

As a great and passionate lover of the written word, I am, of course, an avid (insane) collector of books and other printed materials…I still retain somewhere in the range of 500-600 books on the shelf – not to mention the digital copies on my tablet and Kobo.

The purge comes as a result of an imminent move (as most purges do) and in some ways seems to reflect a spiritual purge that has been going on within me for about seven or eight years.

Fasting is a spiritual discipline. It is a discipline of denial. This long period has felt like a spiritual fast for me and I feel I am coming out streamlined somehow. Whether this is good or bad remains to be seen.

To the opening quote – the me of five years ago would most likely see the me of today as a heretic.

Oxford Definition of heresy in English:

noun (plural heresies)

[MASS NOUN]

I am remarkably at peace with this.

In reference to my inner spiritual life and theology, I remain committed to Christ much in the sense of my seminary’s (Tyndale Seminary) motto – Douloi Christoi, or in my case, Doulos Chistos.

As to who I am now?

I am the same as who I have been and who I will be – I am forever a slave to the grace of God, cheap or costly; I am a slave to Christ, constantly needing to be washed, constantly needing to hear his command for me to “COME FORTH” as Lazarus that I might leave the dark tomb that I continue to crawl back into.

Vantablack is a substance made of carbon nanotubes and is the blackest substance known, absorbing a maximum of 99.965% of radiation in the visible spectrum.

Sometimes, at night, it felt as if he were made of the stuff.