Seeing nil but trusting
Tuesday, April 29, 2025
A Verse for Tuesday
Seeing nil but trusting
Saturday, April 26, 2025
Dark: A Musing Out My Window
“The gods sleep,” they say. “The earth can't see the sun where I am and thus the gods, too, are dark.” In this we equate whatever is most and greatest with what we see. God equals natural phenomena, one-and-same with it. This view is old as time, the earthy end of the gnostic see-saw, telling us the summum bonum is found always au naturale and whatever within responds to it is fully material, for there is nothing else. Sun worship, body worship, sex worship: all on a plate and offered up to all-in-all as what is seen and and known as known. If the earth sleeps, so does god and nothing watches, for rocks don't see. We know this. The earth tells us.
Somewhere we conceive the opposite end, gnostics' claim that knowledge knows all, mind is everything and nothing is ever asleep, a natural response of its own assertion. Only mind can be and we know mind is greater than matter. There's something more than meat – a spirit really – that consumes all, transcending flesh and rocks and brains. The highest is not found in things or sense: they, instead, are second order, even bad. For thinking of them makes them subject and mind will win the day and tell us all things. Science worship, word worship, thought worship, information colossus-king, all offered up as highest good, the all-seeing eye all the time. The University tells us.
God – the living God -- asserts Himself, not in power nor mind, but in weakness and love, transcending both. He is uni-verse, three-in-one, the impossible pulling together of body and spirit in a Baby. And so it ever is. Our bodies make a baby and we marvel, pagan-like, at the miracle. God becomes a baby and our mind breaks, refuses to believe. God is Spirit and God in Christ takes the see-saw, holds it still, beckons us dismount and live. We worship in spirit and in truth. God is not the world and He does not view it askance. He loves the world, His own creation. And He is ever alive. We respond to Him in kind because we are His, and He never sleeps.
The night outside my window is real, as is the darkness in some broken soul, or in a forlorn prisoner or distraught child in war-torn countryside. Though I am at peace, I wonder about all things, and about all I imagine to know: such is the human lot. “God stepped out on space,” the poet said, “and made Him a man.” That is me – that is all of us. And in the dark, He is there. Because He never sleeps, I can.
“He watching over Israel slumbers not nor sleeps.”
Tuesday, April 1, 2025
Live Again
my plans to take the way I knew was His, my hopes that He would be near.
I knew the path I took and well my prayers affirmed --
until I stopped, and sudden knew my ears were dull.
One seldom hears when speaking out and mind made up can scarce unmake.
Without listening.
My steps ended. I sat and heard:
"Stop. Let go. Be done with your own way.
Your doing is undoing all I meant to be and do
in my good way of twists and turns and time.
You run -- or walk -- ahead and pray. Good for you.
But have you listened?