Christians are the Ultimate Hedonists-and yet He loves us

Unfortunately, most Christians are the ultimate hedonists. They know that the greatest pleasure, in the long run, will be attained by foregoing much of what looks like pleasure in this present life and then 'rewarded' for it in eternity. Is this wrong? Is it wrong to give your life to God as a kind of 'fire insurance' against hell? Well, God accepts us on those terms--as long as we genuinely confess Christ as Lord, repent of our sin, and turn our face towards righteousness, asking Him to take us into His heart and make us His, as we take Him into our hearts and Make Him ours. This puts our spiritual maturity at that of an infant however. And sadly, far too many Christians remain infants for much of their lives--there are 70 year old infants out there aplenty. He takes us because of His mercy and because of His love--it never was nor ever will be because we are good. It is because He is good.

But what parent would find joy in having their baby never grow up? Such conditions horrify a parent--we long to see our children grow to healthy adulthood and to have children of their own (that we can spoil). I can imagine the weeping and distress of those with children who suffer from diseases that keep them from growing up. Can God feel any differently about His children when they do not grow? What joy can He experience when His plan for us to grow strong and tall and bear much fruit does not bear out? When we drink in His Word hungrily and then move on to solid food and even the choice meat of His Word--then His heart is filled with joy. We reciprocate His love by growing in Him and growing like Him. His is the love of laying down one's life for others.

If we grew to perfect maturity, we would love Him first and foremost because of Who He is, no matter what our own fates were to be. We would worship Him out of reverence even if we knew we were going to be destroyed for our sin, because we know we are guilty of it and we deserve it. We know there is no shadow or hint of sin in His presence--we would love Him too much to besmirch anything in His Holy presence. Thankfully He is so tenderhearted and merciful to us that He laid down His life so that we could be made holy and therefore able to approach His throne boldly and to worship and glory in His glory, one with Him, lost in Him.

It is perhaps instructive to our hearts to pause and consider our long term hedonism when we think condescendingly on those we see pursuing the pleasures they can enjoy now and call them hedonists. Paul seemed to be willing to give up even his own salvation for the sake of those he loved and led. I don't know if I can do that. I would hope and pray, but I think I have far to go in letting Him purify me to that degree. And God does not require it of us. But it is always there as a sobering reminder that we are just not all that 'good.' Any time we are tempted to indulge in self righteousness, (the ultimate oxymoron), it is a good way to sober up and remember the filthy rags He found us in. It is a good cause to rejoice in Him and His willingness to impute to us His own holiness, burning up our hubris so that all that is left is the pure gold He has wrought in us. Glory to God in the heavens, He is perfect and beautiful and loving and holy and compassionate--were He not, we would have no hope. Amen.

Jesus was not a "nice" man-you shouldn't be either

Jesus was perfect and kind. But He did not play nicely with everyone. Those who seek to be nice and liked by everyone cannot at the same time be good. A good man stands up for the helpless against those who oppress them--if put yourself between the abused and the abuser, the abuser is going to be angry with you. If you are a GOOD person, all kinds of abusers will despise you. If you stand up for social justice, those who benefit from injustice will seek to knock you down. Oh, "Be careful you who think you stand". . . If no one is trying to knock you down, you may be down already--you may in fact never have stood up in the first place. If you are the friend of God, you are the enemy of His enemies. And they are Legion. But in the end, if He is for you, who can be against you? You may have to sacrifice your life fighting His enemies, but you will not do so in vain. You can do all things through Christ who strengthens you. That means you can endure anything He calls you to because His grace is sufficient. Although He makes no such promise for 'callings' of your own design, You can do all the things HE CALLS YOU TO. If your heart is ringing, pick up the phone.

Children of the Light. . . I hope you dance.

Do children of the Light wrap themselves in robes of golden rays, dance drenched in all the colors of the rainbow, glorying in the Author of Light, magnifying His glory with their dance and with the righteousness of Christ they wear--knowing full well that the robes they exchanged for these, the robes of their own making, were the filthiest of rags, eyesores, a stench, biohazards unfit even for human company-to say nothing of their unquestionable unsuitability for presentation in the presence of a holy God. . . it would have been better if they had come naked into His presence-the only thing that could make them less worthy of His presence than their bare naked sin-soaked selves, is the filthy rags of self-righteousness they had assumed as their fig leaves. . . but neither rags nor fig leaves could camouflage their sin--only highlight it for all to see. Now their rags have been consumed by a holy fire of consecration, and bathed in His purifying crimson blood, the paradox . . . they are washed as bright as the most brilliant snow. No man's nor woman's righteousness could have ever bought such glorious robes. No mountain of heroic good deeds could have paid for a thread of these robes which were paid for with the blood of a perfect Man, also a perfect God. The One, the Only. Our At-One-ment.

Do the children of the Light dance before Him for His pleasure, celebrating His grace and His love poured out upon them, the mercy He extended when He invited them to feast with Him in spite of the nails they had driven into His hands with their own sin?. . . Indeed, there is so much to rejoice about--He has turned their mourning into dancing. Their ashes into beauty. That which was dead is sooooooooooo alive!! They are called to dance and they do dance, but the time has not yet come for the Great Uninterrupted Dance. . . there is a time to rejoice and a time to mourn. A time to work and a time to play. Before His Kingdom comes in all of His glory, we cannot stop toiling to bring redemption to the billions more dying daily in filthy rags that will too soon serve as filthy shrouds.

An angry American evangelical stands on the grounds of a university campus and screams to the lost about their sin. A message of holiness, but not a ray of love can be seen or heard or felt by any there who bear witness. There is no holiness, my friend, that is not driven from beginning to end by LOVE. You cannot love God without loving the humanity He died for. You cannot be holy without loving Him wholly. You cannot love Him wholly without loving them wholly. Unless you let Him make you His love poured out, you are an empty vessel, nothing more than a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. Many claim to preach in His Name. Oh, yeah? Who told you?

The Pharisees preached holiness without wholeness. They preached a message of good works. Condemnation for breaking their laws (hundreds more than God had issued). Holiness through personal goodness. Loving God, to the pharisees, seemed impossible without precluding loving humanity. It appears that they believed that loving anyone else could only detract from loving God. They did not understand that you cannot love God without loving His cherished humanity--all of it--every man woman and child. There is NO SUCH THING AS HOLINESS APART FROM LOVE. The pharisees would rather let a man die on the side of the road than get dirty touching him. The story of the good Samaritan is told around the world, but most Christians seem to miss the point just as obliviously as the Pharisees had. Would you allow yourself to be soiled with feces for the sake of saving a human life? Would you allow yourself to do so to save a human's eternal soul? Tony Campolo has made statements numerous times to audiences of evangelicals--variations of "40,000 people just died and went to hell. And you don't give a damn. And nothing proves this point more than the fact that you are so much more concerned about the fact that I just said the word damn than you are about any of those people." You have become petty and have completely missed the boat. You strain out a gnat, but you swallow a camel!

Those who call themselves children of the Light dance, so many of them forgetting so soon that they did not buy their own tickets to this party. That they could not even buy their own clothes to show up at this dance. And they look disdainfully out on those still dying in their disease ridden rags and occasionally scream, "Hey, Sinners! You are dying in the dark! You filthy miserable wretches-- you are clothed with the stinking rags of your unrighteousness, you are lost and don't know where you are going because you cannot see. You are starving and afraid and it is all your fault for being such a pathetic excuse for a human being. It sucks to be you. You should find the Light and leave the darkness, even though you deserve it because of your sin. Get your acts together! Climb out of the miry fiery pit-- though its walls are both as hot as burning coals and a as slippery as slime. Clean yourselves up! Get some new clothes! Come and do as we do--dance before the Lord. . . Get holy so you can hang out with the holy likes of us--the holier than thous." Astonishing amnesia. About how they got holy to begin with.

Even when God saves you and redeems you, He does not remove the free will mechanism from your brain. He cannot take over any part of you that you do not relinquish to Him--He must abide by His own rule and He chose to relinquish to humanity His right to control them, until this age closes and all is set right again. As a result, most Christians never manage to let Him take them over completely. And the room with their heart they guard the most fiercely is the one that gives them the illusion that they have something to do with their own redemption. In fact they got it for free. For the low low price of a request and repentance--all they had to do was identify themselves as spiritually bankrupt and in need of His help, to recognize Him as the Lord of all, and to turn over whatever they had to Him. What came to them as a gift, of course, had been paid with the highest sacrifice of all, by Someone Else.

So many 'children of the Light' screaming at those in darkness, condemning them, berating them, preaching a message of holiness and failure, forgetting that the whole Good News part was the part about how Someone Else would carry them out of the darkness and into the Light. Forgetting that whole co-laboring with God to save the lost part--forgetting that whole Being- Jesus-to-others-by-carrying-them on our backs as He did to a place of safety. Jesus did not scream to the lost about their sin. He spoke tenderly into their pain and healed them. He looked at them and LOVED them. And after that, He sometimes reminded them to Go and sin no more. (Three times it is recorded that He said this. On the other hand, the NT reports Thirty-Three miracles of healing and provision performed for the lost and the outcast. You do the math). But first He made them whole. Because no one can make herself holy unless He first makes her whole, and then He gives us the power to become holy THROUGH Him. Jesus preached holiness to the Pharisees--He preached the holiness that has its beginning and end in LOVE. Jesus scandalized them all by saying that all the law and the prophets could be summed up not only by the Shemah, which they knew--that you should love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, but also with its corollary: love your brother as yourself, which they did not get. They understood the vertical. They did not understand the horizontal. They thought they could love God without loving man, and they were dead wrong. Thus He had occasion to say, Let the dead bury the dead. You follow Me.

Does not the true child of the Light take that golden robe and make of it a rope. . . and then, while keeping one foot in the Light, anchored to the Rock of Ages, dare to step down into the darkness with the other, trusting the Light not to let her be swallowed up too, to be dragged into the pit of sin and despair? Does not a child of the Light take the risk of throwing out that brilliant robe so that someone in the darkness might be called out of it, awakened, as it were, by the Light falling across their faces as that child reflects Him onto their light-starved faces, awakened from the coma of the heart and soul into which they have fallen, awakened as ee cummings exclaims, "to life and love and wings and the great gay happening illimitably earth."

Does not the child of light reach into the fire and filth and grab the hands reaching for help and pull with all her strength--knowing that to be insufficient, but also knowing that where her strength runs out, His begins!!?? Knowing that our weaknesses are the platforms for His most amazing performances?

What are the children of the Light really drenched in? Contempt or compassion???? How many of those who call themselves children of the Light actually do live in the Light and dance in His courts before the throne? And how many are really just shadow puppets living between the lost and the darkness, in a perpetual state of denial? Too selfish to let the Light thoroughly subdue them, too selfish to take the step of faith towards the darkness where they can be His love poured out in golden light, trusting that nothing can separate them from the love of Christ, choosing the terrifying path of faith in Him, choosing to sacrifice that false sense of security that comes from self-righteousness and to love others as Christ has loved them--because the beauty and love that sacrifice will yield, like the birth of a child, will fill the air with laughter, drowning out the memory of the cries of anguish that preceded it.

WWJD? He'd do a lot more than wear bracelets with provocative religious initialisms on them-- He'd put Himself in harm's way for the 1 in 99 who had wandered away and fallen into dire straits. He'd open His eyes and attune His ears to the voices of the spirits of the people passing Him on the sidewalk, sitting next to Him in class, hanging back from participation in His study group. He'd be far more consumed with identifying the broken hearts around Him than counting lexical items on somebody's 'do not say' list. When you focus on forms, you focus on whitewash. when you focus on forms, you have become a Pharisee. When you focus on the function that is the injunction to LOVE all at all cost, you are not afraid to use whatever forms you need to to get the job done.

Focusing on a list of forms someone designates as sanctioned or not allows you to go on automatic pilot. It allows one to proceed without caution, without concern, without compassion--if somebody just gives you a formula then it makes faith unnecessary. (It actually makes faith impossible). Living by faith means you have to actually be alive and conscious and leaning in to listen to the Holy Spirit and find out what He wants from you right now with this person in this moment. And nobody can write you a formula for that. What He wants is for you to listen to Him all the time and let Him tell you where the relevant line is right now.

You can map the oceans but you can't map the waves. The waves move. The map could never represent each second of billions of shapes of billions of waves. If someone wrote you a formula about walking on the waves, tried to give you some detailed map to use and tell you what muscles to do what with each step of the way, it would never match the actual set of waves you would have to confront at any given point in time. But if you fix your eyes on Jesus and let Him tell you each second of the way what you need to do, what He will do through you if you are listening, you will walk with Him on the water and you will make His joy complete walking there by faith. Without faith it is impossible to please God.

That is why, Virginia, you cannot walk by a list of rules generated by man. You don't have a hard drive big enough to cover all the possibilities you will encounter. It's arrogant beyond description to think that you do. What you have to do is plug in to the Original Hard Drive, the one Who wrote the rules and can predict every eventuality. Then He will walk you through, moment by moment, telling you exactly what LOVE requires of you with this person in this moment. Think about how differently Jesus loved Mary at Lazarus' death from the way he loved Martha. He knew what each woman was struggling with at the moment and what she needed to hear--Jesus is not a cookie-cutter God--one size does not fit all--if He wouldn't deign to make two snowflakes alike, do you really think He'd treat human beings with any less particularity?

Yes, indeed. On that day many will come to Me saying, Lord, Lord, -did we not dance and pray and preach and tithe in Your Name? Did we not let everyone know, enthusiastically, about Your laws? And I will say to them--How many people did you tell about my love? Did you tell them with your lips or did you tell them with your life? I was the death row inmate whose execution you cheered, I was the single black mother on food stamps working at McDonald's and trying to feed and house four children, I was the mentally ill man living under bridges and pushing around a shopping cart of garbage all over town during the day. I was the gay man struggling to find . . a place where I would be loved just as I am. I was the bully who was beaten at home and acted out on other children. I was the weak child who was terrorized by the bully until one day I pulled a Columbine because no one cared enough to reach into my pain and love me. All the contempt you poured on them when they were Me, all the things you did NOT do for them, you did NOT do for Me.

You called yourselves by My Name, but you did so in vain, leaving a filthy stain on My reputation before the world! You may have bandied about my Name claiming association with Me, but in deed you denied Me. And on that day I will separate the sheep from the goats. To the goats, on My left, who used my Name without My permission, to those who used My Name in vain, I will shout, Away from Me!!! You who have despised and neglected love, the heart of Holiness-- I never knew you!!!

Now, will the children of the Light please stand up! ?? You done yo Daddy proud! I am taking you and those you have labored with Me to pull out of darkness into My glorious Light, I am taking you all to your eternal reward. And there will be dancing!!!!!!!!!!! And there will be feasting!!!!!!!!!!!! And we will live in joy forevermore.

Don't be dissin' My Name. . .

I said this very clearly through Moses--yes, as a matter of fact, it WAS written in stone--do NOT take the Name of the Lord your God in vain. You dishonor Me by trivializing My commandment as if My central concern was to worry about your vocabulary choices, the superficial, surface form of your language, to the neglect and direct contradiction of the substance and function of your language--what you are DOING with your language. I am calling you to be the humility and the love of Crucified Christ to all your fellow humanity. I gave you ten concrete commandments to show you what it means to love Me and to love all those I love. But you fell in love with the law when I was trying to show you how to fall in love with love. What love looks like. . .

You put far more energy into whitewashing your exterior, the exterior of what is allegedly My Temple-your body, your person, your behavior--all that energy into manicuring the lawn and the exterior walls of your temple, while inside you are starving people of love, starving them from the basic material goods you have access to and they are in desperate need of, starving them by not reaching out your hands to help them, to serve them, of knowledge, of --and you deprive them of the forgiveness and grace and joy that will help make them whole.

The honor of being called by My Name should correspond with the evidence of My Love in you--the evidence that the fire of My Holy Spirit is constantly maintained in your heart. "Your attitude," as Paul reminded you when he was writing to the Philippians from prison, "should be the same as that of Christ Jesus, who being in very nature GOD, did not take equality with God something to be grasped, but made Himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to death-- even [that most humiliating and dispicable death reserved for the vilest of the vile--Nero, Hitler, Charles Manson, Saddam Hussaine, BTK-- the public shame of being hung naked and exposed for all the world to see and revile] death on a cross!

My Son was the only human to walk the earth who had the right to be Self-righteous, but He laid aside His reputation--didn't worry about what "church people" would think of Him for hanging out with the prostitutes, drug dealers, loan sharks, and 'trailer trash' of His day. Nor did He worry about what they would think of Him if He allowed Himself to be nailed to a cross and 'permanently' staining His reputation by dying with the lowest of the low. He was Not Too Good for them. He loved them enough to lay his reputation aside. . . But how many evangelicals do you know who can say the same? Frankly, I see you doing more crucifying than cross bearing with your sterile, distant, and sanitized church lady words.

You are obsessed with forms--with the exterior--that which everyone can see and judge you for. But you neglect the functions, the actions, the deeds, the sacrifices hidden within their forms, these functions that I have set before you as your purpose--you do not impress Me when you sanitize your language according to the prevailing whims of preferred vocabulary, but allow your ballooning egos inflated by the hot air your own (imaginary) self-righteousness-- based on trivial superficiality that I hardly care about--and those damned inflated caricatures of Christianity that you strut around with like floats in Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade--you allow those enormous floating abominations to block the path between Me and those who seek to escape from the fire of judgment into the fire of My love, of My consecration, My holiness. . .

Wake up people! You are not part of the solution, you are part of the PROBLEM! You are standing out there trying to get your bigger-than-life blow-up doll of yourself positioned as prominently and as close to Me as you possibly can-- for all the world to see. And guess what? I don't give a DAMN about your stupid inflated self-styled "Jesus dolls" and how many people you manage to impress by being seen "with Me."

What I WANT is for you to reach into the fire with Me and help pull these people out--to minister to their burns, give them mouth to mouth if necessary, to be more concerned about saving them than about getting slimed by touching them! Get your stupid floats out of the way and get in here and help Me. THEN I will acknowledge being seen with YOU and I will lift you up. If you want to save your life, you must lay it down. If you want to be great in My kingdom, you must make yourself a humble servant to people you currently seem to find unworthy of your presence. Holiness works from the inside out. No amount of whitewash is going to change the filth and death inside that house. Most of your neighbors can't see what I see in your secret rooms. And appallingly, you spend all your time worrying about what THEY see, when My view is allegedly what you care most about.

You fear cursing Me by mentioning Me in expressions of surprise or dismay, and while you put so much energy into bleaching your vocabulary, you curse Me by calling yourselves Christians, but not being Christ to the world, laying down your self righteousness and helping those seeking Me to get through the wall of fire that separates them from Me. You are more worried about getting dirty or burned than you are about saving them. And as long as you position yourself as the superior person, you are a stumbling block for the lost, not a stepping stone.

Now, you need to help or get out of the way. And you can expect me to approach your Jesus dolls with a sharp object and take care of the need for deflation, if you don't. And you need to be a little more concerned about Me cursing you for wearing My Name unworthily than you cursing Me by the culturally fickle inclusion of My Name in various idioms and expletives when they have nothing to do with fulfilling the call of Love. Study up and improve your game or you're going to need to find another Name.

Got it? God it? Good. (:

What you take in vain

I said this very clearly through Moses--yes, as a matter of fact, it WAS written in stone--do NOT take the Name of the Lord your God in vain. You dishonor Me by trivializing My commandment as if My central concern was to worry about your vocabulary choices, the surface form of your language, to the neglect of the substance and function of your language--what you are DOING with your language.

I am calling you to be the humility and the love of Crucified Christ to all your fellow humanity. Frankly, I see you doing more crucifying with your words than

You put far more energy into whitewashing your exterior, the exterior of what is allegedly My Temple-your body, your person, your behavior--all that energy into manicuring the lawn and the exterior walls of that temple, while inside you are starving people from love, starving them from the basic material goods you have access to and they are in desperate need of, starving them by not reaching out your hands to help them, to serve them.

You are obsessed with forms--with the exterior--that which everyone can see and judge you for. But you neglect the functions, the actions, the deeds, the sacrifices hidden within their forms, these functions that I have set before you as your very purpose--you do not impress Me when you sanitize your language according to the prevailing whims of preferred vocabulary, but allow your ballooning egos inflated by the hot air of your own (imaginary) self-righteousness-- based on trivial superficiality that I hardly care about--and those damned inflated caricatures of Christianity that you parade like floats in Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade--you allow those enormous floating abominations block path between me and those who seek to escape from the fire of judgment into the fire of My love, of My consecration, My holiness. . . Wake up people! You are not part of the solution, you are part of the PROBLEM! You are standing out there trying to get your bigger-than-life blow-up doll of yourself positioned as prominently and as close to Me as you possibley can-- for all the world to see. And guess what? I don't give a DAMN about your stupid inflated "Jesus dolls" and how many people you manage to impress by being seen "with Me." What I WANT is for you to reach into the fire with Me and help pull these people out--to minister to their burns, give them mouth to mouth if necessary, to be more concerned about saving them than about getting slimed by touching them! Get your stupid floats out of the way and get in here and help Me. THEN I will acknowledge being seen with YOU and I will lift you up.

You fear cursing Me by mentioning Me in expressions of surprise or dismay, and while you put so much energy into bleaching your vocabulary, you curse Me by calling yourselves Christians, but not laying down your self-righteousness and helping those seeking Me to get through the fire that separates Me from them

a famine of purpose

one cannot live long without purpose. a famine of purpose--purposelessness runs rampant through every modern society on the earth--it is the poor, ironically who suffer less from existential crises, perhaps because they suffer more in barely scraping together their meager existence, theirs and their children's, with hope that the latter will not have to suffer as much as they. but this is where our staggering rate of suicide has its genesis. you don't find many moms falling into the despair of purposelessness (sylvia was an exception) because i think they don't have time to think about it and they are driven by the purpose of caring for their families. it seems to me the moms who do commit suicide tend to have more mental wounds and dysfunction those just despairing for lack of meaning or place in society. so if you can just hang on in the meantime (and i do hope it is not such a mean time) and the inbetween time, to see whose minds you can sweeten with tantalizing little drops of faith that there is meaning and purpose in life, if they can first believe in purpose and then perhaps to pursue it, you will have done a great thing.

Taking off from Rousseau on Inequality (Rated DS for Deeply Sarcastic, let the reader beware)

"I conceive of two sorts of inequality in the human species; one, which I call natural or physical because it is established by nature and consists in the difference of ages, health, bodily strengths, and qualities of mind or soul; the other, which may be called moral or political inequality, because it depends upon a sort of convention and is established, or at least authorized, by the consent of men. The latter consists in the different privileges that some men enjoy to the prejudice of others, such as to be richer, more honored, more powerful than they, or even to make themselves obeyed by them."

Rousseau (1964) [1756] Cited in Hymes, 1996: Narrative Inequality, p. 25.

There are two resources that the mention of the role of consent in inequality brings immediately to my mind, which I think valuable to any brave soul interested in an exploratory sally into the cold, murky waters of our present social reality, a reality so successfully disguised as the produce of free will and individual human agency, which are, in turn, portrayed as the central doctrine of what is touted to be the social organization of choice in the modern world: effectively the true religion of the Holy American Empire and all its Western cousins: Democracy. I am not anti-democracy, but one big problem is that it doesn't really exist in the way most Americans imagine it does. The other is the the way we not only idealize but idolize it, as if it came part and parcel with the 10 commandments on Mr. Sinai--you have to wonder whether this ideology isn't just a little like the old divine right of kings in ages past. . . but that discussion for another day.

One is the video documentary of Noam Chomsky's: Manufacturing Consent. The other other is an article that appears in an edited volume called Social Dominance; this latter is one of those works whose essence is rich, but which rich essence has been distilled and concentrated in the title--rendering everything after the title more or less supplementary and superfluous. The title is, Let's Both Agree that You're Really Stupid: the Power of Consensual Ideology.
A caveat about Manufacturing Consent. I am neither prescribing nor ascribing to anarchism. I think the chief virtue of this documentary is that it points out that that you can wield power over a people so much more effectively if you make them believe that they are in charge and you are giving them what they want.

This reminds me of the common saying that The man is the head of the house, but the woman is the neck, and she can turn the head any way she wishes. Humorous, but nails the nature of manipulation. Well, some would call it diplomacy or politics, but that's also begging the question--what is relationship between the language we use to describe (or obscure!) reality, and the true nature of reality itself. Yes, it's 1984 all over again, (but are we not all grateful that orwell did not have the foresight to prophecy the big hair of that ignominious decade, and thus extend the life of its unpleasant effects) . (: and he may have been off the mark a few decades too early for the extremity of Big Brother, but dear Lord, just a few.

I write from the perspective of what many find surprisingly conservative social views, as one who met with the rude awakening in 2004 of accidentally discovering a law of (politico-)physics whereby, apparently, a fairly conservative resident of Washington DC, by driving a few thousand miles and taking up residence in the heart of Texas, is instantaneously transmogrified into a liberal. And not a lukewarm liberal either, apparently there are flames emanating from my aura. I think that technically, however, they are coming from the fire shut up in my bones and that my 'liberal' ideas resonate with all the old testament prophets and Jesus and the disciples. . . we should not lose sight of the earlier meaning of the word liberal-it means to be generous and giving. It is sometimes used as the translation of 'goodness' in the list o the fruits of the spirit. . .

Apparently, nothing need change but one's residence, for the transformation to Bearer of the Scarlet Letter (L, the L-word in point of course being LIBERAL) and 'poof,' my identity was suddenly transformed into some enigmatic entity I myself could neither see nor describe, save after several years, in year Ot Seven, I had accustomed my eyes to see the image in the collective mirror of the many faces of my new community and culture, and gradually to recognize my own face as it appears in mosaic pieces, on the sea of prosaic faces, in the countenance of a thousand Texans, skewed in the light of a strange reflection, unfamiliar enough to defy detection, and leaving me with a waterless beach full of mystified questions.

The word consent, as it is bandied about in the U.S., is integral to the sacred American ideology of freedom and independence, and is the pivotal notion in what I have come to believe is probably the greatest political snow job of the last thousand years, with the greatest number of subjects in the history of humankind taken in by it. The human animal is smart enough to object to overt efforts at enslavement by other humans. There seems to be enough of a sense of social justice encoded somewhere in their DNA that in time, at least some of them will recognize the exploitation of one class of human by another and will exercise their gift of agency and volition by intervening, revolting, and setting about to right the imbalance that incensed them.

However, it has generally been members of the oppressed population who rise up, having nothing to lose, in an effort to seize back their rightful autonomy as human beings. Unfortunately, it seems you have to actually be one of the oppressed before this burst of humanity shakes you in your shackles. Shucks. Sure the others shirk their responsibility with a shrug of their shoulders and a shameless show of shit-headed apathy. (No apologies for scatological representations of the products of fallenness and hell--scripture quite favors that literary device).

And of course, that other persistent trace in their DNA seemed to destine the revolutionaries to the same fate of their 'evil' predecessors, the same cycle of rising to power with decent motives and then finding that being in the dominant position in society causes clear and certain danger to one's moral health, first a cancer to the eyes, which results in a blissful oblivion to the suffering of others, and soon addictions to comforts (call it palliative care, you know you want to) that cannot be maintained without the oppression of some other capriciously determined class of human beings, and thus, 9 times out of 10, the new civil savior eventually becomes the new unsavory oppressor, just like clockwork.

All that agency and yet--how unbearably predictable the human cycle. All that free will and the lion's share of the population keep their heads down focused on the bit of rut in front of them as they rock back and forth spinning their wheels and trying to free themselves by accelerating in the rut. 9 times out of 10, no one turns the wheel and tries to cut across the grueling groove. 9 times out of 10 they do not step outside themselves to survey the situation and engage in a little metacognition--assess the situation, regroup, develop a new strategy and take decisive action. Yes, Alexander was right, the masses are asses. And we are they.

And Americans may just be the guiltiest and the stupidest asses in the history of time, the most inexcusable. What society has ever had so many tools and done so little work with them? Do not even animals arrange themselves such that the dominant alpha male takes his leadership not only to enjoy its power, but to look after the interest of the herd? Understanding the safety of the herd to be inextricably linked to their own?

What society has ever had so much knowledge at their fingertips (literally), and so much leisure to pursue it--never has it been so easy to just reach up and grab a torch and start illuminating the dark corners of society where evil still reigns to reach in and take up the cause of the innocent and the oppressed. But I see Americans sitting in their lazy boys in front of the TV--a crystal ball providing direct access to intense real-life, naturally occurring, unscripted untrumped up, real life survivor drama where the stakes are life or death, not being kicked off an island, the stakes are shelter from falling bombs and stray bullets, seeing your child live to adulthood, enough food for your family to eat, escaping or surviving rape and domestic abuse, rather than missing out on a chance to win a million dollars with a consolation prize of public notoriety that may still lead to luxury and to still more insulation from the actual reality-shows (not reality charades) unfolding behind closed doors and iron curtains. . . that square shaped flat screened crystal ball a window that leads to a critical door, ubiquitous and thus, much too easy to ignore.

Here it is, heroism (another of the American pantheon of purported principles of purpose) on a silver platter. The American, however, elects to lean back, dim the light, and watch Die Hard for the 4,000th time. Watch someone strong and beautiful spend millions of dollars blowing things up and pretending to risk his life saving others' so we can get our adrenalin fix, pretending-just as a mental exercise- to care about the lives of people outside our own, even if they are imaginary people being saved by an imaginary hero from a gang of imaginary terrorists. Americans spend millions of dollars and millions of hours RE-CREATING death and destruction so we can slake our thirsts for what??? A reminder of how cozy we are and perhaps a spark of a glimmery memory of of an age when we ached with those who ached and spent our millions of dollars and millions of hours on the billions of people trapped in story lines they cannot turn off when they are ready to go to bed at 11:00. Oh yeah. Reality check. We may have thought we had come of age. But the fact is, that golden age has yet to come. We are currently merely inhabitants of the age of gold.One cold ice age, this one is. Yeah, yeah, whatever, one gold one coming up.

RE-CREATION of DEVASTATION as RECREATION--Animation as anesthesia, animal nation shooting up for corporate amnesia, exercising nothing but imagination, exorcising any suggestion of guilt or obligation, hell bent on escaping any actual conflagration, blasting doubters with our righteous indignation, we gave at the door, dammit!! When we checked our consciences with our sheepish woolen cloaks.

Americans pay through the nose to keep the hallucination coming in a steady stream, we pay top dollar for this elaborate delusion, deaden any impulse that might lead to resolution, restitution, revolution. Sheesh, revolution was so much more chic and noble when we were not the oppressor. The best laid plans. . . well, they're still lying there. Right next to the American also lying there intoxicated by their creature comforts, in a pool of luke warm social vomit, expulsed from God's own mouth. Having been neither hot nor cold. Suffocating in their own self absorption. What was that about all roads leading to Rome? Romans road? All Romes leading to this road? A Very, Very long (thrill ride of an) Access road leads to Excess road, A dead end. Well, first there's a moral cliff to fall over, and then the dead end's at the end of your fall. Well, technically, The Fall, capital F, but who's keeping score?

Make no mistake, I do not speak of all Americans. But I speak of the current essence of America. She who has an ear to hear. . . let her hear. But I wax pessimistic. And my alter ego (and my altar ego) believes you really can change the world, and so can I, and so we must.

No transformation can begin, however, before an assessment has been made and acknowledged. Someone has to see and interpret the handwriting on the wall, otherwise its just prophetic grafitti. Mene , Mene , Tekel , Parsin . . .

Reveling with goblets of silver and gold and praising the gods of silver and gold-- yeah there's a cup for you, but it's not a cold one, nor is it a gold one, and I daresay it shall not pass from you save you drink it to its dregs. . . Someone call for a wise man or a wise woman who is not afraid to tell the Emperor that he is BUCK naked! Let the headline show: Almighty buck exposed. We can just call him Al. For now. Al American. The Emperor is not one man or woman, it is the spirit of a nation.

I've strayed a a bit from my original focus. But fear not, I shall return later to continue discussing the matter of deformed consent.

does God have a crush on me? well, He's definitely crushing me. . . but what a beautiful yield He promises

God is crushing me like an olive. He has been doing this for several years now (since 2001). The beautiful thing about crushing an olive is that it yields the anointing oil of healing, the oil of his Holy Spirit, the oil that fuels the flame of His Holy Spirit in our hearts, which we are to maintain--like the lamps in Leviticus that God warns over and over must NEVER be allowed to go out. and the oil of His Spirit is available in wonderful infinite supply--He can keep it flowing and burning as long as we maintain the wicks in our hearts (which involves cutting the wickedness (: , among other things).

if this blog inspires you, please share it with others. i really feel that it is a prophetic undertaking that he has inspired, and i approach the task with fear and trembling, and would appreciate prayer for faithfulness to His Spirit, not to wander off in my own arrogance and ever so fallible flesh.

keep listening to Him, and He will do mighty things in you and through you. beware of the deceit of the pharisees, they spend all their time shining their halos, and don't notice the souls falling and dying all around them. God can take care of your halo, if you take care of the harvest. (:

grace to you and His boundless love,

and what does the Lord your God require of you?

a passionate voice crying out in the wilderness,
Prepare the way of the Lord.
repent! In the Name of the Lord-
stop dishonoring Me by dishonoring the poor!
I am calling you to awake and arise,
to evaluate and mobilize.
I long to redeem you,
but you must long to be redeemed.
I have for you a purpose, a plan, a call.
you have seen My will for you in the writing on the wall,
but you must choose to read and understand,
to be delivered from your place among the ruins of fallen man.
then when you seek Me you will find Me,
and I will put your sins eternally behind Me.
I will lead you forth with a pillar of Fire,
if only you will hear Me and embrace what I require:
that you should live justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly before your God.
and when you become My love poured out, I promise you, all of heaven will applaud.

Are you authorized to use My Name?

a call to all Americans who would call themselves Christ-ian—

that they not take the Name of the Lord our God in vain.
to heed t-His command, you may not take My Name
unless you take My character, My passions, and yes-My Pain
you cannot share in the power of My resurrection
unless you also share in the suffering of My crucifixion.
if it is with anger you go out to preach My gospel to the lost
and not the love-stricken grief that compelled Me to the cross,
YOU TAKE MY NAME IN VAIN.
I did not say, They will know you are Christians by your LAWS.
I said, They will know you are Christians by your LOVE.
You dishonor My Name when you present your laws as My good news,
If these lost lambs I love and My Holy Name you continue to abuse
On the day of reckoning you will hear, Away from Me Imposter,
For, indeed, I NEVER knew you!

On Top of the Globe

The American stood on top of the globe
With his fingers in his ears and his eyes squozen shut.
And I heard a voice say,
If your fingers offend you, cut them off!
And if your eyelids do, cut them out too.
Better to see and hear what the Spirit says to the heart
Than to wind up in
Hell
With your members in tact.