glassdimly

In the Lord's prayer, our daily prayer, we pray, "forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors."

As we forgive our debtors.

Forgive us our debts.

In Aramaic, debt and sin are the same word, ḥōb.

So when Jesus tells a poor cripple to get up and walk, he tells him, "Your sins are forgiven," he is using the Aramaic word, ḥōb, which could mean both things. In all likelihood, he's not just forgiving a debt owed to God. He's not just healing him of his illnesses. He's forgiving his material debts, owed to other members of the community.

It is difficult for individualist-minded Christians to join a populist movement. This is because we want to intellectually assent, as we would to articles of faith, to the intellectual propositions of Occupy Wall Street. But popular movements are living, breathing entities.

When we join a political movement, like when we join the church, we gain brothers and sisters we are sometimes ashamed of. There are missionaries who we dislike, dogmas and creeds that we disagree with. But we are still part of the church, following Christ, for better of for worse.

I am concerned for my generation because prevailingly, we believe that tinkering with our governmental and economic systems will create the definitively just world. For many of us, we believe that if equal opportunity and equal resources were provided, we'd arrive at utopia.

As a Christian, I am a stranger to the world, an alien, a sojourner. I find common cause with people working for a more just world, and I work alongside them. But I only believe in a better world than the one we've got, not a perfect one.

Nonviolence. Ahimsa, "not-hurting." Gandhi proposed another word, satyagraha, or "truth-force."

I have given nonviolence trainings where people believed that any form of property destruction, strong disagreement, or disobedience of authority was a form of violence. For them, nonviolence was ahimsa, or not-hurting. It is easy, using this negative concept, to negate any action at all, from the carnage wrought among ants by the walking person, to the car emissions fueling planetary climate change. In the face of such an full negation, Ahimsa leads to quietism, inaction, and support for the status quo.

mercy
we call to god
such a small thing we ask!
god you are good
but we don't understand
bear her away
to mercy 

My cousin's newborn, Mercy Joan Mertes, died tonight of encephalocele and spinal cysts.

Despite all odds, when little Mercy came off the respirator, despite breathing trouble and dire predictions, she lived a full day and a half. No baby was loved more with such concentration as family gathered around her. It was as though she fed on love, as babies, in fact, do.

Sometimes, I have a hard time with the soul. Consciousness, the flesh's awareness of itself, is enough for me most days. I wonder what is meant by "soul", some sort of non-matter that occupies matter like a demon or ghost.

It is inevitable that all sufficiently intelligent systems will confound their creator-gods.  Tron's story is the story of the war of angels from Paradise Lost, which is in turn the narrative of what it means to create a child, a being differentiated from the self, with a will that can confound the will of its creator. The very framework of the universe, mathematics, was confounded by this problem of created freedom, which was the stumbling block that ended the quest to ground mathematics in formal logic.

I constantly meet people wherein we eventually have the following exchange:

(them) "Oh, you're a Christian, doesn't that make you judgemental?"

"Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."
- Arundhati Roy

I believe in the looking-glass world, where the first are last and the last are first, where the meek will inherit the earth and those who are despised are honorable. I see power as a mark of Cain and wealth as a potential symbol of a soul already vended.

I recently decided to cut caffeine from my diet entirely. In the wake of a three-day illness, I realized that I had past the period of physical withdrawal, and decided to experiment.

she was
good at birth

her age
like cracks
in a foundation
spidering away
from crabgrass

i love her always
this world

i love her as she is sinking
into the earth
like an ancient mansion
returning to dust

i love the earth
so much closer
as we sink
into herself

for she is both foundation and ground

i recall her
to herself
who she is
and was
and will be

she reminds me
of her birth
as she stands

i love her
as she is
created good
and sinking