Winter Christian in Summertime

I’m feeling a tad guilty.  Sunday morning really is Church going time for me. It’s a good habit of quality living. A lot of my life I’ve enjoyed attending a church, first with my family, later alone, and later with friends. The music really appeals to me. I like the thought provoking sermons about matters we’re actually told not to talk about, God, death, morality, ethics.

Yet here I am with dog, Gilbert, and cat George, and I just woke late. I watched the movie Majestic Seven with Denzil Washington, Ethan Hawks, Chris Pratt,and Haley Bennet.  An evil outlaw baron kills farmers in their town and church to take over the valley for his slave mining operation.  Haley Bennet plays Emma Cullen and recruits the magnificent seven, a group of bad ass men of varying character but retaining a shred of humanity and willing to come to the town’s aid.  Matt Bomer plays Mathew Cullen who has been gunned down by the Bartholomew, the evil industrialists,  villainously played by Peter Sasgaard.  Mathew Cullen had been verbally defending the town pastor who Bartholomew had dragged from the church and was having  being beaten to death by his gang.  Obviously the church plays centrally in this movie, burnt by Bartholomew and later as the steeple sniper tower for Ethan Hawks and Lee Byung-hun. I’d seen the movie , this one and the even earlier version.  Despite Hollywood’s  cultural Marxism propaganda, it’s ignorance of Christianity and it’s twisted Jewish revenge motif it’s actually a very good pagan proto Christian movie. Besides all western’s are Godly along with space movies which are really glorified westerns.  Actually any movie with horses is good and even better if there’s a dog.  It ran past midnight.  I like movies where there are guns and things that blow up. 

I slept in.  Gilbert even joined me on the bed using his dog ramp and lying down beside my face to lick it and let me know what time we get up usually during the week. He really needs to learn days of the week.

He’s just bored.  The cat puts him up to it too because I feed them both when I get up. Gilbert wants to play ball but the cat really wants to ensure he’s got his food for the day. Once I’m up they go back to sleep

I start my day, after the toilet, where I read the inspiration for the day as well as do the “other”, unnamed,like politics and religions , which could well be construed as number one and two, simplify the teaching of children.  

Then I meditate. I’m not very good at it. I began doing it in adolescence and have trained with the greatest and practiced ever since but really it doesn’t come naturally.  I come and go with it too. I was doing it sitting in chairs for a long time, back straight.  But then I got back to cross legged which hurt my knees to get down there but now is working out pretty good. I feel good about myself physically.  My mind still wanders but I figure it’s a clear invitation for God, Holy Spirt, peace, higher power, Jesus, Holy of Holy, to come in. Look no thoughts, come Holy Spirit come!
Meditation is listening to God. Prayer is talking to God. So I do the mindfulness meditation focus on breathing, sometimes the mantra meditation ,Herbert Benson MD,  focus on a word or phrase, sometimes both, and observe the monkey mind. “Creatures of thought and thinking’ that aren’t ‘myself’ but ‘constructs’ and relax and wait.  It’s waiting for Godot and today I was mostly interested in the fan in the refrigerator.

Gilbert, my sensei, realized I was useless at this and much more useful playing with him. So my meditation session stopped when he climbed in front of me and put both paws on my shoulders and licked my face.  Hard to ignore. The cat had been behind me rubbing his back against my back.  

I played with them both, scratching George’s back, and rolling Gilbert over to scratch his belly. We’ve played ball some, pretty good for a blind dog, and I’ve had my coffee.

If making and drinking coffee were a sacrament I’d be holy.  I’m really an adept at making coffee, stove top espresso machine, honey and milk , nice blend and a favourite heavy solid mug.  I may well get to heaven and find that God was coffee or manna from heaven in the OT was coffee.  More likely God is chocolate or ice cream.  Skip the comparisons of the Song of Songs,  food analogies work better for me than sex analogies.  

I’m in a long t shirt. I picked it up in San Francisco knowing it was kind of sexy girlish and yet it was a ‘night shirt’ in the old medieval sleep wear manly sort of thing. I’m ambivalent about my bisexuality.  I’ve enjoyed men and women sexually and admitted it to get out of the victim role. Indeed I’ve been working on a spiritual exercise of embracing all that has occurred in my past believing that God is good and all that has occurred in my life is God.  It’s all that caterpillar butterfly thing.  Even loving the ex wives and sometimes forgiving the government but rarely getting that far. At best I pray for the forgiveness to forgive this government. 

I’m old now. I can honestly recommend that young people aim for the straight and narrow. Mainstream is tried and true.  I ended up off in the rough looking for my golf balls a whole lot of times on my course of life.

But it’s not a race and I don’t really believe in a loving God and heaven and hell in that ‘concrete’ piagetian developmental delayed way. I’ve studied Hebrew enough to know the mistranslations of phrase and time. If we do the best recommendations of good parents and a good society then we will be mainly in the ‘church tradition’, not the ‘letter of the law’ but the essence of James in the New Testament.

I love that the 12 step programs grew out of the reading and interpretation and life of the Oxford movement. There’s so much hope and inspiration there.  I’m abstract.  I”m a scientist. I love the Celtic Christian understanding of the truth of nature with it’s DNA and fractals and all that good stuff whicheaetheists rejects. I love God of the Big Bang. I like the Dance of Love, the Dancing David and the Jesus who likes little babies and his fishermen friends.  

Over the years I’ve cross dressed.  In theatre, in dance, in kilts, with long hair and earrings and even attending annual balls where the girls wore tuxes and the guys wore gowns. I loved wearing a klush gown and  having my hair and nails done. I miss the theatre.

I’ll forever remember the day I bought my first ‘stretchy material’ blue jeans.  As a kid I read science fiction novels where the men and women had unisex spac suits which fit their bodies adjusting naturally to hot and cold and were protected from the elements in every way. I’ve been ‘functional’. I wear ‘suits’ to work and that whole ‘masculine leader’ role is a burden.  I have open toed sandals and close toed sandals and feel better at work with the latter. Yet when I come home I’m down to men’s shorts and a tshirt. When I sailed in the tropics I lived in my shorts.  Clothing is functional in my books and for comfort these days. I don’t even like the constraint of waistbands and in the tropics was satisfied with the wrap.  I don’t think any of that has to do with masculine or feminist.  There is a part of me that envies the women their obvious clothing for sexuality which of course the perverted lying feminists deny.  So much of female garb is relational and art whereas men’s wear is functional and work.  

So a lot of my staying at home is unwillingness to get dressed. To go to church I would have had to walk the dog, and showered and shaved and then I’d be obliged to dress like I do for work.  Shirt and slacks. It’s not at all demanding like the 19th ventury and even the 50’s. I do miss the tie. I liked having all these groovy ties and could make a statement “I’ve dressed up for this occasion’ simply by the choice of tie. I wore jeans and plain shirts and added the accessory tie and that was good. I love jeans , mostly for motorcycles and falling down and using wrenches and grease and stuff and black shirts. I love black shirts.

I see white pants and white shorts and white shirts as distinctly feminine.  I can’t have a Burger or a hotdog without mustard jumping on tto my shirt.  So every once in a while I do the zen like awareness of my body and clothing and focus on my space and environment like dance but I could never do this and get any of the things done that society associates truly with manliness and work. Those these days all the girls are doing the manly things and getting praise and downplaying the achievements of men unless done by women and I sew and cook and do all the traditional female things but with no support from a society reveling in the destructiveness of Marxist chauvinism and cultural communism.  A man is praised for pushing the baby cart while the woman is praised not for using a wrench but for her ‘superiority’ , the whole feminist thing is only about control and power.
I enjoyed using a wrench yesterday with all the importance of the tool manipulating monkey and loved the movements muscles and the activity and held it like a violinist holds a violin bow.  Men appreciated their ‘crafts’ and celebrated the ‘craft’ and once women did too.  But feminists are heartless aberrations of humans totally caught up in dominance control and power.  So seeing a man pushing a baby cart isn’t about shared parenthood but rather about freeing the woman for the board room. Because that’s where the feminist wants to be and would never understand the billions of men who love their ‘work’. Narcissus and Goldmund the great tale of the 30’s is beyond the feminist mind.

I want to carry less burden, fight less and stop having to push back when bullies of all sorts especially those in administration burn down the church and throw their weight around. I want to do my ‘craft’ and my ‘purpose’ and my ‘calling’ and my ‘duty’ and I could do it nude if it weren’t for the bullies who have me wearing jeans so I’m always ready to get down dirty with those fuckers. Because they play war in the board room and wear white shirts and grow their fingernails long to show they don’t have to work.  But I like my hands knowing work.

If I was in church I’d be hearing about peace and turning over my cares to Jesus.  I’d leave my burden and confess and together pray for a good week.  I’d have to get dressed though.

I’m here whining and moaning and reflecting on not writing the great Canadian novel and how I could get up and walk the dog and go to the hot tub. I’ve  aches and pains and lay in bed enjoying the freedom from bodily awareness.  Cycling yesterday did it.  Exercise leaves me the next morning hurting. I don’t know if it’s good pain or not.  When I was young all pain fo exercise was good pain.  Now I can’t tell the difference between pain and strain.  

God is this creation ,this dream this holograph and existence I’m in. It’s all the culmination of the ‘collective consciousness’.  Owen Barfield one of the C.S. Lewis crowd wrote of this and how God was the ground. The potter and the clay. The individual as co creator. I’m responsible for my life and the blend of fear and love that coexist day to day. I see the church as a safe place. I may make the 4 pm service or compline later today.  I’ve missed the first call to church but it doesn’t mean I can’t make a later one.

I feel better if I get out. I will shower now. Cleanliness is next to godliness.  Shaving is good. I’ve been more conscientious regarding shaving since my beard became grey and white.  Neither Bruce Willis or I unshaven today look like the young guys with their sexy stubble. 

I often wonder if the desire for a sex change is just a desire for youth again. I don’t think any one except youthful idiots wants to be old, to have the problems of geriatrics.  Oh dear, let’s have sex change to an old lady and worry about pissing yourself when you sneeze.  That’s not the marketing ploy that the gender surgeons use. Neither is the idea of getting prostate disease and incontinence or erectile failure what motivates women to be men.  So much of the attraction for those older is the idea of ‘youth’.  To be a young and fit anything is appealing to the over 50 and over 60 crowd.  I think the Hindus with the hope of reincarnation have a more positive outlook.  I’m likely coming back as a dog and that’s okay.  I’ve watch my blind dog adapt to blindness whereas I’m still bitching about my knee.

I see the Hollywood movies promoting the young men and young women sexually.  50 years for the women and there’s  the movie REDS with the old ladies and old men of spy days and they’re sexy but still we’d want candlelight and incense especially for the bald guys.  Thirty year olds have a fairly universal appeal. And the 40’s are delightful but 50 is the over the hill on the sexy scale for men and women functionally or just to look at. Generally stripped naked men and women stop looking great older. If we can add character with an expression as a photographer might the 60 year old nude has appeal. But not in a police mug shot lighting of the whole body. A 25 year old yes, she or he can look sexy in that flat lighting we associated with the morgue. But not old people with worn out parts and wrinkled skin and stretches and spots.

I love the old. I can see the beauty ‘in’ the old but not the superficial way that Hollywood does.  So a 60 year old offered a ‘sex change’ or a ‘youth change’ might well take the latter rather than the change of genitalia.

Such considerations are like religion and politics not to be discussed. 1 or 2. I did know several bisexuals who thought that they’d be more ‘popular’ if they expressed their sexuality in the other way only to find that regardless of their orientation they were not liked.  I was interested that in therapy they found a way out of their ‘unlikeableness’ and a specific ‘line of development’ and this had a specific ‘efffect’ on their sexual orientation.  There are those hard wired heterosexuals and hardwired homosexuals though the latter would argue all homosexuals are hard wired and the hardwired heterosexuals would too but it’s in nature as spectrum and in cultural history often opportunistic.  Right now there is a ‘halo’ effect around certain ‘choices’ or ‘alternatives’ and without that ‘halo’ effect the distributions would change.  Just as the threat of aids turned many off to gay experimentation and use of needles. Multiple factors affect behaviour despite the propaganda.  In science we are always learning in comparison to politics where there are those who insist they know it all.

I think I’ll go get showered.  I’ve got to find clean clothes. I don’t know where the ‘fat shorts’ are, probably in the laundry’.  I find it easy to get into the fat shorts a t shirt and the open toed keens sandals and walk the dog. He likes that.  That’s a plan.  I did have toast and jam so don’t need food. I don’t know what I’ll do after that. I like the freedom of a Sunday like this without plans, my weeks and work are highly regimented, whereas church would galvanize me and I’d have a more productive day but really what’s productive at my age.

I’m in God’s waiting room. I’m waiting for death in some ways. So many I know have died ‘relatively naturally’.  I could be growing death right now. I would not be too greatly mourned. Yes I ‘d like another 20 years but it’s not like when a 30 year old dies.  I’ve lived a good life. I don’t have to ‘hustle’ .  I can get a sex change anytime. I don’t have to write the great Canadian novel to day. I don’t have to sign up for foreign missionary service.

I could pray and meditate more but I don’t think it’s going to ‘speed’ anything up.  It’s coming for me. I’m old enough to slow down and accept both the hound of heaven and the grim reaper.