I’m in this good harbour by a peninsula where I have often been in my dream with my sailboat. It could be any number of safe harbours I’ve sailed into. There are sailboarts anchored out from land but I’m fishing on a peer. I’ve seemed to have caught a large fish and let it go, though I’m never one for catch and release but like normally to eat whatever I catch or shoot. But here there is a beautiful woman who could be any of a number of goddesses but most resembles Venus. She’s now caught a very large catfish. I’m touched mentally by a number of images I’ve seen on uTube and several of my friends catching big fish, the joy they know. Now this joy is here. It’s comforting. What’s happening in the dream is clearly symbolic. This 6 foot fish is brought up to the peer but is too heavy to lift in. Together we have the fish half way out of the water about to be landed when a chunk of the fishes mouth comes away with the hook. This huge fish swims back into the sea . The girl isn’t disappointed any more than I am though I don’t know what to do with the chunk of fish in my hand. It seems the sea is abundant with fish and that we can catch the huge fish another day but that maybe it’s easier to catch smaller fish for eating. She is laughing. I’m laughing. I have in the past been disappointed by the ‘one that got away’. But I’m not. I’m comfortable inside myself.
Of course the fish to me is Christianity, spiritual awakening, the soul, the big fish, Jesus, but I don’t know what this being left with a piece of cheek means. The body of Jesus. Now the beauty of women is such a theme in Ethiopia. Weddings and children are such a powerful theme. I think of my poetry , “love between the sacred and profane.’ We’ve been talking about women of love while I know I’ve had thoughts of lust. The dichotomy of powerful male image of Madonna and whore. Conversations about the Madonna and Child. The celebration of the mother in Christianity and all the Christian women here with that gay laughter so appealing in the feminine bubbling close to the surface way. Lightness of being. Such a dance of community compared to the sordid. The lightness and darkness.
In the conversation with the professor I was touched by his description of the double message in orthordox or perhaps more specifically Coptic Orthodox teaching. The scripture and that teachings that are easily spoken and sounds that are said but below the surface there’s a deeper meaning. I had a thought of Gnosticism but then thought no that all the gospel has this riddle. The teachings of Jesus always having a superficial meaning and a deeper meaning.
It’s all coupled to my eating Pan Fried Nile Fish before going to bed. The piece of fish I held in my hand being almost too small to fry and eat but like the fish that Jesus multiplied and the piece a bit like the bread I had in communion, that fragment that is the body and risen bread.
It’s all left me with this auspiciousness. I loved that the priest said that one must always come to church with the knowledge that this day one would find God. He was a mystical man, deeply spiritual, and we chanted together. From Isaiah 6. He said how St. John had said much the same in Revelations.
Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord Almighty, the whole earth is full of his Glory
Holy Holy, Holy is the Lord Almighty
Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord Almighty
The whole earth is full of his glory
The whole earth is full of his glory.
We talked of translation and I so admired the professor’s knowledge of Hebrew , Greek and Amharic, languages he said are from a similiar root, I see today in my search for Isaiah 6.3 that there are dozens of Biblical translations, Standard, King James. I was comforted to see the NIV bibles in the church today as that was the translation I’d studied so deeply. My own copy from theological college days and home study is covered in ink, passages circled here and underlined there, writing in the margins. Nights of reading with such excitement. Remembering how they took my Bible in the asylum and I was like a man in prison trying always to remember the bits of a song. The feelings. The intuition. Jonathan Living Seagul. The images here in the ecstatic paintings of the dove descending to Jesus and the Lord saying “this is my beloved son of whom I’m so pleased” \
And I miss my Dad and feel such sorrow for all the men who are fatherless today. Like all the babies being aborted and then I see Phillip and my thinking his anguish is over the top as he cries out like a lost prophet of old begging the nations to return to righteousness and stop what is described today as the ‘Holocaust of our time” This murder of innoscents by the millions. Lust. And I’m fatherless now. I shared the depth of my despair and the sense of castration as I could not convince her not to abort our baby and there was nothing I could say or do. Never had I felt so powerless. And I’m always reminded of the history of the great slaughter of wars and the chivalry that has this feminine I’d raised to altar to worship now the murderer. I am so ashamed. I am so deeply caught in what all could be lies, the illusions of life. This world of what easterners called Mokshaw. The superficial and shallow. I am the unforgiving and unforgiven of imagination. Locked in my own limitations.
All around there are soldiers with guns. The women too dressed in the blue and black uniforms hold AK’s and automatics here, with the large military clips, like the Israeli girls, not hot house plants easily offended, calling for lawyers and bullies to do their bidding well claiming innoscence and weakness borderline defences, projection and naracisism, rage and hate, and the Jezebels and the Long Necked Women of Isaiah and the Cleopatras’.
In my dream she is a beautiful friend, the woman as sister, like the women around the disciples in the day. Jesus doesn’t talk of lust except to say if you think it .it is as if you have done it, the call for clarity of mind, St. Paul’s teaching to ‘pray unceasingly’. The aetheist communist and the desire for possession and lack of code , the need to achieve power and wealth, the image of Lenin and Xi Ling, the ever attacking ever stealing. I’m always fearing the thieves who teach my own love of things. The choice of the young rich man, like the psychological pictures that show you can’t see the old lady and the young woman at the same time for your mind is switching. The message of ‘holding on to the God Channel’ and stop switching . Settle the mind. Meditation. Mindfulness. Practicing the present. Brother Lawrence. And I’m here so much aware of the jumble of my mind and the laughter I also feel, the holy dancer.
We spoke of time. I thought of Science and the Scientific American cover of time and the importance of time. The reference saying that science said as much or as little about time as St. Augustine had. The concept of time is different in each culture. He’d been studying the tribal sense of time. I was jealous. I so often felt like I was constantly feeding feeding feeding and as a lifeguard and life saver threatened to be pulled under, the child eating the mother when the milk is done, feeling devoured. Talking about the flying dreams and remembering being chased. Falling when you stop believe. All around are the Vorgons and that great creation of literature the ‘Borg”. Here they were called the Derg. The name is always local. The church had older names.
My thoughts are like CS Lewis described ‘creatures’, what the yogi’s call ‘monkey mind’. Spiritual Consumerism. I would have faith and walk in Joy and Love yet fall back into fear and forget the Hound of Heaven. The dance of lovers. The message in the sexual. The hide and seek. The Cistine Chapel of God reaching down and Adam reaching up. Grace.
It’s all there and I’m here. I’ve come along way and it seems I’m becoming more comfortable with catch and release. The image of the original disciples, fisherman who are not catching till Jesus shows where to cast the net and then the net overflows. There is abundance. Comox the native word.
I’ve been praying for guidance.
My hand has been shaking like my fathers. I spill my coffee like he did.. I judged him so often as a young man. The greatest man I knew who had given his life to his family and children, who loved to fish in old age. He’d put away his gun and waited with a hook for the gift of life. We talked about Baboo of India today. The Holy Beggar, sitting hungry with his feeding bowl learning in his very depth that God will come. But if he is impatient and wants to take food or demand food he leaves the monastic path, failing the test of truth and faith. Only the man who goes a year without food dependent only on the love of his fellow man’s and woman is welcome in this monastery.
I’m so untrusting. I don’t believe my fellow man can care for me. It’s such a gift of trust I share with colleague when I ask for their help. In my training they made me call Bernie every day and trust that Bernie, abrupt, impatient, laughing, self centred, human, fallen, Bernie, would pick up the phone and want to hear me ‘checking in’ trusting the buddy system when the buddy’s I’d known had used me and hurt me. I preferred to be alone. My fellow man put me at risk and I always had to rescue them because I couldnn’t surrender. I couldn’t trust that anyone else would be there to feed me.
Yet I was touched by this young Coptic Christian man who held his hand out ready to catch me as I walked behind him down the mountain. My legs have become uncertain; My balance is going. My back is sore, My knee is in pain. I remember my brother and I talking about our legs and knees and grieving, he the soccer player, me the ‘billy goat’. I’m so much aware and ashamed and unforgiving of the failing of this body, the signs of loss. Deaf now. I’m asking the young girl at the airport to repeat herself again and again and how often I’ve lost patience with others but she doesn’t and the transaction goes through with the help of the musician with the Biblical name.
Every day I like Doubting Thomas am reassured. There has always been food. I am saved. I’m born again. I know this life as passing and that I should wear it as a loose robe. But my grief is so unbearable that it turns to despair. I’m so anxious I can hardly move. At times I’m near catatonic. I am cocooned in my despair. I cry out for Jesus.
There was a fly in my room and I brushed it away, aware of it’s life and autonomy. I’m sometimes aware of the sanctity of a leaf so a fly is more aware. I sometimes even feel the Sufi dance in a rock. But this fly I brushed aside. Respecting his life in the morning. Being Buddhist in that sense but worrying later that it was a Ttse fly, wondering if it had already bitten me in my sleep. I am already in dementia. The ever knowing psychosis. The hangover from the psychedelic of youth. The constant immunological healing and repair daily of the ever present cancer of body and mind. Leonard Cohen’s I want a new face. Lover lover lover, come back to me.
This night I came and there was another fly. I didn’t think it was the enlightened fly of this morning, didn’t think that it had already bitten me and like the vampire returned but rather that it might bite me tonight so I killed it. It was like Findhorn. I was ready to co exist but I didn’t want it living right out in my face each day testing my trust in the sacred. Don’t feed the raccoons. I think often of Livingston before he went to Africa, his understanding of life and death and biology, his not wanting to kill or be killed, thinking of the wild and saveragery of Africa then his epiphany that stepp;ing on leaves walking to the outhouse was the death of millions of life. Who would choose which life live. Today in this time of great shallow sentimentality the cuddly and furry and held while the scaly and hairless, the ugly are discarded. The Appearance. Keeping up the Appearances. The fascination I had with the microscope as a child and the scientific awareness of the infinite worlds, co existence. Quantum physics and string theory. Thought to be mocking when i challenged the professors conception of ‘vacuum’ asking the very same questions Einstein had asked. Empty. Really? I don’t think so. Enclosed, Really. I don’t think so. Something. There is always something Now black matter. The lies and lawyers and dreams within dreams.
I am here. I came without a schedule. I got myself here. This hotel has been a wonderful Inn. I’ve felt safe and protected, I’ve not even seen a mosquito and my body is full of the latest antibiotic and my DEET is like a cologne I wear. My obsession was falciparum malaria and schistosocimiasis and the horror I knew in medical school studying tropical disease , my talisman of “iodine’ when I hiked in India that first time. I’d not even considered any of this in Morocco when my ‘talisman’ was hashish. Then I’d trusted the alcohol. I’d had had the motorcycle too and the dog, and the friend and the family. On the sailboat I carried the gun. There were always the knives. What do you put your faith in. The psychological questions long before the Japanese woman asked what brings you joy. The question of what 5 things or 10 things would you take with you if that was all you could carry. Packing for this trip. The woman telling me of choosing when she escaped the Communist iron Curtain with her husband and son.
I have put trust in this body even and all are failing me as I age. I’ve failed all in this circle of seasons. I mourn more each day. Family and friends passing from the visible to the invisible. My depth of loneliness challenged by each new day. I’m not alone. I’m never alone.
I called Bernie that one day when all I could do was pick up the phone. “Come over, ‘ he said. And he’d played his banjo and sung a Christian song till I laughed and cried and could move again. I’d been frozen. Trapped in uncertainty.
How Great Thou Art.
I thought it was a test when Bernie asked me to hide him but I couldn’t. My masters have come to me, the mothers sucking on the children’s tits. I’ve struggled long with neutrality, sins of omission and sins of commission. The transactions. I turn down the freely given fearing I have nothing to give. It’s the catch. I want the price up front. I have been tricked so often, they came to me almost daily to use my reputation to get out of jail to get money, wanting me to be their warrior and advocate. Forgetting immediately. I fought so many battles and now I’m weary and have so many enemies of those whose causes I knightly joined. The defeated are the most resentful. . Like the days of AIDS Patients and the sickness, how unsafe. The accountant I knew who shied away from sickness. Those who wear masks now fearful of the stranger. The superstition roaming the land again or always. I’ve wallowed into the mess and glue and swamps but now fear age and mosquitoes. Little things. I like the burro that way, so strong and tough before the big things but frightened by a spider.
“We learned to whisper,” my friend said of his time living under the rule of the Muslim invader.
“When two or us were together and a third joined us, we knew one of us had to be an informer’ the doctor told me of their life under the communist rulers.
The image of Jesus on the cross, my Irish Catholic psychiatrist colleague,said one night, sitting with George Vaillant, “I knew as a child if that’s what he did to his own son who had no fault, I who was a very bad boy in the eyes of my mother and father and all my teachers wasn’t likely to fair well.’
“I’m a better doctor than a Christian,” i once wrote.
“I”m afraid to be too good as a Christian because look what the world has done to the very good. The disciples and saints don’t fair well. Everything in moderation, an apple a day keeps the doctor away and all that , I’m a moderate Christian.....I seek to be good enough as Winniocot said of the ‘good enough mother’. I fear it’s not enough. .
He said he lost power in his dreams of flying when he doubted. If you have faith you can move a mountain.
It’s all there, if you have eyes to see, ears to hear.
Holy Holy Holy Lord God Almighty
The whole earth is full of his glory.
I counted coup on the fish in my dreams. I will bring out my begging bowl again tomorrow. I have an amazing schedule of flights to holy places booked for the week. Perhaps I can find a place in the Inn tomorrow. I have asked for more phone connection and will face the mosquito tomorrow. As kids only in shorts my friend Kirk and I carried canoes in the north paddling away from land to get away from the clouds of mosquitos. We played in the toxic fumes they sprayed to kill the mosquitoes int he city. We were always picking off ticks. I hated leeches wading through swamps among swarms of bugs carrying canoes on portage. The ticks carry lime disease. We didn’t care. We were kids. I loved to fish and he loved to explore. Boys in the Canadian north. We were so tanned with summer so dark we once stood naked waving at the passing Transcontinental train knowing no one would recognize us, children playing ‘black like me’ , believing the passengers would tell their fiends of the two naked native boys who’d waved at them in the northern wildness. And we laughed. We laughed as only boys could laugh. Unless you can be like children again you can not enter the gates of heaven.
I am a child of God. God doesn’t make junk.
Come Holy Spirit Come.
Bernie sang, How Great Thou Art that day. Playing the banjo, in his home. How great thou art.
I thought I was less than then it dawned on me that I am right sized and in the prescence of God I saw in awe but with my fellow man I’m am equal though we play these one up one down games and men carry guns and the reincarnationist say they play the game of serial murderer till even they grow bored and move on. Another stage in a glorious game.
I don’t know the Crestor, if this is a Matrix or Tron. That part of me that set up the treasure hunt and laid out the bits of bread is not something I’m easily aware of but it could be.
I think of the Vorgon and the mice, and hitchhiking rides on space ships. I cling to my towel and Mark Twain’s vision of heaven. Jesus is my friend and saviour.
Amazing Grace.
Holy Holy Holy Lord God Almighty
The whole earth is full of your glory
Holy Holy Holy Lord God Almighty
The whole earth is full of your glory.
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