Yuma, Arizona, Christmas Eve Day, 2023

As young as I can remember Mom prayed. She prayed with me on my knees beside my bed at bedtime. She prayed at meals.  We attended church Sundays and we read the Holy Bible.  She gave thanks to God the Creator and Jesus Christ.  We were raised Baptist Christian and attended Sunday School.

Christmas was a time of worship, gift giving and family meals with turkey.  Christmas Day was the day of celebration but Christmas Eve was important too.  Even Boxing Day had meaning and was the secular celebration following the spiritual celebration of the birth of Christ.

When I was young I still believed in a linear reality and that time was fixed.  Now I know the circular reality of time of the East and that Time is relative according to physics and spiritual insight.  Today is all there is. Now is present.  I am here and now. God is in this moment. There is no permanence but God and I am perception.  My relationship with God is I and the other, creator, love, Jesus.  

The birth of Christ and creation of all is happening now in my consciousness and memory and belief.  It’s is the meaning of this relationship of the material and spiritual.  God became man.  Jesus the servant God, creator creation, spoke of the love and truth of the Father.  The Kingdom of God was more than the material kingdom of earth. This dichotomy of mind spirit and body material is central to my perception but not necessarily reality.  Reality is much more and much less. God is one.  The mystery lies with me and the sense of being lost on the journey.  God is not lost.  He is within.  Being born today in Bethlehem a mythical and real place I have visited and known Miracles in.  Miracles are everywhere and every when. If you have eyes to see and ears to hear.  

Joseph, Mary and Jesus are all within in the Biblical story with the evil dictator King Harrod who killed John the Baptist and the Judges and Rabbis who condemned Jesus and Pilate the Roman overseer that could have stopped the crucifixion.  But that was all 30 years later in the life of Jesus. 

Christmas we celebrate his birth.  Immaculate conception.  A miracle.  A gift of God.  Anything is possible with God.  God is great.  God is not small. I am small. I am limited. God is infinite.  I am afraid and I scoff. I am a man of hard facts but I’m also a scientist so I’m never closed to possibility.  I am humble as a scientist and open minded but not so open minded all the marbles fall out.  The idea of a God becoming man is not new in the spiritual realm. History is replete with men becoming Gods. The myths are early history.  The essence is they are now, here and now and each day I wake up and choose what I will do with what I’m woken too.  

Celebration of the Baby Jesus is a good thing.  Jesus talked of love and said ‘do not be afraid’.  Believe.  Have faith.  Have hope.  

One of my all time favourite songs is Monty Pythons ‘Look on the bright side of life “ sung by men being crucified”.  The absurdity of life is too easily forgotten. The Harrods are without humor, sub human really,  muscle bound, clever cretans living in fear like Pilate and all the others dependent on this world for joy.  Yet Alexander asking the greatest philosopher of his day what he could do for him was told simply to step aside as he was blocking the sun.   This wise man knew.

Today we hear the angels and shepherds sing.  An event that changed history and raised the eyes of the world to heaven and inward to heart.  A baby is born.  A ruler to be.  The Birth of Christ.  Love wins.  

It’s a great story with Harrod killing hundreds or thousands of babies and Joseph and Mary and Jesus, Jews, fleeing the Jews.  Escaping to Egypt.  The all time thriller and action movie of the era.  Joseph the greatest hero, protecting his wife, adopted child and children from countless warriors, soldiers, police and those who would steal the child and sell him to death for profit.  

There’s no story like Jesus.  There’s only one Jesus story.  Lots of similiar ones. But today is the harbinger of the day he rides into Jerusalem on a donkey facing censorship and obliteration by the terrified men with toys and women and drugs and lust.  30 years he survived till that day which is celebrated in a few months at Easter.  

But time is millions of years and Christianity has survived only thousands. A drop in linear time.  Perception.  Today that time is far away and we celebrate his mother being told by an angel that she will give birth to the Messiah and now she is fleeing in labour to give birth in a manger because there is no room in the inn for a pregnant woman giving birth.  Talk about people not getting up for old men and old women on a bus. Here is a middle class woman. Joseph was a carpenter.  Here she is in the barn giving birth because no one would give the mother of God a bed with clean linen for her to have her baby.  Wise men arrive. They follow the star.  They don’t visit the inn keeper or the penthouse or palace but they come from afar to be there for the humble birth of Jesus., child of God. The coming of the King.,  Gifts of frankincense and Mirh. 

It’s happening today. Right now. Here in our hearts. Jesus is being born and will escape to Egypt with his family because the authorities are afraid.  And he will teach and heal one day  and destiny will be served.  

I’m just glad to have a coffee today and remember all the wonderful times with my mother, this Mother and Child day of Days.  I will pray too. Thinking of Joseph as the great escape artist and manly man like my father who kept the kids safe and together long enough to reason on our own,  It’s so easy to disbelieve.  Aetheism is a fools realm.  Angry adolescents and ‘no’ shouting toddlers.  To believe. Now that is Shakespearean.  Today I believe.  Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not come. Today I believe and look forward to singiubng songs of praise and thanksgiving Christmas Eve with others who celebrate motherhood and babies and escape from tyranny and stupidity.  Christ lives.  Christ is born today.

Gratitude Thursday

I am grateful today for the air I breathe. Thank you Lord for the rain that makes the air so fresh and clean.
I am grateful for my dog Gilbert and the cat George. Thank you for their company and health
I am grateful today for my health, mental, physical, emotional and spiiritual. Thank you Lord for the guidance and care that has helped me maintain my health with your grace despite trials and tribulation.
Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil.
I am grateful today for the food in the refridgerator and cupboards, the food I prepared for breakfast, the coffee I made on the propane stove and drank this morning reading the messages on my iPad thanks to the wi if.
Thank you Lord for this trailer I live in and the amenities I know, the shower, hot water and heat.  Thank you for my neighbour who I met walking his dog as I walked mine.
Thank you for the trees and stream and quiet path.
I am grateful today for work and the ability and training to help people who are ill.  I am thankful for the years of service.
I am thankful for my loving parents now departed and my loving family members who are departed and the amazing family I know here and overseas.  Thank you for such blessings and the blessings of such amazing friends both departed and still present. May I be a better friend and a more a loving family member.  Thank you Lord.
Thank you Lord for space ships and galaxy and physics and chemistry and poetry and art.  Thank you for the wonders of creation.
I am grateful for our relationship Lord. I know you best in silence, and call on you most in times of fear, and anger, and uncertainty.  I am so thankful for your presence and guidance. I have been insensitive at times but help me gain greater awareness and know you as you know me. Be with me now Lord . Holy Spirit Come.
Christ within me. Christ without. Christ of yesterday tomorrow and today. Christ above me. Christ below me. Christ to the front and back of me. Christ to the sides. Christ in all my endeavours. Christ in all those who meet me. Christ in all that talk to me. Christ in every action and every deed. Christ in stillness. Christ in sound. Christ in every thought.  Christ protect me. Christ surround me with your love and help me to love as you love.
Thank you.

Advent is near

My Lord cometh.  In the deepest darkest nights of the winter year a remembrance of a baby’s birth is celebrated at Christmas. Not a God from a far. Not a machine like presence. No cog in a wheel. But a God become human in the womb.  A visitting God reviewing his creation and the co creators he made.  Obviously not all were good.  Among his own he couldn’t gather even 10 Good men. As one was too fond of money as those who are addicted to money are. The power seekers and the crows who like the shiny.  One day he would say you must give up your wealth to follow me to one who was addicted to gold and pomp but wanted too the love that was this God.
Do not be afraid, he said.  Love God. Love your father as yourselves.  I am the son of God. I am the son of Man.  From his teachings the trinitarian God was born. For when he left this one with the father son of God said he’d send the Holy Spirit to comfort us.
When I think of Jesus Christ, a name which means ‘god within’ and ‘god will come again’, I remember I’m not alone and that my life is playing hide and seek with God. When I forget the spiritual I am sucked into the morass of the material.  I lose sight of the incredible lightness of being in the gravity of the earth dwellers.
God is love.  God is omniscient and omnipotent, transcendent and imminent.  When I am still I know God. Be still and know that I am God. I run this refrain through my mind as a reminder. I can be one with God in such a moment
In advent I celebrate the coming of Christ. The coming of Christ is the coming of light.  In winter we fear the sun will not return. The superstitious childish ancient fear that this is the last of summer and the last of days comes over me in the darkness of the rain. Driving home at night I am troubled.  In the morning I can celebrate the dawn but by the time I leave my work the dusk is gone and it’s as if the sun has been stolen. I feel already like I’m back in the arctic with hardly a few hours of daylight.
Constantine worshipped the sun before he became a follower of Christ.  Love is light.
“Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for Thou aren’t with me.”
I had that sense once of being alone. I’ve been so often alone without people but for a moment I thought that I was outside the sphere of God. I’d become so hardened and scarred and had like Satan turned my back on God. I was fascinated by my own shadow. How big it seemed. But then I turned around and again began walking towards the light and didn’t feel alone again.
Amazing Grace. “I was lost but now I’m found”
I love the idea of Grace. That I the seeker of God am being sought. I’m chased by the hound of heaven. Even today the Birth of Christ is coming at me as I am slouching as a beast towards Bethlehem.  I don’t feel particularly good. I value truth and live in a world of increasing lies and those who don’t even know their lies.  Worse there are those entrusted with the protection of truth who have fled from their service, bought for so few pieces of silver.  But then who am I to judge? So often I have denied God even before the cock had but crowed.
I am a ‘sinner’. To sin is to miss the mark.  I do that which I don’t want to do and I don’t do that which I want to do. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The ‘outcome analysis’ of my endeavours shows the deviations that are still me.  I am flawed though seek perfection , impatient when I would be patient, unkind when I would be kind, quick to rage when I would be more forgiving, speaking when I would be silent. The list is endless.
I pray today that I might be the man my dog thinks I am. I pray today that I might be more loving and kind. I pray to day that I would expand my personal kingdom in service of you. I pray that I could be a better follower and be better in my work and service.
Christ above me. Christ below me. Christ behind me. Christ beside me. Christ in front of me. Christ around me. Protect me Lord.
I pray that I do the best and be the best in my person and my work that I can be this day.  Thank you Lord for all your blessings. Thank you for my parents and family, my teachers and my friends. Thank you for this life Lord, this sacred and wondrous adventure.  Thank you Lord Jesus. Thank you God. Holy Spirit Come!

Why do you call God Jesus?

Why do you call God Jesus?
-by William Hay

“Why do you call God Jesus?” he asked
“My mother called him that.” I said
“That’s all.”
“It’s no small thing to me.  She introduced me to God and called him Jesus when I was a little child.  I remember praying at the side of my bed on my knees with her beside me. That’s no small thing.  Praying beside your mother on your knees.  I still look back on that time as truly wondrous. She told me she knew Jesus long before she knew me. She said she’d asked Jesus for me and prayed to Jesus for me when I was a baby in womb. That’s pretty special. Coming from your own mother. Knowing that she called out to Jesus when she was carrying me."
“Alright, I get it. But what of your father. Doesn’t he count?” he asked.
“Oh yes, my mother and father loved each other very deeply. My mother said she’d asked for my father and prayed for him. He wasn’t particularly caught up with God himself but he did call him Jesus too. It’s just what they called God in my neighbourhood.  That was God’s name.  Everyone knew that when I was growing up.  Everyone knew God just like today they know Steven Jobs.   All the other men and women in my child hood called God Jesus.  Certainly it’s what they called him in my church and Sunday School."
“And you’ve found no better name?"
“Not really. I’ve tried on a few others but they don’t seem to fit long for me.  I liked Higher Power for a while. I still like Holy Spirit.  I do like Christ. They’re kind of like nick names, the way I see it. Jesu sometimes fits too."
“But if you were born in Syria you would probably call God Allah, in Israel Yahveh, in India , Krishna.  Because that’s probably what their mothers called their Gods.” he asked sounding a bit full of himself
“Yes,” I said, reflecting seriously on the question.  “I suppose I would have called God what my mother called God if I was born in other countries. Even if they were Christian I would call Jesus by a different intonation. The Gaelic way of pronouncing Jesus is a different thing altogether.   The sounds wouldn’t be quite the same but somehow the meaning would remain the same."
“What do you mean?"
“Well the words aren’t as important as the devotion of the heart.  I don’t think God is like the Apple Phone Siri. I rather think Jesus is more like an Emergency room nurse.  I’ve known some of the finest and they’ve that uncanny skill of understanding exactly what a person needs when they’re having difficulty talking due to pain and English isn’t their first language. Jesus is like that. Here we have Babylon but in the language of the heart our meaning is heard.I know Jesus understands me when I’m praying even when I’m not quite sure what I’m saying. The Pentecostals take that even a step further with their ‘talking in tongues’.  The Quakers take it a different way with their ‘silent prayer’. Come to think of it, if Jesus were a government God,  we’d be praying in triplicate.
“But they’d be different God’s."
“I don’t think so. Not at the Mother and Child level. That’s why I love the Madonna and Child paintings so terribly much. I cry seeing them. I really believe there’s a purity of communication between mother and child that captures the spirit of Jesus like no other image. There is no greater miracle on earth than birth. Despite all our science and superiority there’s something utterly sacred and mysterious about conception. It’s truly wondrous.  Human creation is such an important process and a series of exceptional occasions.  Society has done all it can to marginalize it.  Still, it remains truly glorious."
“And you still call God Jesus."
“Of course. Throughout my life I’ve come to know Jesus is  the best name for God. I’ve looked at all the others. I’m forever studying. It’s just that Jesus is so very different and special than the other Gods people worship.  Jesus is unique. Jesus is God. It’s quite simple for me. "
“And you don’t think if you were raised in India, or Iraq, or as an aboriginal, you’d think the god of your people would be like Jesus."
“No I wouldn’t. I’d rather be born in those nations than the Godless aetheist nations which have know such horror and pain of communism with no one to blame but themselves.  At least countries with a God can turn to something more. They're moving in the right direction.  We’re so limited , so finite as people. That’s the miracle of the Jesus story.  Neitzhe understood this. Other Gods were powerful Gods.
There were also hearth Gods but Jesus was both, God incarnate, an infant God, paradoxically powerful in his weakness. He was a crucified God. He was a vanquished God. A rebel and a healer, a loser and a winner. His was a story of miracles.
As I’ve become older I’ve come to know why the story of Jesus is called the greatest story of the world. It just seems more remarkable the older I get.  The resurrection is comforting but more so I imagine all that power and grace in the little baby Jesus and the restraint.  It seems there is no other God that is so restrained and so forgiving.  When I was young I admit I liked Yahweh better and Allah seemed spectacular spectacular.  I wanted a God that smote my enemies. I loved the stories of the Pharaoh’s armies being swallowed by the sea. I liked the Gods of Greece and the stories of Troy and the Argonauts.  Even the Great Spirit God was more appealing than a Jew dying on a cross. I was pretty vengeful when I was younger.  I probably still am. I’ll turn the cheek 70 times 70 but then I’ll smite with gusto. I don’t think that’s quite what the way it's meant to be.   But it is the way I’ve chosen to interpret it.  Slow to anger then all bets are off.
 "Forgive them for they know now what they do." That’s been hard.  My greatest fear has been the ignorant and delusional.  I think of Pilate in later years realizing that he killed God, the people there going to their graves in old age, realizing that they didn’t do more. I imagine the guy who helped carry the cross slept well but the others in the story, well, it’s what I think about and it’s not at all about war and conquest and the Big Guy.  It’s none of that Hollywood idea of God.  In my version of the Holy story I’d probably choose Jerry Springer or George Costanza to play Jesus rather than Charlton Heston.  Gregory Peck might do it best but only because of his ability to portray the thoughtful. I like Mel Gibson but that's because he's capable of playing the crazy like Peter O Toole. And Jesus only did the crazy thing in the temple when people were using the holy ground for mere marketing.  The whole Schwartzeneger set just don’t seem to have what it is I see in Jesus.  He's just not action hero material.
Jesus still lead from the front not from behind. He was first into battle like the marines but not to vanguish but to save. I really think the story grows on you. I’ve read the other stories of God again and frankly they’re great like Superman and Captain Kirk even but there’s a comic book quality at the end of the day for me. I love the Bhagadva Gita.  There's something particular appealing in monkey gods and elephant gods.   But the atheist's "State as God" Communist Manifesto grows thin pretty quick.  I like the aboriginal Turtle God story but they’re not the same for me. That may be because I am not as familiar with them as I am with Jesus.  I actually believe that the more I talk to Jesus the more like him I become. I don’t want the stigmata of St. Francis which makes the story even more poignant. That it can reach out for hundreds and thousands of years, as powerful as that and more so, is itself uncanny.  I’m thankful to know the story and to know Jesus. It’s all a little scary though Awesomeness has that quality.  It’s not a bland flavour by any means. The Church can bore one to tears with the weight of flavourless beurocracy and cowardice but the Jesus story has none of that lethargy.  Jesus is to my mind the spiciest God there is.  But then for me he’s the only one.  Three in one but one."
“Well you’d better talk more with him because you’re a long way from Godly by anyone’s account,” my friend laughed.
“Isn’t that true. My mother, if she were alive today,  would radically agree with you. Then I really think, especially now she has passed, that she knew Jesus more than I ever could know.  She had the peace about her."
“Not like you, you old rogue.”
“Not like me. Maybe some day. Jesus is calling.”

My God

My God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipotential. My God is OM.  One Mind. Sounds like HOME.  Also AMEN or ALM.  We are created in the ‘image of God’.  This is the imagination as it were. I was surprised by a friend still dichotomizing reality.  He actually believed there was God and something else.  But Phillips addressed this best in “Your God is too small.”
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth etc.  In the beginning there was God and not ‘God and building blocks”.  God the Creator.  The creator created creation of the creator.  No of nothing else there’d be God and nothing.  The essence of the message of the great mystic, St. John of the Cross, who wrote Dark Night of the Soul was NADA.  Not God. There is nothing in this creation that is NOT GOD and to think of some thing like money, or an individual person, or substance, or a book as God is to make that thing an IDOL.  NADA means that’s ‘not god’.  CS Lewis the great Christian theologian and Jew lover said, “Don’t look for the architect in the wall.”
So this computer, my fingers, the seen and unseen, the indivisible divisibleness, the alpha and omega, are all God.  God is one.  God is love. These are statements of God or the nature of God or attributes.  Medieval theologians seriously asked how many angels could fit on the tip of a needle.  That was even before electron microscopes and that was before the Haldron collider particle accelerator.  Looking as deeply inward there is as much expanding mystery asthere is looking outward into the galaxy with the Hubble Space Telescope. The sacred is in the ‘aha’ moments.
Dr. Carl Jung talked about the 4th dimension, that world of synchronicity, where the 12 steppers are spiritually ‘rocketed’ , and what to the genius is commonly known as the “flow.” Right now my friends are asking if they write the poem or the poem writes them but that’s because in moments of insight the separation ceases to exist.
I like words.  My schizophrenic patients were as much an influence on this as the Oxford Dictionary.  But a world like “I-DEAS” holds in it the NADA truth of ’thoughts’ as ‘creatures’ the term C.S. Lewis used for them, not to be ‘idolized’, not to be given God like power, not to be worshipped.  Sensations are like this.  The drug addict, a true materialist hedonist, seeks that sense of ‘pleasure’ and worships it.
The idea of Jesus is profoundly different from the notion of Krisha.  In the eastern religion man evolves upward, much of his own doing, reaching higher and higher to greater and greater complexity until eventually he becomes God, experiencing Nirvana and passing beyond this dimensional world, beyond time and space into the One Mind.  This is contrasted by the western idea of enlightenment inherent in Jesus.  For Jesus is God come to meet and lift man up as on eagles wings to be with God.
The Christ Conscious yogi or mystic chants, “I am he I am he, make me the sea”.  By contrast the western Jesus aware saint says.  “Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me.”
Prayer is speaking to God. Meditation is listening to God.  And the Sufi's twirl. In the experiences of dissociation there is a crack in the consciousness which lets The sacred in.  Carmelite Nuns meditating under PET Scans showed orgasmic brain waves enlightening all regions and special parts of the brain brightening and glowing for days after.  With cocaine, like other drugs, the functional MRI shows the blast  followed by the lights of the frontal lobe, or last developed, most human aspect of brain, shut off for weeks and months.  Devolution as opposed to evolution. The language of the left, getting high is really getting low whereas the language of the right in going slow is really going fast but neither matters because all roads lead to Rome where there is but one God and God is both heaven and hell. The concept of eternity or infinity wasn't the true translation of the Biblical and ancient texts because that waited the mathematic abstracts of Cartesian thought, the contribution of "Zero" of the east , (the story of Zero by Given a must read for the scientifically mystically minded). To the agrarian mind , 'a long time' is all that they measured time in, more truthful in reality than the abstraction of the mathematical without all the false prophecies of computer projections and numerological worship. One goes to hell for instance 'for a long time'.
Martin Buber the great Jewish theologian and mystic described the relationship of God and human as Person and God.  I and Thou.  HE said the primitive experience, or paranoid experience as psychiatrists would experientially describe it would be as fear based, I and It, whereas I and Thou is love based.  The immense beauty of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling and the mystical genius of Michelangelo was in showing an awakening languishing Adam reaching up with his finger as God is reaching down.
I am not Alone.
God is love.
God is chasing me as I am chasing him.
Jesus is dancing with me.
Jacob fought with  the Angel.
In the dance, in the struggle, in the crisis and calamity, it is all still God but I in fear retract into my own alienation and refuse to open up to the feeling of the sunshine on my face or the breeze in my hair.
When Alexander the Great met Diogenes, the cynic he asked him what he wanted and Diogenes answered that he wanted him to stand a little out of the sun.
The Wisdom literature is great.  The teaching stories are a delight. The path of virtue is the challenge.  We crawl as children and walk as men and women.  We have but this day that begins with a program of the past which we can not ascertain except with circumstantial evidence.  The past is a linear hypothesis that science says may indeed not exist except in the changing imagination of the collective unconscious.  Similarly we are part of God’s imagining of the future and can be in the here and now where the omnipotential is the greatest and we can embrace “Thy Will Be Done” or insist on ‘my will being done’.  Indeed the two are inseparable because separation is an illusion. The fish in the water don’t know the water any more than we listening to a gesticulating lady are rarely aware of her using the movement of the air to massage the relationship as she might be adding perfume to the conversation.  The subtlety upon subtlety is mostly beyond us unless we meditate and pray. Still the cacophony of the world. Still the senses
Be Still and Know That I am GOD.
Time to shower, another day of work, an experience with soap and water, then a rush to dress in fine clothing, the product of 80,000 years of industry and tailoring talent, then the immeasurable joy of climbing into a vehicle and experiencing the wonders of the scientific age, combustion and electricity and the pavement and city planning and law and order and a true genius of potential.
My little dog is patiently waiting for another walk that he might sniff the air and go with me to wherever I might take him today.  And I am to God as he to me.  I love that Dog spelt backwards, the words again, with their curious insights, spells God and the nature of the relationships.  I walk with Jesus as the footprints in the sand have taught me.  There is Grace, thank God.
I am not alone.

Christmas and Family 2015

Christmas is a time of family. The birth of Christ.  Joseph and Mary.  I was thankful to be welcome at my brother’s in Ottawa. Ron is a mensch.  His wife, Adell, is also adorable. Their sons, my nephews, are a joy to know. Graeme the oldest, an engineer and film maker, is a big hearted nerd. The next is Andrew, a genius indeed but with a wild sense of humour, a geologist, studying robots and doing MRI’s of the terrain.  The youngest is Alan, the child psychologist in the making.  Andrew married Tanya, who is a whiz with computers and shares Andrew’s appreciation of the original.  Alan has met Meagan a delightful psychology student completing a double major while working in a cheese boutique.  Then there is Eva the cockapoo. It’s a regular family. All pulling together to help each other.
I get to be apart of it.  It’’s really quite an honour.
Velma and Melvine are Adell’s aunts.  They invited us to their church. Adell and I joined them for a Baptist candlelight carole sing. I loved it. The minister is a bearded young man with a whole a lot of Jesus about him.  The guitar playing music leader was just right.  All around the voices were warm and it really was a holy night.  Velma and Melvin are old school Christians.  They don’t so much talk but show the Lord in their positive outlook.  I enjoyed their company again at Christmas dinner.
Opening present was what it’s supposed to be. Fun.  A lot of fun.  Alan’s a paper folder.  Ron was great at handing presents from under the tree, sometimes throwing the small ones.  I loved the books I received and the sweater.  Tanya and Andrew were a whole lot of fun. They’d baked the very best fudge and we all got a little box of this precious. treat. Graeme gave me a mandarin orange. I remembered how when we were children this was a special treat, mandarins only arriving for Christmas holidays. Now we can get them just about all year round.  
Megan and her sister and her mom arrived for a visit.  We all had tea and ate more chocolate. More present opening. More laughter.  Pleasant repartee.
It’s in the midst of all this world of almost Jane Eyre and Bronte Sister revelry that I realize I have had a particularly bloody life dealing with physical illness for years, then mental illness and now addiction.  I feel bit Kafkaeque like Metamorphosis but stay focused on the day. Christ is born. Love is in the air. I’m just a little nostalgic, missing mom and dad,my aunt Sally, grandparents and uncles, aunts, our childhood dog Sunny.
I loved the turkey dinner.  I understand now how much my father loved this too.  Turkey dinner on Christmas day.  Tradition.  It’s so good of Ron and Adell to host this and invited us all there. I loved being at that table.
And yes, we all attended Star Wars.  I’d seen it as had Alan but while Alan slept in I went a second time. As it was 10 am showing Adell had picked up egg mc muffins for the showing. Then after the movie it was a big breakfast at Summerhays’ Restaurant., Allan joining us. Lots of talk about BB8 and Rey and Hans Solo and Luke Skywalker.
I didn’t do any shopping before Christmas so was thankful to Alan who took me out before Christmas and on Boxing Day to get presents for the family.  Thank you Apple and Best Buy.
More meals. Great left overs.  More chocolate.  Rides with my brother. Talk of illness and anxiety.  Frustration and recovery.  We’re getting old.  Parts are wearing out.  But it’s all good.
Eva was happy. I ‘m looking forward to flying back now to Gilbert, my cockapoo. Laura is taking care of him.  I get in at 1 am and tomorrow is a work day. But it’s a short week and Laura and I are spending New Years’ at Harrison Hot Spring and Spa.
Thank you Jesus.

Easter Musings

The crucifixion of Christ God is upon us.  His death and resurrection miracles are reenacted annually. The message of love is everywhere this Holy Week.  God who taught us “love your enemy” died for our error and humanity.  God who incarnated in his son Jesus taught we are all children of God each and everyone of us capable of miracle.  Come and Follow Me, he said.  “I will make you fishers of men”.  For thousands of years God caught our imagination.  Distracting us from war and killing and the refinements of torture and the salience of sex.
“Come follow me.”  “Repent!”
This world is the surface of things.  We are shallow thinkers who fail to follow the greatest minds of our day, the Max Planck’s and Einsteins. They too taught us to look beneath the surface of things.  Heaven is within.  Our very ideas and presence individually and collectively define reality.  The Uncertainty Principle, String Theory, and Shroediger’s Cat all bring us back to a man dying on a cross who says,
“Forgive them for they know not what they do?"
“Father, why has thou forsaken me?"
“It is not I that turned away.” he says.
I am afraid.  I am so afraid.  I know anxiety is a measure of my distance from God.  I pray.  I meditate. I work and I do the next right thing.  I am forever standing as David before Goliath. But the nightmare recurs over and over again. I’m am shitting and pissing myself because I’ve forgotten my sling.  Somehow I know in the story I conquer the beast. Always in the end I’m the one who awakes to the light. In the nightmare I’m failing again and again, the Sisyphus of Kierkegaard Suffering Unto the End, caught in the existential angst of the Scream.  Hollow Men.  The Hollow Man.
I kneel before you accepting the transformation of wine into blood into god stuff.  There are no illusions.  It is real.  I joined the collective insanity preferable to the individual insanity of the one alone among the stupid people.  I too am pinned to a cross like a trophy in a child’s insect collection.  I sometimes imagine I hear Herod laugh.  In the Collective Unconscious of Carl Jung I become all those who are there at the drama of death. I’m the grieving mother, the crying lover and the callous hardened soldiers and the superior church and political leaders. I’m all of these august members killing God to keep the love out of the darkness we create to frighten children and hold onto our rank stupidity.  The reformer is the enemy of anyone who would challenge the status quo. As above, so below. As within, so without.
I am a fat cat  I despise  ready to eat the mouse or fight whatever and whoever would take my spot in the sun.  I am indifferent. This addiction to the passing fashion and past play of the false promise of escape or enlightenment is my undoing. I am here till the end, servant to the King.  Only the good die young. Each passing moment I am more and more aware of how deep evil is and how thoroughly it has eroded my faith.   I no longer fly in dreams, soaring as Jonathan Seagull, laughing.  I am heavy with sorrow. I’m waited down with  failure upon failure.  I have lost my way in the Maze and think only of the Minotaur.   I am not the resurrected Lazarus.  I am the forgotten..
It was only yesterday you died for my sins yet I’ve distanced you, placed you back in history somewhere after a Big Bang. I’ve made you a story and a myth.  I’ve reduced you to what I can grasp. I’ve reduced to infinite and sacred to bite size portions. I’ve cannibalized creation unable to open myself fully to the miracle that is you.   I’ve ignored the constant tapping on the door of you wanting to come in.  I have turned from the light.  I have crucified my Lord.  I have hated my fellow man. I have ignored the ten commandments. I’ve forgotten the Beatitudes. I have moped in self pity and focussed on myself. I have studied my naval and beheaded John the Baptist.  All the while my friends have said to me, “Get down off the cross, we can use the wood.”  I am not much but I am all I think of.
The paranoid always externalizes blame. The shame is always with the other.  So shame on you.
I want you God. I want you more than all creation. I want the relationship with my Lord that you had with yours.  The Father and Son are one.  I would be One in humility.  A servant king as you.
This weekend we celebrate with pomp and pageantry. The miracle of spring is upon us.  The terrible winter of darkness and sickness is past.  Tulips are exploding from the earth in psychedelic colours.  Blue skies are replacing the endless grey.  Snow is melting and warmth is replacing the cold.  There is again the miracle of hope. And we take all this for granted.
Soon we shall  shout. Altogether now! Christ is Risen! Christ is Risen! Christ is Risen Indeed.  I cannot wait God.  Each year I feel as if I am crawling to this finish line, more and more wrecked.  I am slithering really, snaking into the home plate.  The song Desperado comes to mind.  Really Lord I’ve been out riding fences for too long. I’ve lost my humanity in the rat race. I’ve let bits of importance fall from me in the struggle to stay up right in the hurricane.  I’ve have stayed to long in the valley  of corruption and greed.  I now wait for you to prepare a table for me in the presence of my enemies.  My cup runneth over.  Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me, all the days of my life.
Still I’ve warred with myself. I’ve not loved myself. I’ve not forgiven others and I’ve not forgiven myself. I’ve held onto all that fear and rage. I’ve been little minded, smug and shallow. I’ve been all the failings of man.  I’ve lost hope and faith and believed that pains would never end. I’ve been thankless and lacking in gratitude waking to blame others for my own refusal to believe.  I’ve let the end down and failed to do my best every minute of every day. I’ve been selfish and unkind and unclean.  I’ve barely made it to Easter this year Lord. I’ve hardly survived this winter.
But now I’m struggling to stand up right again. I want to greet you, standing.  I want to reach up and touch your finger.  I want to feel that moment when sparks fly both ways. I want to know you Lord. I really want to know you.
I love you Jesus, Son of God.  I am your follower, such as there is. Take me in all my brokeness and unworthiness.  I am one of those who killed God out of fear when God came to visit his creation.  I carry all of those who have gone before me in my DNA and in my mind.  I too am Son of Man, Son of God.  I remember Peter denying you. I remember Judas betraying you.  I am those.  But please God know me first as he who loved you.  Teach me to pray.  Help me. Guide me.
These days and nights of Holy Week I want to walk with you.  This Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and all the days of the year I want to  remember your sacrifice. I want to hear you saying,
“Forgive them for they know not what they do?”  “Love them.”  Love your neighbour as yourself.  But first of all, Love God.
Then I want to hear the horns and sing out with all the earth, “Christ has Risen!  Christ has Risen! Christ has Risen!"