Rare Life

Sewn, rooted, flung
Systematically Vibrant
Colorfully collected
Filling and overflowing, consuming and reproducing
Violently unique
All freckled and folded
It grasps, moves full of hope
Urging forward, outward
Then gives forth itself
Begetting again
Life

Life knows its own preciousness.
To Ends and Deeps it reaches out
And the Earth bears forth its abundance.
Sings, soothes, feeds, kills and destroys, and yet again is reborn
Life flows on

Tuning itself to an unknown melody
Bound and boxed in by nothing, eternally creative
Its vibrant voice calls forth:
Echoing hard knowledge even from its darkest forms,
Murmuring truths to captive minds
Life speaks on

Carefully hold it
Guard it and know it,
Use it, create with it
Speak of it and name it,
Open it and see
The Heart of Me

Since everyone else is commenting on Tebow...

From an article I read that comes from a secular perspective:
"The crux here, the issue driving this whole "Tebow Thing," is the matter of faith. It's the ongoing choice between embracing a warm feeling that makes no sense or a cold pragmatism that's probably true. And with Tebow, that illogical warm feeling keeps working out. It pays off. The upside to secular thinking is that — in theory — your skepticism will prove correct. Your rightness might be emotionally unsatisfying, but it confirms a stable understanding of the universe. Sports fans who love statistics fall into this camp. People who reject cognitive dissonance build this camp and find the firewood. But Tebow wrecks all that, because he makes blind faith a viable option. His faith in God, his followers' faith in him — it all defies modernity. This is why people care so much. He is making people wonder if they should try to believe things they don't actually believe."
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7319858/the-people-hate-tim-tebow

Oddly, I think this could be said about what Christ has done for us. What we thought foolishness has now become wise and what was holy, other, different and unknowable has become one in empathy with us. I hate to trivialize Christ by comparing him to a modern popular figure, but I do think there is some value in recognizing parts of who he is through applicable, modern realities. When Christ tells us "take up your cross and follow Me," doing so would have seemed foolish to us before, but by becoming human and going before us, he has made us believe in that thing we actually could not believe in or act on before.

My favorite Christmas hymn has a verse that speaks to this:

Filled with mercy for the broken man
Yes he walked my road, and He felt my pain,
Joys and sorrows that I know so well;
Yet His righteous steps, give me hope again -
I will follow my Immanuel!

From the Squalor of a Borrowed Stable

P.S.
I am one of those hard core stats people, but I think I know that like life, sports mean nothing unless they reach somewhere deeper than simply the logical. Life was never meant to be lived, expressed, and experienced with only an empty pragmatic mind, or God would never have been able to simply say to his disciples, "drop all your stuff and come follow me."

aliens and the alien

I used to always enjoy watching the History channel, but recently its been driving me pretty crazy. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy the occasional episode of swamp people and modern marvels, but the name History implies that it should discuss history.

Instead, the only history that the history channel has been trying to explain to me is how aliens somehow were the cause of virtually everything in the ancient world. They helped the Incans build Machu Pichu, the Egyptians build the Pyramids; they gave them language, religion, art, and morality. Pretty incredible, who knew? Segments like "Ancient Aliens: Aliens and the Secret Code," "Ancient Aliens: Alien Devastation," "Ancient Aliens: Angels and Aliens," pop up as this week's alien flavor. Not surprisingly, there are plenty of eager historians to share there new 'facts' about aliens in the ancient world.

But the History Channel is probably one of our last cultural institutions to grab a hold of these aliens. I couldn't even begin to tell you the number of movies that have been made over the last couple decades with a plot involving alien influence, invasion, struggle or whatever. And if you walk into a Half-Price book store the section of Science Fiction is taking up more and more space.

But why is this? Maybe I could pass off this growing belief in science and history that aliens do exist as actualities of rationality, but I really don't think that's the whole truth, nor really anywhere close to the truth if I'm honest. We live in a culture dominated by materialism, rationalism, naturalism; even in post-modernism, even if science isn't the driving mind to our culture anymore (which I still think it is, just maybe more subtly and deeply than we know), the fundamental belief of most westerners is that the universe contains no other answers but material ones. Our place in it is simply a natural progression of it and we are nothing more than that. Even if I desperately disbelieve those principles, I find many of its tenets and conclusions stuck somewhere in me, ingrained in me by the world I live in.

But even in this world, we still search for meaning, purpose and beginnings, we still are looking for mysteries, we still look for the alien. The movie plot lines of alien invasion and encounter generally follow these basic lines:
1. Aliens are invading us because we are destroying the earth or we are incapable of being peaceful, we are inherently messed up and should be destroyed. Sometimes the heroes save the world and therefore redeem it by giving a new morality of courage to us. Sometimes there's an alien who comes to warn us before we are to be destroyed by other aliens because he sees 'potential' in humanity... he has an unwarranted love and compassion for us.
2. Aliens are coming to tell us something, share or show us some deep moral truth, some overarching principle of the universe. Or maybe they're some kind of moral judge over us, choosing the good and bad ones from among us, separating the wheat from the chaff if you will.
3. Aliens are something new and exciting to blow up or kill or just something mysterious to throw into a story to make it more attractive to the viewers. They are a new adventure if you will.

I think I covered the basics. I haven't read all the science fiction dealing with aliens and I'm sure its more complicated than that, but I would bet many of the same themes are presented. But what are these themes saying about us, from where are they emanating? Are they not essentially the same kinds of themes we deal with when we talk about religion or mythology? Could it be that we have simply replaced super natural mythology with naturalistic, extraterrestrial mythology?

A mythology that supports our need for a basis of morality (really a purpose for life), a hope for a salve to our wounded humanity or a salvation for it, and an alien otherness, a mysterious being to relate with but also be terrified by. All these things are instinctively mystical and outside of our rational way of viewing the world. Its as if we have projected our human mysticism into our deeply ingrained materialism even though it is constantly at war with this desire within us. This ideology was supposed to give us freedom from our irrationalities, yet if i may dare say it clearly hasn't. We are born with something that not even the most anti-mystical ideology can wipe from us. We need to have a purpose to live for and a principle to live by, even if it was given to us by some alien from a world called oz. We feel utterly messed up and out of place all the time. We seek a redemption for us and the world because we constantly feel our hearts both drifting from what is right and in the wrong place to begin with. And maybe most of all, we desperately seek that which is alien, holy, mysterious because we feel alien in this world and because we feel the need to be in awe of something.

The truth is that Christianity has always dealt with these questions and has always answered them.

The otherness of aliens is distinctly what attracts them to us. The description of God as well, his holiness, his absolute otherness is both supremely terrifying but yet awesome and desireable to us. The alien in God is part of the reason we desire him. The implanted desire for His holiness in many has been projected by people into the infinite material universe on some alien life form.

But maybe that's to simple for you. Argue the semantics of whether aliens exist or not all you want, but that's just not the point. Our hearts and minds often get mixed up more than we think. Our worldviews and desires for the world and universe create the history and science of the universe way more than we are willing to say, and the overwhelming feeling of our modern world desires aliens to exist. To me the why we desire them is the important question because it leads us back to the nature of humans and what, if anything, is already written into our hearts and minds at the inception of our consciousness.

Couple Poems

So, writing poetry seems like an odd thing to do, and I am really not all that sure if Im any good at it, but its honestly an easier way for me to get points and truths out of my head than simple writing. For some reason, right now at least, it has become a release valve for me to express stuff boiling over. I put this stuff on a blog or other places for people to read simply because I can't write anything that has value unless I know it might have value to someone else (its just the way I work)...

Anyhow, I'll probably post several more poems as they come to me, but here are two that I wrote in notes on Facebook and I figured I'd go ahead and leave them here.


Dogs, We Are, a Dog for Me

Dogs, we are, all in captivity
Many bark and bound to mistress vanity
Others of us heel to reasonable sanity
And a few still sniff for our lost divinity

Dogs, we are, coming to our masters
Heads bowed low begging for peace
"Give us, oh please, scraps from your dinners
Pity us in this short life we lease"

Dogs, He called us, for dogs we are
Wandering out in this dark street
Barred we were from His wedding bar
For from His table we ran like harlots in heat

Cast from Eden, we run and head east
Empty and hungy seeking our own feast
But, dogs we are and once again we sit
Returning to lick up our own sick vomit

Yet, while I, a dog, ran and ran
Down He came, a dog He became
And a dog He gave me, colored tan
A golden, white
A precious delight

She, a dog, loved this poor fool
Licked and cleaned me with warm drool
My golden sought me wherever my lost heart went
Down she'd lay her head by my seat
A living sign of eternal love at my feet

For love was her way until I could see
The Master who came as a dog for me.

To All That is Real

There is story beyond time and space
Telling a truth that is often effaced
To a heart that has stopped its race
Forgotten, but not false, a word not contrived

Tales and myths, old and jaded
Speak of a world unseen
But so often now left only to be decreed
As naught but fables of an escapist bein’

Night no longer frees the dreams
Of a World too true to be seen
Drowned are they by the jeering screams
Of medicine laced with an artificial sheen
That hides from us its plastic nicotine

Right, they may seem to rule the dark
But wrought in their governance
Is the seed that smothers our Spark
And all that light is unable to hark
Us back from this sorcerous trance

Woven, weaved out of the heart it springs
Splitting our minds into contrary themes
Concupiscent cravings to be our own kings
We forge a hell alone with no dreams

When will we hear again
The voice in the calm of the mighty wind
That, like the molten setting sun
Melts the stony hearts of men

If yet we be stilled,
Awed anew by the Deep night with no din
We will behold again the once killed
Fearsome Light given unto men.

The First poem, Dogs We Are, has multiple points. First, and foremost, it is about my golden retriever who died about year and half ago right after I think I came to know Christ for the first time in my life. In many ways, I feel like she was given to me as a symbol of His love until I came to know Him. When she died, I knew instinctively, her work was done and God had truly given her with the purpose to love me unconditionally as a sign of God's eternal love to those who He calls His own.

Second point, had more to do with the first part of the poem. We are dogs in a very real sense, and we act like dogs in comparison to the humanity and divinity God has given us (notice, I could have used the word humanity in the first stanza, but left it out). In fact, Jesus at one point in his ministry is begged to come heal the daughter of a gentile and Jesus replies that gentiles are like Dogs coming to His table.

Once I heard a preacher expounding upon this passage along these lines, but went further to say that not only are we like dogs, but Christ himself took the place of us, who are dogs. So in a very real sense, though we are gentiles, Christ came to take the place of us, who are dogs, cast from the covenant of God and long since unreconciled to him, so that we could be one with Him again. What a beautiful truth!

Second poem is a bit more complex and probably not written exactly expressing the thoughts I wanted to express, but hey, it was my first shot at it. Overall, I was trying to describe the state of humanity when we lose our ability to dwell and imagine upon the beauty of reality. Reality is not simply a machine of natural actions that most of our world seems to believe; it is full of things that go beyond simple naturalism and into the spiritual. We often divide the spiritual and that which can be physically known and we end up dividing our minds into two seperate themes. In many ways, we don't allow what are imagination and hearts know to be somehow, someway real into the realm of actual possibilities. Ultimately, we shut off the very incarnation of Christ by doing this, dissallowing us to see what Christ did in His coming as man yet still fully divine. He's proven that they are not seperate, we don't just live in a world of shadows of true reality and beauty or a world of only hard and fast reality, but one that is deeply physical and real yet also fully spiritual. Both our imagination and reason must be combined to see the world God has given us rightly.