January 24, 2014
Day off. Spent the morning napping and reading. It is a rare luxury!
Enjoying the silence and stillness of solitude.
Apple sleeps cuddled up next to me - wouldn't sleep this morning of course when I hoped to sleep in! But she sleeps now that I am totally awake =P
I love watching her sleep though. There's something about watching small creatures sleep that is so restive to the soul... like all the world could be in ruin but as long as a baby sleeps there is some shred of peace still left in it.
How I love the luxury of time on a day off - like I can stretch out in it and breathe in it. Already so full of things that should be done and need to be done and yet none as important as feeling the length and depth and freedom of the day. Time is such a gift that we so often unthinkingly waste.
Psalm 82
It must be the influence of reading Dune lately - but I feel like so often when reading the Bible I miss or forget the ancient-ness of its writing. The history and story and tradition and culture steeped in its words. There is something ancient and mystical and powerful that I feel we have lost touch with in our sterilized modern world. Some bits of primal understanding rooted within us that die in the face of scientific fact and rigor. I've absorbed that rigor as a part of the cultural air I breathe - as part of my framework and understanding of the world. So woven throughout my way of thinking and point of view that it is rare for me to be able to shake off a bit of it - to be shocked into a different awareness... Good books are re-teaching and re-framing perspective. Sometimes the beauty of a moment or the intangible quality that shifts ordinary to extraordinary. I feel like I was more in tune with it as a kid and have lost more of my awareness of it as I've gotten older... that link to the world we can't see - the spirit world outside of the scientific empirical world... The world of truth in fiction - where truth is sometimes clearer than fact...
It's just shifted a bit for me - reading these ancient words and feeling their mystery:
"I said 'You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you;
nevertheless, like men you shall die,
and fall like any prince.'"
That tension between our potential and our failings.
We are all like gods - capable of so much - yet - like all men, we will die - and fall like even the princes amongst men must fall.
Unlike us - God stands council over the divine realms - in the midst of gods who are no stronger or weaker than we - He holds judgment and will judge the earth and all its nations...
Supreme over all...
Feel the mystery of that - we are just as strong as any of the gods of men... Capable of so much. Perhaps in different capacities of the gods we create that capture our imagination - Greek, Roman, Egyptian, science-fiction, spirit-world, fairy world - I love these stories because there are elements of truth and reality in them that cannot be explained by fact - these gods of our imagination give vision and direction to the works of our hands.
The imagination of man is powerful indeed - driving the sciences - driving our actions - propelling us forward - giving us direction and meaning and framing our lives.
And yet this power - this power that makes us as gods on the earth - will perish - wither - is susceptible to corruption and death despite our efforts to escape that destiny - through one mechanism or another.
We are perishable gods.
So full of so much potential and so much power - wasted and thrown away - perishing in the corruption of our very natures - the fact that we are jars of clay.
And despite that - death is not an enemy - but a friend. A release from the prison of the corruptible into the incorruptible - when the imagination that hints at this world just beyond the reach of our understanding will finally be open to us... The power of our imagination a sudden reality at our hands.
Heaven must be a place of no corruption - because Hell must be the reality of our imagination corrupted - running wild.
No wonder God looked at man with the tower of Babel and said: "This is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another's speech." (Gen 11:6-7)
You gave us such imagination Lord - planted within us an awareness and link to the Spirit world that is Your reality - the realm of endless possibilities - that will one day be home and reality for us...
Calling us homeward.
We so often stuff and ignore it. Realize only the smallest potential of what we could be:
"Give justice to the weak and to the fatherless;
maintain the right of the afflicted and destitute.
Rescue the weak and the needy;
deliver them from the hand of the wicked."
We have this capacity - had this capacity - but confused and corrupted and broken in the wake of our breakage between heaven and earth and all right relationships so that:
"We have neither knowledge nor understanding,
we walk about in darkness;
All the foundations of the earth are shaken."
Arise, O God - judge the earth -
set it back to right relationships where things as they should will flourish - uncorrupted - put back to their full potential beyond the wildest imagination of good men.
We will get there one day.
We will be there one day -
Set free form the corruptible.
From when all things turn sour and go into decay.
What a vision of a future...
The way to which we do not know
"I AM THE WAY"
as You told Thomas (John 14:6)
"Do you still not know me - after all this time?"
I am still learning Father - and want to keep learning... Seal in me the mysteries that I cannot begin to scratch the surface of - open my awareness to the world that is ours - and yet seems just beyond our reach - What we are meant for and have lost. Give me a vision Father - a vision and the courage to share that vision with others.
... How? How can I do it in a world that sees these mysteries and shies away from them? They capture our imagination and we reject them as stories, dreams, fiction - not realizing the deeper truths that speak to our souls of a greater destiny than what we can see or understand or prove or even believe or imagine.
How do I tell people that the fiction is true and the reality is false - without people rejecting it as just as insane as all the rest? How do I honestly talk to people about this world that is truer than the one they live in? It makes no sense to most of us - any of us - and yet we know the truth of it somehow in our souls.
Help me to be unafraid of rejection
Unafraid of how crazy and wild and insane it may all seem to others...
Give me words
and open hearts that they would hear
And trust that it is the sharing that matters -
It is the truth that matters -
not the "result."
Help me find my way Father - the way You purpose for me to be a bringer of truth to this world - and help me to have courage to seize that destiny and live it - not run from it to a life so limited - a life without imagination.
Amen.
Love Always -
Whitney.
