God's Will

I've always had a problem with those new age youth groups where everyone seems so happy, holy and full of passion. How can one be human and be so one dimensional? Where is the questions, the doubt and the conflicts that makes one's belief have depth and one's soul have grace?


I've since given this much thought and I've come to see many of the issues that have bothered me. The one that stands out is my firm belief that contractions lie at the heart of all things. What is white without black? What is rich without poor? And how can one understand or be good without the presence and the understanding of evil?


Therefore it is for this reason that I perceive the joyfulness, virtuous, onemindedness of those electric guitar playing, heads rolling, hands waving 'new age' youth Christians as repulsive, sanctimonious and shallow. I feel they use religion as a drug - they are addicted to feeling holy, they are addicted to painting the world in black and white and seeing people as either the chosen or the damned.


Give me instead the flawed vessels humble in their sin. Give me the tears and grasping of people seeking salvation in their own personal, desperate ways. The world and its people are grey and although God made us in His image, he coccooned His essence in a mortal mind and body. Therefore we have the vital spark but it shines out of a shuttered globe into the thick fog of this world, an infant world lost with only a memory of the sun.


I am a child of sin seeking to understand his Father, seeking to do His Plan with my mortal hands.

Samsara

Humans have given romanticism back to the gods and in return assumed the right to degenerate

A Saturday night

I walk the streets, no longer a boy, yet not a man; drank, yet am not drunk; sober enough to see the void within and without. Surely there is more to this polyester world than the empty momentary bouts of passion and rage. The homeless, asleep in their misery, awake in their futility - wrapped in cloth against the winter chill, awake in their wide eyed lust as the young in their mini skirts, designer jeans and loud laughs and voices give sound to the hollowness of existence. Maybe it's just me. Give me a few drinks today and the alcohol makes me a dark philosopher; contrast to that of yesterday where in the sunshine of friendship, hope and life we laughed and drank to the promise of tomorrow.

Perhaps this is the reality that crystallises with age -despair at an increasingly loveless, colourless world where white rabbits are shot, where the wolf eats the pigs and sleeping beauty is passed out in ER. Oh stars above, show me the light that once comforted and guided the lost mariner.

I, You, me, She

I sat at the ferry docks awaiting the next ferry home. Young couples walked about, many of them dressed in colourful costumes varied in their degrees of sexiness, absurdness and commonness. It was a festival but I was tired. The ferry docked and I walked aboard and upstairs; sitting at my usual seat at the back on the left hand side next to the open windows. A cool harbour breeze blew and I began reading my novel.

I dreamed a dream. In it I saw a mountain. A huge mountain that began with virgin forests and reached upwards to the clouds above which the straining eye or the imaginative mind could see, a snow capped peak and a tiny speck (a temple? a hut?); companion to it. Around the mountain stretched vast plains - a black sand plain to the left and yellowing grasslands to the right.
It called to me this place. The vision was a place but what it promised was journey. Oh how my unstill heart ached to climb that mountain and walk those plains! How I longed to search those lands for me; and also perhaps, She.

When I awoke, I created You and then set You free. You the traveller, You the loner, You the searcher. You were to wander where I could not. You, the shadow of I. You, the soul of me.

My girl

Circle of Life - the symphany of joy and sorrow

What is love if not happiness?
What is happiness if not loss?
What is loss if not despair?
What is despair if not love?

Life is full of circular relationships and perhaps this isn't one that everyone believes holds. But nevertheless bittersweet melodies play in everyone's lives at some point and perhaps drives our hedonistic lust to embrace our existence.

Me

There's an inner me: quietly contemplative, sensitive and a melancholic. Perhaps like a poet, afraid to be happy because happiness is meaningless when it is so inevitably fleeting.

There's an outer me: brash yet awkward, outgoing yet shy. Sometimes fun and always given to excesses. A rough shell that yearns for a life of its own.

If I stood at the cliff overlooking the world how many of Me would give in to temptation? How many would stand fast? If I travelled to the ends of the earth what would I find there? Rocks and the sea? Myself and emptiness?

Between these two caught is Me. A dreamer and a nihilist, an optimist and a pretender. Form without form, thoughts without beliefs... at least some of the time.