Do Not Mourn For Me

Do not mourn for me
when I bury the skeleton of your vengeant god.
For during the burial process,
I’ve dug up something else.

Do not mourn for me
when I hope in something different.
For it’s grace that I’m hoping at all,
and perhaps I know yours by a different name.

Do not mourn for me
when I’m no longer a product of this world.
For it’s the darkness that I’m fleeing,
not what you think to be the light.

Do not mourn for me
when I’m not who I once was.
For I’m burning the remnants of the past
and basking in the embers of renewal.*

Do not mourn for me
when I stop folding my arms in silence.
For it’s the complicity of those folded arms
that swallowed the key to these chains.

Do not mourn for me
when I die before I die.
For it’s in the death that I’ve found
all the life we’ve all been looking for.

*Line from A Seeker’s Manifesto

What Matters Most

‘Cause we can talk and debate
Till we’re blue in the face
About the language and tradition
That he’s coming to save
And meanwhile we sit
Just like we don’t have give a shit about
Fifty thousand people who are dying today

Derek Webb, What Matters Most

[Photo taken in Huntington, Indiana]

I Have Found

I have found
that peace tastes sweeter than war,
that I mustn’t take part in the cycle,
and that it’s hard to wipe the blood
from these heavy, filthy hands.

I have found
that hatred is tiresome,
that cynicism is a false shadow of love,
and that whenever these run up against each other,
we will always sense maddening tension.

I have found
that it’s easy to mistake justification for liberation
when we’re looking through closed eyes,
and that freedom is here,
if we can only stop excusing our chains.

I have found
that competition exposes the misfortune of others,
and concludes by rejoicing in it,
and that love was never born for this purpose,
and will never live for it.

I have found
that there is great worth
in the intangible, the incomputable, and the uncommon,
and that we ought to be kind to our whims,
for they value these such things.

I have found
that a god of love would kneel down beside us,
that she would rather be good than right,
and that her tears and those of her children
would be one in the same.

I have found
that this is not all there is,
that we’ve seen only the tiniest drop of love,
and that once we’re sitting at the bottom of its waterfall,
we’ll have no choice but to swim freely.

I have found
that we are finding and being found.

Sunday Morning, From His Eyes

A herd of white folk shuffled into any one of the twelve
 open doors in the front of the building. Women freely 
exchanged weekly updates on the lives of those who
 were not in their vicinity, joyfully meddling in the 
affairs of their peers. Husbands scoffed at Saturday’s
 football scores and offered bitter words to describe 
the victors and their fans. Single folks proceeded
 silently to their pew — the same ones they settled in las t
week.

The coffee was brewing in all four separate kitchens
 and the after-service refreshments were collecting on 
their designated counters.

After watering the flowers on his freshly stained front 
porch, the devil sat back in his fully furnished, 
two-story suburban home and quietly rejoiced.

Franny and Zooey [excerpt]

“Well, as I said, the pilgrim — this simple peasant — started the whole pilgrimage to find out what it means in the Bible when it says you’re supposed to pray without ceasing. And then he meets this starets — this very advanced religious person I mentioned, the one who’d been studying the ‘Philokalia’ for years and years and years.” Franny stopped suddenly to reflect, to organize. “Well, the starets tells him about the Jesus Prayer first of all. ‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.’ I mean that’s what it is. And he explains to him that those are the best words to use when you pray. Especially the word ‘mercy,’ because it’s such a really enormous word and can mean so many things. I mean it doesn’t just have to mean mercy.” Franny paused to reflect again. She was no longer looking at Lane’s plate but over his shoulder. “Anyway,” she went on, “the starets tells the pilgrim that if you keep saying that prayer over and over again — you only have to just do it with your lips at first — then eventually what happens, the prayer becomes self-active. Something happens after a while. I don’t know what, but something happens, and the words get synchronized with the person’s heartbeats, and then you’re actually praying without ceasing. Which has a really tremendous, mystical effect on your whole outlook. I mean that’s the whole point of it, more or less. I mean you do it to purify your whole outlook and get an absolutely new conception of what everything’s about.”

Lane had finished eating. Now, as Franny paused again, he sat back and lit a cigarette and watched her face. She was still looking abstractedly ahead of her, past his shoulder, and seemed scarcely aware of his presence.

“But the thing is, the marvelous thing is, when you first start doing it, you don’t even have to have faith in what you’re doing. I mean even if you’re terribly embarrassed about the whole thing, it’s perfectly all right. I mean you’re not insulting anybody or anything. In other words, nobody asks you to believe a single thing when you first start out. You don’t even have to think about what you’re saying, the starets said. All you have to have in the beginning is quantity. Then, later on, it becomes quality by itself. On its own power or something. He says that any name of God — any at all — has this peculiar, self-active power of its own, and it starts working after you’ve sort of started it up.”

–J.D. Salinger

Doubt

“To deny the existence of God may, paradoxical as the statement will at first seem to some, involve less unbelief than the smallest yielding to doubt of his goodness. I say yielding; for a man may be haunted with doubts, and only grow thereby in faith. Doubts are the messengers of the Living One to rouse the honest. They are the first knock at our door of things that are not yet, but have to be, understood… Doubt must precede every deeper assurance; for uncertainties are what we first see when we look into a region hitherto unknown, unexplored, unannexed.”

-George MacDonald