Author: psalmstwentysevenfour

The one thing I ask, the thing I seek most, is to live in the house of the Lord all my life, delighting in His beauty and meditating on His glories.

God´s Grandeur

by Gerald Manley Hopkins

 

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Trust

Trust
Is the stark naked truth of believing
That by giving you the knife
I am not endangering myself
It is looking into the retina without blinking
And knowing that all will end will
It is falling into nail scarred hands
And trusting those scars to guide me right
Only foolish children doubt the scars
And I’ve been a fool
Chomping forbidden fruit
Messily covering my shame with leaves
Quickly wiping my mouth
Hiding from God

I distrusted him
Lusted after what wasn’t him
And defrauded myself from his better plans
The only hands
That could save me were his
But I thought they were clutched around my neck so I hid
My path from him
Covered my back
Retraced my tracks so he couldn’t
Find me in the snow
But who knew he’d know
Right where I was the whole time
He was there with open hands
Waiting like a midwife for trust to be born again
And when it came out red and bloody
He breathed his life into it and made it to eat and walk and stand
Till trust could ever be broken again
Because it’s stronger than when we started

Finally Human

Health and wholeness

A bent and broken reed overstepped

But not overlooked

The schizophrenia of our age

The mental illness of the stage

Takes the names of frattered tattered teenage angst

Blamed as rebellion or hatred or sin

The rust within

The heart’s defense mechanism

To keep out that hateful fire

Of a house divided, of parents fighting

Lighting gasoline poured carefully in each other’s bedrooms

Alarm, alarm rewind and shut down

Lock out, the crowd of zombie insults

Who throw their drooling carcasses mercilessly

Against the feeble shelter

Against the traumatized soul

 

But made whole

The trampled lawn of the heart rebounds

And takes its true form

He was born

As the blueprint of greatness

Poorly followed

A pill quickly swallowed and spit out

The meaning forgotten

The song long lost in the

Garbage heap of commercialized distractions

The actions of industrialized life plans

The standardized fashion

Claiming novelty

As unique as the next

But half as fed

 

He wants to break free

And be truly himself

Wholly human, unchained from the awful

Recurring nightmare that turns to a daymare

Of a mouse in a maze, looking for cheese

Shocked at wrong turns by a diseased

Madman. Scampering like a hungry rodent

Crippled dragging hindleg

Speeding down the highway, stereo blaring

Head throbbing, life lobbing pop flies

With sun in eyes and a disappointed crowd

As the ball lands behind him. His only hope

Is escape, or distraction. A new job or old drugs

 

There is more for him

A tune sung before his name became

It’s a destiny grander than anything on the scifi channel

A life so rich and full, with chocolate and almonds of the soul

Bleeding from the cracks, wounds made into victories

Finally human, finally whole

Finally in key, not perfect but flying

Deep into frailty made strong by Adamantium

Infused bones, our original design strengthened with

Unthinkable power, unstoppable love

True purpose and meaning infused into the withered

Raisin-ed husks of our beaten lives

Falling hard and shattering into a million pieces of greatness

Spreading like bread and measly fishes

Multiplied for the masses

Rot to riches

Fully restored, healthy, and whole

Now Pt.2

I am a long string of moments

That I try in vain to capture on a phone

To review later, escaping the present

To only half enjoy the past

 

I was created by God

A frame in a moving picture

A dusty, spirit infused meat

Made to look something like love

Though born with a disease

 

I mutate and regress

I stagnate and swell

Until I fell back into the arms of grace

That stood me up on feet again

And taught me to walk towards the coming son

Taught me to become less, to go down

To learn from the smallest of things

How to be great

 

To learn from death how to live

And from life how to die

To everything I think I need

And grasp the only thing worth grasping

With a grip made doubly strong

By the fact that it grasps me back

 

A moment

Caught in time

Of a hand reaching out

To catch a falling man

 

My whole life is filled with these snapshots

Leaving me walking through a gallery

Experiencing an emotion humans only touch

When they begin to think outside of the present

When they join the great I Am in simply existing

 

Present, past, and future in the meshwork of it all

Recalling past fithfulness and failures

Perceiving future rewards or pitfalls

 

To climb the branches of a tree

And look out over the underbrush of moments

Above the canopy layers

To see all the way to the horison of life

And to know more than just today

Is the only way we can understand this moment

 

Without perspective I am a weird series of stills

A sad collection of washing dishes

Forgeting where my car keys are

And watching my toe bleed after tearing off a hangnail

 

No wonder this world confuses most people

How do we make sense of genocide?

Animals that eat each other

And women who put plastic in their breasts?

 

Is the world so nonsensical

That the option that makes most sense

Is to give up trying and just drug ourselves?

 

Escape, escape

All I see is my friends trying to escape

The moment

 

If a moment was good, they try to nail it to the wall

They want to freese it in time so they never have to leave it

If the moment is bad, and they cannot escape it

They will damage their senses so they need not take it in

 

They would gouge out their own eyes

Impair their ability to enjoy future moments

Just to escape the hell of the present one

 

And all this thinking or lack thereof leaves me climbing trees

Burying my nose in some history book

Or reading about the future of artificial intelligence

To try to tie my life to something greater

To try to find my place in this world

My sense of time has left me

Not wanting to waste it

I yearn to be this well oiled machine

This expensive factory, getting stuff done

I want to be working round the clock

And creating the product with the highest demand

I want to be going to the right school

And learning computer code

I want to be teaching myself french

And how to cook raviolis

I want to be going and doing

Because I was born in the country

That teaches that stillness is waste

And that rest is idleness

I need to reprogram my brain

To mirror the cycles of days and seasons

The way nature goes further by not burning out

The preperation of the pupa

The hibernation of the grizzly

 

Oh God of all moments

Who gives me each day a steady stream

Of now

 

I look for you in each second

Turning my present into praise

Recounting my past in song and tribal dance

 

Offering my future as a sweet offering

All my hours and minutes I give to you

As firsts and not seconds

This moment is a holy place

Just to be with you

 

Just to be

Now Pt.1

Woven

Threads of red and black

Of time and past

The burnt and fraying edges

Of the quickly sifted days

Streaming like the runners of a kite

Behind your lifting life

 

Do not

Become enthralled in the not yet

So wrapped up in the yet to be

That you blindly snub the daily

Flower opening

Of oportunity

The first steps of the stairs

To tomorrow

 

Do not

Yearn so longingly for yesteryear

Painting your dwelling the somber tones

Of melancholy, of remorseful green

Don’t go back there

 

The weeks gone by are meant to be

Left as columns, holding up your everbeating heart

Yet so often you Benjemin Button yourself to the wall

Trying to grow young

So you can relive the moment. It’s sick

 

Let bygones be bygones

You will never enter jr high again

And any kid in jr high

Would want to be the present you so bad

He would think you a fool for wanting to go back

You Marty Mcfly

Trying to die and be reborn

As the same person for a second try

 

You only get one life

One shot at this glorious, painful, short,long existence

Don’t abuse it

Live in the now

And let the flowing stream of moments

Weave the rug until

Halfway through your thirties

You make out enough of a picture

To happily continue on your way

Until the merry grave

Unsucessfully attempting to convince others

That they too should stop taking life so seriously

And instead go live it

 

Too many college grads

High on optimism

Crash like test-dummies into the wall of life

Only to pick up their broken pieces

And stand frozen at the prospect of repeating such a horror

 

They stand

 

Eagles

 

Edge of the nest

Hesitant to fly

 

Live your life with such flare and vigor

That they are drawn from the edge, not pushed

That they smell something in you they want to imitate

In this way, you will lead a generation beyond their stupid phones

And tailored snapchat image of themselves

 

They don’t know who they are

Setting countdown clocks on their iphones

And wasting time in the doctor’s office

Scrolling through pictures on their facebook from five years ago

 

Unable to relish the knife edge of this second

The shocking beauty of life

The elusive grandeur of that time account

Paid equally to all

Enjoyed only by a sparse few

While the majority line up at slot machines

Paying their seconds, minutes, and years

To hopefully strike big and make it all worth while

 

All along those bold lovers of life

Inhale the fragrance of the passing present

Called mundane by the exagerated moviestars

Who throw so many hashtags and faded filters on their reality

They can no longer appreciate undocumented breakfast

Or the sun’s first arrival over the eastern hills

Without alerting every social media outlet

 

Release

What’s before and behind

To have empty hands

For everything the present yearns to gift you

Friday

The violence of our time

Is calling forth a bride

Kissed by blood like wine

She was born in a day

Who has heard of this

Who has known before

 

Of the man unrecognised by beatings

Of the incognito king

The lone defender of the broken

Summoning power from unknown sources

The crimson hero

The broken overcomer

 

The clouds eat the sun

And the very ground convulses

Sobbing at the death

Hiding the exposure

Of the God-babe, grown till tall

Broken like the reeds he humbly overstepped

 

These things crumble

And fade like shadows

But the husband and bride remain

Estranged

But longing for a wedding

Brothers

2-12-16

I want to live with my lungs wide open

To sleep to the stars, spread like paint flecks across the void of space

I want the sun to leather my hide, for the cold to chew on my bones

To reach out before me with every stretching fiber of my being

At the unraveling road, at the vibrant hope of the present

 

And I have this glorious advantage

My brothers, meat and blood, who sing the same songs

We cry and writhe and try and fail

Together

This whole world is too small for us

We own the sea

We claim the night as our own

All the wild corners sit like big oysters

And we are the few who would trade our sleep and comfort to enjoy them

 

I want to live with my heart still bleeding

Feeling something inside, pain or joy or sickness

Just never nothing

Sometimes my heart grows an unhealthy shell

A husk produced by the day to day in and out of ‘normal’ life

Then God sends the rain

And three brothers bike up soap creek road to the flashes of lightning

My clothes stick to my burning chest

And the seed slowly breaks out of it’s casing

To seek the dampness and light

To reach upward towards morning

After lying dead in the dust

To become a bush, no, a tree

And trees we are three

Bending towards the son

Shading the little upstarts

And following the example of the sequoias before us

 

Someday, we will be withered old men

And young lovers will come to carve their names in our feet

Owls rest in our crooks and our bark comes crumbling apart

But miles above the forest we still sprout upward

To death we sprout upward

To heights only wild dreamers reach

To air only the ancients breathe

Together

 

The Catechism

9-11-15

I. Where will we dream?
On this handknit rug
By this oak fire on the hearth
With coffee and journal in hand
We will dream

II. Where will we live?
Not only wrapped in ourselves
But spilling out into the street
Where the broken and hurting live
Where the sinners lose their way
We will live

III. How will we know God’s will?
In much seeking and confusion
In an orchestrated catastrophe
That often looks like a mess
But a mess that brings us closer each moment
To the Father’s heart
In tears and longing and much time
Will we know God’s will

IV. How can we forgive?
By fixing our eyes on the one who died
So that we could learn to do the same
By taking the ax to our self seeking desires
And leaving the bloody stumps writhing in freedom
By learning to forget
We can forgive

V. When will you trust me?
When I take every last layer of clothing off my heart
And you see my soul stark naked
When you know me as I truly am
And see that all I ever want is Jesus
Will you trust me

VI. What will we tell our children?
That the road was long
With many twists and turns
That we didn’t know the answers from the start
And that the journey was always sweeter with Him
Will we tell our children?

VII. How will we die?
With much longing in our hearts
Towards the one we were made for
With anticipation and gratefulness
With joy and expectancy
Of all things finally made right
Will we die.

Why do you ask?