If the mountains swell and rumble, split and tumble into the sea, and the waters froth and foam, rise and roar,
and if the politicians rage, and the nations get up on their horses of war,
and God says, “That’s enough!”
then burns all the land mines and missiles and fighter jets: and the empires kneel, and the propagandists renounce their tongues, and the money puppets empty their pockets, and the shores and hills grow still —
well, that would be a wonderful story:
like the close of a good book, where a joyful river with pleasing streams is running through the centre of the city,
and the people call it Holy, believing the Spirit of God swims in the river’s depths, rides her waves and runs her rapids: God’s wild mercy and flying wet hair catching the laughing sun,
and no one needs a fortress, and no one needs a refuge, and no one needs to panic, and no one needs pills, when the Lord of impossible beauty, and bracing stillness, is with us, here, in our tear-soaked rooms, our trembling hospitals; with us, in the storms of these stampeding times.
There can be thousands of galaxies in a galaxy cluster. One of our larger ones has a mass of three quadrillion suns and is a billion light years across.
It’s out there. To us, a speck. But useful. We employ it as a young child might a toy magnifying glass, hovering over a crack in the sidewalk, peering deeper and deeper, prying into the affairs of the edgeless cosmos.
Lemurs don’t know about galaxy clusters. At night they look up into tamarind trees, choose one juicy leaf after another, and lounge the whole day long. They settle all their disputes quietly, through ‘stink fights’.
The poet of Psalm 8 didn’t have access to an infrared telescope, or means to launch it if he had. He knew some names of constellations, coined in Mesopotamia. Also knew the startling fabric of the Milky Way, and strained to see beyond its lazuli-blue lace.
And what he saw were the irises of Yahweh. And forgetting his personal conflict, dropped to his knees and uttered a question:
When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have ordained, what are mortals that you are mindful of them, what are humans, that you care for them?
It’s a question we’ve since vivisected, data-mined, and tied to a chair to beat out our proprietary answers. And every answer brings another stinking war. All the while failing to see it was never a question to be answered, but a possibility, to be held: spellbound, enrapt, in awe of being. All of us, huddling together in perfect humility.
Time is a line that winds and bends and swirls — vain to try and clutch it.
The heart is a spotted pear — there’s no getting through without some bruising.
The mind is a sea star — able to regenerate its brilliant purple rays, capable of omnidirectional moves, and too often clinging to the same surface.
The soul, at peace, is paradise.
The individual is a phantom — in wonder and blunder, we receive our selves through the eyes of others.
Love is an embattled, radiant thing, with arms that reach for us through the grief-fractured layers of our lives.
Flashes of insight, lit by love, beauty, forgiveness, can rocket your life, then flop down like expired fish. Faith is about remembering those flights.
Grass pierces pavement at its own peril — still, on it grows.
Laughter, at the right moment, restores sanity.
Pack light. Most everything you need you’ll find along the way.
Should you want to find God, which is to say, should you desire meaning, learn to love the earth and her array of inhabitants.
Theology eulogizes the universe; poetry hugs a birch tree.
Theology says I come from the heavens; poetry says I come from Springside, Saskatchewan.
Our favoured certainties should routinely be set on fire to see what rises from the ashes.
Our privilege is also our blindness.
A tincture of cynicism is emancipating, but a full meal is constipating.
Doubt is an apple-a-day, but the spell of skepticism is a hospital cot.
From the crushed grapes of volitional relinquishment, comes the fine wine of spiritual well-being.
Keep pressing your face against your particular gift — a new door will open.
Art enlarges our bearing and being, which is why despots of commerce defund it.
Science and religion are humble in theory, but never when monetized.
An intellectual conviction can be overturned by spiritual experience, but one does not go slagging science.
It may be too late to have an honest conversation with a glacier, but we have to try.
Things reset themselves if they are unplugged for a while, this includes humans.
Wisdom is knowing when to let poison pass through, and when to vomit outright.
To counsel hope at the wrong time, can be malpractice.
Death is hard, hard, hard, and every explanation unfitting.
Adoration is the twin sister of sorrow.
Don’t beat yourself up, worry can be a form of prayer.
The Big Bang is God’s dancing body. The shimmering fallout is yours.
We are bottles in smoke, owls of the wilderness, sparrows of the desert, tracings of the Holy Mystery — on our way home.
Despite the crazed addictions and the pomp of our vanities, our true longing is to be each other’s joy.
Lovers, who are ascending the Everest of life-long commitment, make everything around them stronger.
If we have eyes for it, if we have courage for it, the kingdom of heaven is among us, in unfolding inclusiveness.
There’s always more to be said about peace, love, and harmony, but now, let us lace up our shoes.
You step out into the mauve-dark morning and God is there, in a thick quilt of snow. It’s hard to name the calm: a few lights in porches, some chimney smoke, but not a single tire turning. A calm you’d find in some lunar library.
You know that somewhere, someone is slipping off the highway, someone is sliding into a needle, someone is anxious about Christmas, someone’s morning is morphine, against the pain, someone is bitching, being almost famous, someone is curled up in loneliness, someone is replaying their tragicomic romance, someone is sinking into madness, someone is bone-weary, without a strategy.
You stand with your feet in snow and watch the whiteness fall past the lamp post, like pollen, like nectar. You can smell the frankincense of snow, the myrrh of burning cedar, and in the absence of an eastern star you lift your eyes to the haloed street light, and sing! You sing as though rage, money, religion, had never made a hole in music.
And with the Holy Mystery so close, you direct your song: Inscribe us in your Book of Light, crown us with loving-kindness, crown us with the moon’s own merciful-tenderness, and heal us under the cover of darkness, keep it dark, keep it calm, prevent high noon and heal us, stay the sun’s verdict and heal us.
Heal us here, where we are — in the ditch wrenching open the car door, walking into the breakers with pockets full of beach stones, dying at a desk, jaw set for the wrong success, lying under grief’s long astonishing sigh — O Light of Lights, write our names in the Book of Life, just the way, inscribed on our hearts, are the names of those we love, O Child of Peace, and those we’ve yet learned to love.
