Spirituality

Viva Edmonton Folk Fest

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No other place, no other time, would I consider leaving backpack, camera, and other belongings on a tarp while 10,000 people wander by. But it’s Folk Fest time in Edmonton and baser human elements are left at the gates.

edfolkfest Suburban suspicions and urban hides are shed and the micro-culture inside becomes largely free of cynicism, workaday rancour and obsessive security. It all seems to be swallowed up in the spacious moody melody of Cat Power, or spun off the hips and hula-hoops animated by the driving Mali-pop rhythm’s of Amoudou and Miriam.

It’s possible, when the swelter abates, and you’re prostrate on a grass hill, the deep groove of Aimee Mann’s Save Me rolling over you, to dream of "world peace." Viva folk viva fest!

Beauty/Christianity/Spirituality

Holy Greed

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Ephphatha cross (winter)One morning, when I used to go to Ephphatha House, a small Catholic community of prayer, and a place of apparent "uselessness," a young girl who lived there told me about her cat:

She was sitting on a large stone on the path to the chapel, the cat lounging listlessly on her lap, and our conversation started on its own. I asked about her cat and she said, "Oh this is not my cat…and he hates kids. It took me a year to get his love and so now I just want to stay with him."

Besides the sweetness of a kid loving a cat that much, I just love the fact that at the end of her longsuffering experience, her patient experiment of opening herself up countless times with a kind of holy greed, that she found herself in love’s leisure, simply and naturally wanting the company of this cat.

I’m reminded of some lines from George MacDonald’s Diary of an Old Soul.

Those who would be born again indeed,
Must wake our souls unnumbered times a day,
And urge ourselves to life with holy greed,;
Now open our bosoms to the wind’s free play;
And now, with patience forceful, hard, lie still,
Submit and ready to the making will,
Athirst and empty, for God’s breath to fill.

Poetics/Spirituality

Adulthood – a notice from life

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Every once in a while, life notices you. It gives you the equivalent of a free grande Sumatra. And those things you wrestle with and writhe in seem manageable. On such a once-while, you decide–because of that espied fingernail of freedom–to take your day and ride it–ride it the way a psalm-god rides upon a cloud. And you know, in that tumble of time, that good accidents don’t come along often enough and that if you refuse the gift just because of the rarity of those good accidents, because you’re in some pool of adolescent huffiness that refuses everything because of not getting what you want when you want it, well, then you shrink. A little piece of you, some part inside, shrinks, and hardens. And before you know it you’re missing all kinds of good accidents just because you can’t recognize them for what they are…little packages of good, (like plant slips). And, at best,  your life resembles a Barry Manilow tune, and you’ll get stuck there, never able, never having the patience, to wait for that CD to end so that just maybe, Taj Mahal, or Bob Marley, or maybe even Sherry-D Williams "doing" poetry (with everything that that implies) comes on. It’s the adolescent part of you that interests you, that is, on those times you rise above. You can see its cloying desperation, vainly pulling and sucking slivers of achievement off of someone else’s life and you suddenly, or not so suddenly, see how long you’ve skidded under that weight like a steel runner under a shit-sled. Your bones crunched like half frozen horse turds. And you wonder aloud,  even groaning as you walk a busy sidewalk, "when and how or how and when you’ll ever grow up…? But then you remember you’ve got today. And, you, sink, into, it, putting away the thoughts of your immaturity so that you stop circling and so that you allow yourself to be flung off that desultory orb and ride with god, upon any old cloud, even if only for one split second taste of ice cold rarified air. And that little notice from life prepares you, like summer-fallow, for the receiving of adulthood.

Christianity/Spirituality

Affliction

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Affliction, like the gray bird of Minerva, flies in through a broken window. Pain storms the body’s broken beach. And the mind fails to ward off objectivity and can only wish, jejunely, for being appeared to, darkly.

But Idealism’s refuge is gone. Its dream long ago ended with a shoeless kick at a boulder. "Ideas are not the only reality," says pain…as if this was pain’s job to point out.

The walk of chronic pain is always an eternity of the moment. A step taken is swallowed and never taken. This is pain’s stasis. And stasis’ affliction. In affliction there is no flow, no motion to be true to, and no walk, and no time.

What could produce a budging, a stirring, a movement? Love only, says the teacher, only love.

sleeping on park bench(sm)Perhaps, when affliction has its say, when the hope for dislodging it is gone, when the lights go out in the tomb and the call to wait is no longer heard–is in fact absurd–then will desire end, and gravity give way to grace, leaving us fallow,  and prepared to receive love without filters. Perhaps.

That interminable pain may be made "use" of, and this, only discoverable personally and existentially, is not, and never to say, that affliction has a "why". Affliction can only be a necessary accident of creation…or God is a monster.

That there may be an embrace of affliction’s necessity through something like obedience or acceptance, and that this may find its terminus in a love encounter, as with Simone Weil, as with John of the Cross, as with Theresa of Avila and Theresa, the Little Flower, well, there’s a mystery.

Love and its mysteries eclipse pain, suffering and affliction. That affliction is recognized as evil is also to say that life has value, is a wonder.