stay on the track

the strait and the narrow

suffers no fools

dreamers

or lovers

- 1.37, jan 16

Its amazing how we see the world in lines. We divide people according to dotted lines... race, religion, preferences. We divide people according to definitions of 'same' and 'different'. We divide ourselves into poles..just to struggle the rest of our existences with one another, just to argue and fight and war.

I am guilty of the same, everyday. I must learn to embrace difference, to appreciate that i have been given opportunity to expand. This is what it means to love our neighbours - the Samaritan empathizing with someone outside his sphere, someone who, in society's view, would have no claim with him.

This is how Jesus empathized with the women, the widows, the prostitutes, the lepers, the beggars, the Greek, the Roman, the Samaritan. Seeing God's Heart in all hearts.

The challenge of self-righteousness is great. The fear that we cannot hold on to something that would differentiate us from others, from the tax collectors, the corrupt, the liars and the thieves, the proud and arrogant, the dirty and the desperate. The fear that we are actually the same.

This is why religion sometimes becomes a rock that hardens our hearts. It gives us the sense of a heightened ground from which to make our judgements. It can easily be warped to be the thing that justifies our divisions.

**

in this rough and tumbling turmoil

(that i know by heart)

i will seek the unmovable

truth

and while wretched my soul will weep through this,

God

whatever name we call him,

is constant.

He knows me by heart, and you

He has us in the palm of his hands

lest we forget

that deep in our heart we will find the answer

not in our deepest fears or insecurities or uncertainties

but in light

that is constant, whichever way we turn.

7.50 a.m., 12.1.2012, a new breath.

i'll meet you there

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase 'each other'

doesn't make any sense.' - Rumi

Let's try that again:

If we are not careful to guard our thoughts and actively pursue truth, there is danger that we may unwittingly develop a mindset of exclusivity, and approach all our issues as us vs them.

We may not realize it, and our intentions may be well. It may be the very thing that we say we fight for. but it may have been programming, developed through years, that needs to be confronted, unhinged.

We need to learn to see further - climb the hedge and look beyond it. Or else in the same quest for justice or godliness, we end up enforcing the very thing that hinders love. there should be no division between children of God. if God sees our hearts through His eyes, so much so we need to see through human eyes.

We must learn to see beyond. The day when buying bread can be racist, is the day we all need to check ourselves. Check our responses - do we have, hinged in our mind, that there is 'us' on one side and 'them' on the other?

It is not the government. it is not the issue of scholarships or rights or privileges or what others have done. Our own thoughts, the words that we say, are suspect, and we may not even know it.

let us not be caught blind.

Whither hope?

The day buying bread becomes racist.

Offensive animal parts in holy grounds and sacred spaces within

one man's opinion begins a chorus of voices, accusatory, it wasn't me's, my ideals have been robbed from under my feet, in a circus where

everything is juggled

nothing gold catches our view

anything that falls and crashes are ignored in a shatter of absurdity. we shout even louder.

The day we make god racist

is the day we must check ourselves.

it is not the government, it is not the schools, it is not politics, it is not the other. it is the day we must look deep within ourselves and catch where we start seeing our discriminations before a human heart. is when we no longer recognize it, but we are slowly allowing hatred breed.

but then i am young, and disappointed, and will hold on to innocence to my very last breath.

...now to move on to higher things

i know i have been given plenty. of talents, of thoughts, of heart. and these would be my core as i journey through life. this is the material i am made of, crafted by a Perfect God, and so. these are the materials that react and converse with events of my life, empty ruins, turmoil, or peace.

my confession: there are moments when i would have given everything up, for the comfort of silence. these moments are not uncommon - they have come to me almost regularly for the past... well, since i was ten. sometimes i think these are isolated incidents, rarities. sometimes i think i am past it, but then there i am again. sometimes i think it is my choices, my mistakes that bring me there. sometimes i think if i just changed, stop making mistakes, i would finally reach the mean line, the range of 'normal'. sometimes i think i am all to blame..and it is these times when the noise pushes me too far into the corner, i feel i must find a way out, must escape. i must implode.

i am not sure how much destruction it has caused my life, my relationships (or the distinct void of them) thus far. perhaps much.

the situations have changed. the players have changed. the times and seasons have changed. the feelings and responses remain. so perhaps it is the only elements that have remained the same, how we deal with it, that needs closer scrutiny. i guess i just have to let myself stop going there. destruction is the rule of darkness.

if our hearts, our souls, is how we reach God, i suppose it is easy for us to confuse it with our feelings, the type that is fleeting and flutters in a moment. i suppose it takes more, it takes a whole being, to listen more deeply, deeply into the whisper of God's voice in the heart's heart. my dream is to live a life, as true within as it is true outside. that my inner thoughts will align with my outer words. that what is true in my heart will come true in my conduct. that there will be no more schism between my self as it exists in the community of people, and my self as it is. that i will stop rushing home to be alone, to be myself. that i will enjoy being one with the company of others, as with myself. to live from the inside out, with God and self and man; not like a black hole, sucking everything in into a hidden empty darkness.