Elsewhere in Dreams

Thus far I have:

1. Visited the Calgary airport and was scared by their… unique baggage claim complete with sculpted beavers and mummified Indians.
2. Marvelled at the oil pumps in just about every field and the kilometers and kilometers of pipes that go just about everywhere.
3. Spent two and a half hours driving through what is essentially the flattest place I’ve ever been to.
4. Bought a cold cut combo at Subway only to find out that it costs 60 cents more here than in Ontario.
5. Eaten the most wonderful no name burgers ever courtesy of Nick.
6. Had my picture taken about a thousand times. At least.
7. Found a buffalo jaw complete with partial teeth. I’m devising a way to smuggle it back to Ontario.
8. Walked a beautiful chocolate lab through the Kin Coolie Park no leash zone.
9. Watched an episode of Gilmore Girls and Home Improvement.
10. Slept in an actual bed with an actual mattress.
11. Had the best coffee ever at the Madhatter Roastery in Medicine Hat. Ever. The end.

Now, off for more of those burgers.

dan (who is writing this on a Mac)

It’s an easy thing to tell the truth,
when the rudder in your heart’s a lie
and you’re sailing back to Sodom on
the crimson blood of Jesus Christ.

It’s any easy thing to claim the death
when your life’s back in the cubicle,
when you’re storing up a sack of rust,
and your head and stomach’s always full.

And all I want is you
to come and make that true,
for all the steps I say
to bring my father praise.

It’s an easy thing to drown the ghost
in the holy water written here,
to smooth the rippled whispers down
and paint a soiled conscience clear.

But all I want is you
to come and make it true,
for all the strokes I say
to paint my father’s face.

Oh painted grave, a garden full of weeds,
a footloose path carved out of what I need.
Oh love of mine I’ve opened my legs wide
to every king except the one who died
with healing from his opened side.

It’s an easy thing to love the law
if you wrote it only yesterday.
But it’s difficult to walk the road
where the things you mean are what you say.

But all I want is you
to come and make me true,
for all the words I say
to sing my father’s praise.

There’s one question that I think we don’t ask or answer in scripturally-based churches often enough. I would think it obvious that Biblical authority is necessary for a church to grow and reach out and be successful in its mission. If scripture holds no authority, the church - which is, like it or not - based on the Word becomes nothing but another cultural collection of opinions, and not even a collection of opinions from this culture, but one from a culture long ago. And in a modern and post-modern world, the opinions of another culture are largely irrelevant, not to mention that there are already enough opinions to go around.

But even if a church doesn’t cast aside its admittedly strange positions on issues like - to pick one old horse to beat on - feminism, it still has to answer the question of where scripture itself derives its authority. Because face it, if the Bible is yet another collection of ancient spiritual advice, it’s once again just opinion, just like every other strange book written by strange men in strange cultures a long time ago.

I think it’s a crucial division to say that one can be a Bible worshipper without being a Biblical one. Or to put it another way, worshipping the words instead of the God who wrote them. Yes, the words are important, but apart from Christ - the centrepiece of the whole schebang - they mean nothing at all.

More to the point, the words of scripture derive their authority from the person and the work of Jesus, and any attempt to divorce them from that, be it by the uberhumanisation of Jesus or the deification of the book itself, robs scripture of its authority. The scriptures say this: the Word became flesh and lived among us. And it’s easy to forget that without Jesus, even that statement is bereft of meaning.

I’ve often wondered how David could write about the law like he did. He fills the Psalms with writings about how the law is no burden but a delight: David meditates on scripture and rises with it in the morning to call visiting God’s house a joyful thing.

I tend to think of law as a burden, and goodness knows a Christian life is filled with them. Simply, I don’t get to do what I want, and I certainly don’t get to shape the law of love that I follow into something that simply validates what I want.

But the law is a delightful thing, I think, in that it points me to Jesus, but also a depressing thing as it points out my complete imperfection. Or, another way, it’s a sack of bricks I know I can’t carry.

The Spirit points to that new law of love and liberty, the point at which I can drop those bricks. Yet the new law is no different from the old law: it changes people. Being Spirit-filled means listening to the voice of God, delighting in scripture, and changing.

Or to bring it full-circle, a new law means a new life, and a new perspective, and a new way of going about things, and a new concept of reality. From that side of the veil, I can see how David writes a Psalm about delight in law; the law is that thing that points out the weeds, and the Spirit is the one that powers the arm to uproot them. Another way: I am a new man with old man tendencies, and the scripture and Spirit are the heart and lungs keeping me alive.

So, I start my week.

There was once a man who owned a horse. He loved this horse a great deal, and from that love grew a desire to do what was right for the horse. So one night while the horse was sleeping, he built a fence around it, a fence just large enough for the animal to move around a bit.

“There,” he said to himself, “now my horse is safe from danger.” He reasoned that it the less room there was to move, the less likely it was the horse he loved would hurt itself.

As time went on, he began to erect more elaborate safeguards around the horse. Finally, the day arrived that he dug a bomb shelter, led the horse inside, hobbled its legs, and began to feed it through a tube.

The neighbors looked on with mild disgust, but it was not after all their horse. So they went about their business.

It wasn’t long, however, that a thief - having caught a glance of the horse in the bomb shelter one night whilst sneaking through the man’s yard - decided to steal the horse. Steal it he did, nursing it back to health in a faraway land.

Years later a lady from the horse’s old town was traveling to that faraway land and recognised the animal galloping through a field. She wondered, as she travelled back to her town, who had actually loved the horse: the man who dug the bomb shelter for it, or the man who had stolen it in the middle of the night.

We all got together at the house just after dawn and decided that it would save gas if we drove together. My sister thought it was a grand plan, and as the boys tossed their stuff in my car’s trunk, I got the thing started. Hardly a goodbye and we were on the road still slightly groggy from going to bed too late and getting up too early. They sat in the back seat and Noel in the front leaning the seat back a little to catch some sleep - he said - until I tuned the radio to that all-news station and he decided that it was impossible to get any shut-eye in that position anyways. Several rude remarks about how nasal those woman reporters were and how many bugs were hitting the window later and we had one of those rollicking conversations going about things that we don’t really remember all these years on but seemed incredibly important at the time. Maybe they were and the point isn’t to remember them but to forget them before they have a chance to haunt you.

He flipped through my music looking at the titles and deciding on whether or not he actually like anything I had in there. “Mostly stuff I’ve never heard of,” he told me which conflicted me. I always wanted people to like the music I had but as it turns out most people don’t like to hear anything they aren’t already familiar with, especially when they’re in the car on a summer morning and the coffee’s just working its way into the bloodstream. Listening to generic music on the back roads: it seems like a summer tradition in retrospect.

We drove for what felt like hours but was probably only two. I remember saying something about living in Japan - like I knew anything about Japan at all - and how you didn’t even have to drive a car there and how you could go from one side of the country to the other just taking trains. Also something about living with your parents for so long you forget what it’s like not to have a family, so unlike here where we all split and separate and fracture and go our own ways like the country is some great field for us to spread out roots it. Maybe it has something do with size… so many places to go and so much empty space that we feel as if we must eventually drift away to different parts of this vast wilderness and only talk to eachother over buzzing wires. Did I say that our telephony is an analog to their trains? I can’t remember but in the last analysis that doesn’t really work as the Japanese have more wires hanging around than we do or more waves in the air or however it is they constantly talk to eachother. But then, I don’t know much about Japan and never have.

We began to feel almost there as soon as we could see where the land stopped like an abrupt drop-off and the horizon met with that beautiful blue of the lake or ocean, and Noel chose another disc, some punk-pop band that always leaned too close to utter cheesyness for my tastes while at the same time serving up catchy hooks and listenable melodies, a phrase that popped into my head and made me wonder why I sounded so much like a music magazine. I remember us all singing so loud it made our heads hurt, but the songs are lost in the time between now and then. Again I suppose that doesn’t really matter as much as the way we grin about that time we made the car swerve back and forth on the road like you were drunk doyouremember?

Thinking of it now, we were real children and didn’t probably deserve to be driving anywhere listening to any sort of music, or perhaps we were adults only playing at being teenagers strung out on caffiene and hopped up on sugar. In any case we had the sort of fun that doesn’t involve having to think about how much fun is going on which I think is the best sort: you can shut down all the neurons you use all week and shove the girl troubles and job troubles and school troubles into the back of your head and act like if you just sing a little louder and drive a little faster and act a little weirder the weekend will last forever.

We got there, paid the girl in the suffocatingly small building, parked. We took off our shoes, slathered lotion all over eachother and grabbed the sports equipment from the trunk before running over the dunes to the beach. This was of course before me and her - but that’s another story about the same beach that I’ll save for a different time, when we’re all old and all the connections have started to fade and we need to break out old mysteries to make our bland pasts more intriguing. Do you remember thinking we should have kept our shoes on when the boardwalk started burning our feet? I do.

I am not a good person to take your spiritual cues from. In many ways, I’ve failed as a Christian, and I know that, and it pains me. More acurately, it pains God. Or even more pointedly it pains my Father in that I haven’t followed his law, his Son in that I’ve treated his salvation like a common thing, and the Spirit in that I’ve ignored and suppressed his guidance and prompting.

That aside - as aside as it can be - I have been thinking. And you know what I think? The key to the Christian life is the Holy Ghost. The Spirit of God dwelling in me, sent to comfort and to guide me. I don’t give him enough credence.

As I see it, the law of the old covenant has been replaced by a new law: the law of love. Or, the commands of the old imperfect covenant have been fulfilled in the commands of the perfect new: I am alive in Jesus, dead to sin, and his law is to love the Lord and to love my neighbor.

But what is God concerned with? That’s the hard part. And before you charge me with digressing, this is why I mentioned the Spirit before. Scripture bears out that the spirit has been sent to guide me: why then am I not tuned in to him more? It’s obviously not enough to say love and leave it there. Scripture expounds on it, but it still doesn’t tell me how to drive my car; it’s simply not written to be that granular. But the prompting of the Spirit - he can tell me how to drive my car. Sounds a bit freakish, I know, but there you have it.

My problem is this: I want what I hate, and I hate what I get. I don’t like the law of love - and it you’re honest with yourself, you don’t like moderation and liberty either - because it’s too ill-defined. I want a new law to tell me how to live, but I hate the new laws people come up with. Only this sort of music, and only this sort of dress, and only this sort of drink, and only this sort of food. Yet I don’t hate these things because the kingdom is not about food or drink or clothes or music: I hate them because I am in the last analysis rebellious.

There’s the rub. The libertarian antinomian inside myself wants to believe that I’m actually freer than those inventing the new laws for themselves when the truth is that I’m one step further away from the law of love and the liberty of living in Jesus than the people with the made-up rule book are. At least they have a law! They’re trying to get somewhere; not particularly well, mind you, but they’re giving it the old college try. It’s the old rebel without a cause trap.

I’m a worse tyrant than God could ever be (and I know he isn’t). If I’m not a slave to laws of my own invention, I’m slave to laws of the devil’s invention; if I’m not missing the point entirely, I’m ignoring it on purpose. Or to put it another way, if I’m not wearing the scarlet robes of self-righteousness, I’m flaunting the nudity of my lawlessness, and in either case I’m supposed to be clothed in the humility of Jesus’ love and Jesus’ law and Jesus’ blood.

Ephesians has been perfectly honest in pointing this out: I am a new creature, not made to follow rote, but not made to wander aimlessly. I have the Spirit in my heart, I have the scripture in my head, and I have a soul destined for glory. How then can I still be hitting the ditches?

I was visiting at my parent’s house (as I will be on Friday as well, and as I do most Wednesdays) and my little brother was watching me pour my mother’s chilli into a plastic container to bring home for my food-deprived self. So he asks me what I’m doing, and I say “Bringing this chilli home.”

To which he replies, “You mom must like that!” Now, he’s only 5 or so, and I’m 24, so I guess he thinks that I still live at home with my own mom. And I was like, “Um, we’re brothers, you know.” And he nods energetically and says, “And your mom is going to like that chilli!”

I shatter his illusion then by explaining that both he and me proceeded from the loins of the very same woman. Freakish, yes. Twenty years apart, yes. Separated by nine other children, yes. But miracle of miracles, we are kin! With the same mother!

I thought it was funny, though, that Josh didn’t really picture me as part of the family - I suppose I knew this would happen, that my younger siblings would never really get to know me as a brother, but it never hit me until that moment how abstracted I have become from my family proper. Not that I’m terribly sad about it: life happens, people move on, and in an immediate family as large as mine, things get lost in the shuffle. Not to mention that my life has taken me in divergent paths.

On a slightly different note, I’ve cleared a few IP ranges from the .htaccess file on the server here, so those of you unable to access this site before now will be able to take part like anyone else. Which is to say that you won’t be able to. I suppose it was silly in the beginning to block people from reading it, especially when there’s a mirror at http://www.xhan.com/blog/ and you could access the Google Cache just about any time you wanted to get any and all of the text you wanted. So that said, have fun.

One last thing: I’ve started a study of Ephesians, and it struck me as I read the first chapter how much hope is inherent to Christianity. Not just the hope of deus ex machina but hope for the hear and now in what we go through on a day-to-day basis. It’s amazing really, and I am thankful for the reminder.

Jesus is odd in how much he demands: everything. I know it, but it’s a hard thing to do. No, an impossible thing. But the giving of everything is so much more than a little time and some money; it’s organic and starts from the feet up (or from the mind down). How do you start converting your attitudes? How do you subsume your rebellion? How do you not go crazy?

On that note, I have some financial obligations that have recently ended (between transitioning from TORCR to LWRC, I was giving to some Christian ministries), and I’m starting giving to my actual local church. Well, my actual not-local-at-all church, but let’s not speak of that right now.

I love this verse:

Then I heard what sounded like a great multitude, like the roar of rushing waters and like loud peals of thunder, shouting:

“Hallelujah!
For our Lord God Almighty reigns.
Let us rejoice and be glad
and give him glory!
For the wedding of the Lamb has come,
and his bride has made herself ready.
Fine linen, bright and clean,
was given her to wear.”

Revelation, if you must know.

If you were wrapped around me
like nightfall (like we had closed
the blinds) it might explain this
organ dropping through my gut
whilst drumming in my neck:

you are a moon hidden behind
the distance between here and the sun,
made to sway oceans like a swath
tearing the world apart in
broad daylight.