I

A dark vow

that married death and life.

The branches of the

Tree of Life intertwined.

A match made on earth

with roots dug deep

in fecund soil,

and arms outstretched 

to Heaven,

before a great cloud of

witnessing stars

in the dark night.

II

We are the bastard children

of an unholy union.

Orphaned in the feud between

a Queen and a Tyrant

yet bound to both - 

destined to repeat

their bloody history.

III

Blood begets blood

death begets death.

The dense soil readied

with generations of

human compost and refuse.

Death cannot be escaped.

Could even God himself

dirty his hands with the earth 

and not succumb?

IV

A tree is more than a tree

when it is cut down and

fashioned into a cross.

Flesh wounds are more than just

when they are on the hands 

of God.

Death is made less than death

when defeated and subjugated.

Man is made truly man

when resurrected.

V

The fruit of the spirit are ripening

on a tree with blood in its veins.

Come sit under the shade of growing leaves

as we stare into the persecuted skies

and dream of our place among the stars.

Death and life are intertwined,

with each other

and with us. 

But the shed blood no longer is our own.

Forum 1

In our society, everything we do is, in one way or another, for someone else.  Think about your job.  Most likely you are providing some sort of service for others.  Teachers serve students.  Politicians serve the public.  Waiters serve eaters.  Factory workers are making products for others.  And what about what you do when you're not working?  Most likely you are supporting workers.  We are told our consumption is good for the economy.  Which means that as we spend we are doing it not only for our own good but for the good of others.  And yet for all we do for others we are still selfish and we lack community.

Community is more than simply providing services or fulfilling needs.  As Christians, our community is the Church - the body of Christ.  This distinction is important because we often fail to remember who's body we are.  The fact that we are Christ's body makes all the difference.  As Christ's body, we follow his lead and our community is held to the standard of the cross - the standard of sacrifice, forgiveness, and redemption - namely love.  Meeting this standard is not something we do on our own - it takes a whole body.  We need each other.  It is our striving together for this standard, the standard of the cross that makes us distinctly Christian, so that the why of meeting needs is as important as the what of the needs we are meeting.  When we get the why right, community flourishes and needs truly get met.

This Is How I Feel

I've begun recently to get a clearer sense of our being aliens as Christians.  More and more I feel out of place.  There is a real sense of existential distress.  Not in a nihilistic way, not like Sartre or Camus, or others like them. But a very real and pervasive questioning of my life, the way I live and the way of life of the world around me.  And I find myself in a black-hole of sorts, in a vacuum between the church and the world.  I find the secular world-view to be vacuous and futile.  Greed, oppression, and violence are the rules of the game.  It's sad, frankly.  And it is death to the soul.  What is worse, the place that I should be able to turn, the church, is playing the same game, and playing by the same rules.  Now to be fair it's not all bad.  There are shafts of light that break through the stormy clouds.  I find myself drawn to those shafts and feel at home in the brilliance of Love that makes the light.  But at the same time, while traveling from shaft to shaft, the path is dark and cold.  And I don't know what to do.  The word of God is supposed to be a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.  But what do you do when that word is being distorted?  When it is being covered and causing the path to be shrouded in darkness all over again?  When those in whose charge it is fail to use it properly or effectively?  These are things I working through.  This is how I'm feeling right now.  I see more and more how much I bleed the half-truths and blatant lies of my culture, secular AND christian.  It's beyond my control, and beyond my ability to do much about it right about now.  That's all.

The Good Dead God: Killing a God With Philip Pullman

We find God, the Ancient of Days, on the limits of tangibility.  He lays in His portable seat like a withering wrinkly old baby.  Angels transport Him from a fortress in the sky, as Metatron, the soon to be Authority, watches a war between the Kingdom of Heaven and those who would initiate the Republic of Heaven.  On his way to safety, God, decrepit and senile, meets the enemy and his seat fall from the sky.  Not long after, rescued by two children who have no idea who he is and who help him sympathetically, even pathetically, God disintegrates into the air.  The end of God, the death of the Authority.  

Philip Pullman has great distaste for this God.  It is evident in his description.  This God is weak.  He is beyond old.  He can not even move himself.  Pullman admits to his hatred of religion.  He is forthright in his purpose in writing the "His Dark Materials" series, the first book of which was recently made into a Hollywood film.  Pullman is a militant atheist, so to him the obliteration of religion from the face of the earth would be a good thing.  To him God is dead, if He ever existed.  All that is true is reason and science.  Consciousness is God.

I see things diametrically to Pullman in so many ways.  But one thing we do have in common.  The God that dies in his series can burn forever in the hell He was born in.  He is a cruel God, even an evil God.  He is a tyrant, He is the Authority.  And we are better off without Him.  

There has been a lot of uproar over "The Golden Compass", the recent book turned movie.  Many christian parents are quite upset.  Pullman is gunning for impressionable children.  He is overstepping his bounds, and so we should boycott the film.  I couldn't agree less.  

Instead, I think that the church should stand up with Pullman and declare the God of the His Dark Materials series dead.  Because He is.  He fell with the modernist movement that created Him.  And like I've said, we are better off without Him.  

Pullman's dead God is not the God of Christianity.  He might think so, but I think he is wrong.  But the God I worship is a God of pure love.  A God who rescues and saves.  A God who gives and forgives.  A God who is unafraid of reason and consciousness, because God is the one who fashioned them, who gave them to us as a gift.  The God I worship is quite different from the dead God of Pullman's books.  The God of Christianity is a God who is alive; God is the author of life and all life is possible only through God.  What Pullman doesn't realize is that if our God is ever killed, then we die with God.  So the God he kills can't be the Christian God, but is a God who needs to die.  A God that too many christians worship, but who is not the God of the Bible.

We should not fear Pullman's books or the message they might send to our children.  Instead we should embrace this good death of a God who is dead.  And use this death to point to the God who lives.