we call this Friday good

I know the vast majority of my readership comes here for the art nouveau and the college radio tuneage and not my existential digressions on politics and religion, but anyways. It's Good Friday, and that calls for some degree of observance even from lapsed-catholics-turned-bleeding-heart-evangelicalishes like yours truly. My goal tonight is to find a dark church playing old requiems where I can ponder existentially for awhile.

hildegard

Ironic enough that it was finally my colleague, a Noted Pagan of Distinction who finally got me into her, much thanks homie, because I have some strange affinity with proto-renaissance chicks who commune with the divine. 

Praise to you
Spirit of fire!
to you who sound the timbrel
and the lyre.

Your music sets our minds
ablaze! The strength of our souls
awaits your coming
in the tent of meeting.

There the mounting will
gives the soul its savor
and desire is its lantern.

Insight invokes you in a cry
full of sweetness, while reason
builds you temples as she labors
at her golden crafts.

But sword
in hand you stand poised
to prune shoots of the poisoned
apple --
scions of the darkest
murder --

when mist overshadows the will.
Adrift in desires the soul is spinning
everywhere. But the mind
is a bond
to bind will and desire.

When the heart yearns to look
the Evil One in the eye,
to stare down the jaws of
iniquity, swiftly
you burn it in consuming
fire. Such is your wish.

And when reason doing ill
falls from her place, you
restrain and constrain her as you will
in the flow of experience until
she obeys you.

And when the Evil One brandishes
his sword against you,
you break it in his own
heart. For so you did
to the first lost angel,
tumbling the tower of his
arrogance to hell.

And there you built a second
tower -- traitors and sinners
its stones. In repentance
they confessed all their crafts.

So all beings that live by you
praise your outpouring
like a priceless salve upon festering
sores, upon fractured
limbs. You convert them
into priceless gems!

Now gather us all to yourself
and in your mercy guide us
into the paths of justice.

To the Trinity be praise! God is music, God is life that nurtures every creature in its kind. Our God is the song of the angel throng and the splendor of secret ways hid from all humankind, But God our life is the life of all.

Fiery Spirit,
fount of courage,
life within life
of all that has being!

Holy are you, transmuting the perfect
     into the real.
Holy are you, healing
     the mortally stricken.
Holy are you, cleansing
     the stench of wounds.

O sacred breath O blazing
love O savor in the breast and balm
flooding the heart with
the fragrance of good,

O limpid mirror of God
who leads wanderers
home and hunts out the lost,

Armor of the heart and hope
of the integral body,
sword-belt of honor:
save those who know bliss!

Guard those the fiend holds
imprisoned,
free those in fetters
whom divine force wishes to save.

O current of power permeating all
in the heights upon the earth and
in all deeps:
you bind and gather
all people together.

Out of you clouds
come streaming, winds
take wing from you, dashing
rain against stone;
and ever-fresh springs
well from you, washing
the evergreen globe.

O teacher of those who know,
a joy to the wise
is the breath of Sophia.

Praise then be yours!
you are the song of praise,
the delight of life,
a hope and a potent honor
granting garlands of light.

hanging gardens

Police cars in front of the house up the street, an alternate route taken past beautiful Victorians and the coffeeshop where the Albanians hang out, and I admire everyone else's balcony plantings, the sunflowers in 5-gallon buckets and scraggly tomato plants entangling the ironwork, the sweet potato vines dangling over, Babylon this is not, but it'd be nice to have some wonders of the world.

I talk to my mom about gardens and work, and my dad's going in for some kind of crazy heart surgery so he doesn't get clots and die, and then I talk to my dad and we have our camaraderie of rock and roll and God and gleeful morbidness, this is where it all comes from, and I say I want him around as long as possible and he says that won't be all that long. I know it's the truth, and that nothing lasts forever, but it's hard to think about.

There's a vigil up the street for Bridget's friend, and a friend of a lot of people in my orbit that I don't know all that well, but it seems he was a wonderful and full of life person, and I walk past the throngs of people I've seen at shows or out and about, connected enough to know faces, but not enough to hug or stand alongside, to where the candles are on the corner, and I don't know what to think or say so I stand there silently and pray for all these grieving souls around me, the friends and family and for the guy who'll go to jail over this, because I don't know what else to do, and it's too close, but not close enough and I don't want to colonize another's grief. I'm not good at this whole thing, and it seems like people around me are losing people they love all too quickly.

One of my friends lost his best friend to cancer a few weeks ago and is still torn up, a lady at my church who'd been in and out of rehab and jail died last night. I didn't know her well, I had her grandkids in my class, and one time she asked me for money and I said I had none, because it's easy to score drugs outside the doors of my place of worship and I didn't want to be responsible for enabling that. I wonder if I was wrong. An award's being handed out today at the place of employment in the memory of someone I really liked and never got to know, whose memory is used to project an ideal that he would have laughed at.  It kills me how inevitable this mortality thing is, how easily it gets used for this or that or the other,  that it costs so much to bury, and that as we get older, the ashes and the bones continue to rattle in our memory.

venusian

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

 
I didn't know what to expect as I left work to head down to the park, but saw that the clouds had begun to dissipate around the sun. It's once in every hundred years or so that this thing happens and while my Skeptical Friend along for this venture might scoff, I did send a quick prayer up that morning for a clear sky that night instead of the usual clouds of Clevelandia, and behold it was answered.

An evening of science and slackitude commenced, of looking through telescopes at sunspots and the corona of flares shooting out from the sun, gazing through a viewer that blotted out everything except the light so intense, and everyone was so friendly around us overgrown straunge folk. Maybe there was a sense of geekness solidarity in that camaraderie that I don't find at most events involving people I don't know who don't necessarily know each other. Bridget says and shows it well here. People seemed smart and nice and that's not something I always see, and while I have little faith in humanity, the interactions that we had with everyone kind of made me feel warm inside, the way that people shared their super expensive telescopes with us and showed us things.

I saw Saturn tiny in the viewfinder, the orb a hundred times the size of my planet a mere inch across, its rings and all. The sense of near-infinity and the vastness of space hits me so hard, the smallness and the awe.

We made a night of it, walked around the park, drank whiskey out of a flask on the beach, tossed a frisbee in the darkness, sat on the rocks and watched the water and stargazed. We probably would have built a fire out of the driftwood if we knew we wouldn't be hassled by The Man, and about a half hour before midnight I took leave to drive home and fall promptly asleep, having been up since 4am. I woke up this morning still feeling a little euphoric and full of wonder, falling in love with all these things I loved as a child once more with the same sense of amazement.

When I consider your heavens,  
    the work of your fingers,  
the moon and the stars,  
    which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them,    human beings that you care for them...

planetary

I remember my parents taking me out into our big backyard in a now-more-affluent suburb to see Halley's Comet. I was four years old, I think. All I remember was falling asleep and that the moon looked swirly in the darkness. There were no lights in the backyard and it was there where I fell in love with stars, deciphering constellations of the summer and winter with a star chart, getting out books on the planets.

I used to wake up at 5am with my dad and I'd stand outside and look for Taurus and Cassiopeia and Orion, Sirius and the Pleiades, Venus, the morning star brighter than all the others fading only in the face of the sun. I was awed by the concept of infinite galaxies, of concepts of light years and nebulae and a God who knows each of the trillions upon trillions of  stars by name.

So tonight I'm pleased to see the clouds breaking ever so slightly so maybe I can see Venus pass past the sun through the lenses of my friend's welding glasses, standing on the shore like it's 4th of July with the throngs of people. It's not every day something like this transpires.

the voice of many waters

Can you fathom the mysteries of God? Can you probe the limits of the Almighty? They are higher than the heavens above—what can you do? They are deeper than the depths below —what can you know? Their measure is longer than the earth and wider than the sea.

  One of the strange silver linings of living in a dying town is even the peons have access to cheap rent within walking distance of the lake. It is true that most of our lakefront is cut off by highways and salt mines and the homes of the affluent, but to have the simple primal pleasure of being near rocks and water, it is there, and we make use of it. It keeps us alive, keeps us from killing ourselves, lets us clear our heads. Is it some kind of thing wired in us to love rivers, oceans, lakes, to live near them, to drink and baptize and immerse, because they are our lifeblood, we would die without what they give.

The rational side of my weird brain knows that these moments of extra intense melancholia have their reasons and that they'll pass, that feelings and reality are not always congruent, and so I let the waterworks dry up and went to the park where the rocks and water are, and walked down, navigating the concrete breakers and the scrubby trees growing between the boulders that keep the shoreline from washing away.

I try not to think of all the people who used to come down here with me, all the memory of this place,  I try not to think of the occasionally encroaching loneliness that hovers closer like a bird of prey each year.

The waves were too high to walk across to the beach of pebbles beneath the cliffs so I made my way to a flat rock not completely soaked by water, far enough to not infringe upon someone doing the same thing. And I sat there for a couple hours at least, in non-yogic quiet meditation, silently pouring out my soul to the creator of all this beauty, seeking some kind of oneness with indescribable longing, with the waves breaking and the water undulating through watering the deep green moss on the sides of the rock where I perched, taking a break only to grab a sweater out of the car as the sun sank lower and changed from orange to pink.

The water in this lake may be dirty, and I haven't swam in it since I was in my teens, but there was this cathartic cleansing in the moment, of the sense of smallness of one's self and one's inner drama in the face of elementals that made me realize I should seek out this place and others like it much more than I do.

Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me.

I walked up to the top of the hill to watch the swollen pink sun sink into the violet waters, with the sounds of the birds and the sweet smell from the honey locust trees, we were all enraptured by the newest installation of the endless cycle, the teenage girl scrawling in a notebook, the Muslim family on the park bench, the dead ringer for latter-day Kerry King, the couple with the big hair and the couple embracing on the breakwall, and the old man on his night walk. As the light vanished, we walked back to our cars, back to the neighborhood, experiencing some small moment of transcendence.

For the grace of the presence, be grateful.
Touch the cloth of the robe,
but do not pull it toward you,
or like an arrow it will leave the bow.

Images. Presence plays with form,
fleeing and hiding as the sky does in water,
now one place, now nowhere.

Imagination cannot contain the absolute.
These poems are elusive
because the presence is.

I love the rose that is not a rose,
but the second I try to speak it, any name
for God becomes so-and-so, and vanishes.

What you thought to draw lifts off the paper,
as what you love slips from your heart.

 - rumi

passio

I was late, and was foiled in attempts to sneak through the back where incidentally the choir was set up and already singing, no seats to be found so I kept moving forward, finally settling on the cold marble steps of the altar in almost complete darkness as the tintinnabulated voices and mournful strings soared up into the vaulted ceiling as the sunset light shining through the stained glass windows faded into darkness.

The words of John's gospel translated from Latin, the chorus of voices narrating, and I marveled at the banality of the church music I grew up hearing that lacked the gravitas, the weight of sadness, the magnitude of events sanitized by a culture that cherishes positivity rather than profundity and sanitizes anything morbid or painful. I read through highlighted pages of Isaiah, of brutalized suffering servants and promises of judgment and mercy and the intensity of the sound and its meaning overwhelms me in the darkness so perfect for pondering, because it's just me and sound and God and here, here is exactly where I needed to be.

 I sit there scrawling prayers into a notebook and weeping because while it's sunk in before, it's hit nerves that have never been quite so exposed, of the injustice of the state, the toxicity of misguided religiosity, of betrayal and desertion of one's closest friends, of selflessness and incomprehensible love, of our own pathetic mortality and attempts at morality. Forgive us, for we know not what we do, it is so hard to even begin to understand.

gethsemane

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

  Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

  The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

  The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

  The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good. 

Our culture values positivity to its detriment, not that wallowing in a sea

of sorrow is somehow better but, the people I know who seem most disturbed by my 

tendencies towards melancholia as some kind of spiritual ailment and exhort me to be 

more positive, because God wants me to be happy, because this is what's taught to us

from birth it seems. 

And yet, since my lapsed-Catholic soul is still attuned to liturgy, I think of 

the verses of the Lord as a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, who agonized

and sweated drops of blood seeing the impending pain. There's nothing in there

about keeping one's head up, but an acknowledgement of the reality that shit is 

fucked up and something needs to be done to put it right, and this sentiment is borne

out in psalms and lamentations and cries of rage and grief from prophets and regular folk.

Because there is only so much much that we can do besides the golden rule basics 

so hard to follow as it is, and it seems that every other religion tells you to 

suck it up or just try harder and hope that maybe things work out because you're 

not as bad as that other person. 

If we pretend that this pain and suffering and just plain wrong things aren't there,

we simply deny the reality of human existence in a world wracked with entropy,

where we all see through the glass darkly though some try to tint that unknowing

with shades of green and rose. And maybe I'm just crazy, but I can't help but wonder

if I'm in good company here. 

the clefts of the rock

When you go to Ethiopia someday... 

It's said as if it really truly will happen. I'd love it if it did, because I'd love to see these churches hewn from rock, as legend says by angels. My friends from church from there say that isn't true, and neither are the tales of the Ark of the Covenant being hidden away on a church on an island, but these are wonders of the world I want to see before I die. Christianity is so strongly associated with Europeans, despite much of North Africa and the Middle East but it took root very early on here in its own way.

The images of the divine cast are just as ethnocentric as my own culture, but somehow this is what I imagine things to look like, if they look like anything.

 

we workers do not understand modern art

So on our weekly walk through Clevelandia, we came upon an art installation in the cathedral downtown, which upon observation and putting our admittedly geeky and freely associating brains together, we had difficulty coming up with "what it all means" which makes me sound like a bit of a get-off-my-lawner because the parallels to the Stations of the Cross were not terribly apparent even with the additional placards and an appeal to Saint Google for insight into such arcane knowledge.

It's not that I'm opposed to postmodernism as artistic aesthetic, because I cobble together mediums and imagery from all over, but even at my most abstract, I still could not make the connections between this and what I remember from Catholic school when the sixth graders would act out a tableau kind of thing during Holy Week. While I believe that one's faith should affect how one sees the world, I also take issue with the politicizing of religion whether it's the God Bless America-centric right wing that I grew up around or the overly earnest lefties who are just apt to politicize the transcendent, to squeeze it into a constraint of context.

Supposedly in reference to Simon of Cyrene, but, um, I got nothin'

Even with the symbology, this whole thing did not move me except to remind me of a ridiculous theology class in high school (class: Is God more like a jumper cable or a spark plug? More like a circus clown or a trapeze artist?) and wanting to have a pillow fight with the pile of such fluff by the baptismal. Randal jokes about smiting, but this church is more of a museum than a living house of faith as it is. Cake or death, anyone?

This is supposed to be Jesus falling for the second time

I'm pretty sure that ripped out pages of the Qu'ran can get you on someone's shitlist pretty fast (in fairness, these are no longer part of the exhibit, and a copy of the local paper has taken its place. It still doesn't make any more sense)

this is supposed to symbolize Jesus in his mother's arms

Maybe I'm just too literal or jaded or feeling like the message gets lost in the heap of broken images and fragmentation. Maybe that's the point, or I'm not seeing something, but it doesn't move me to contemplate God or my relationship to humanity, really. It just kind of feels like a reaction, a semblance of substance, a naked emperor messiah. Art's just as subjective as music I guess, and what moves one may not move another, but other depictions have hit me in the gut infinitely more.

 

in spirit and in truth

The place where I hang out on Sunday mornings is a mix of cultures and personalities that mesh in a way that I rarely see elsewhere, a smattering of age differences, ethnicity, politics, economics, and personal tastes and conversations where our different understandings and cultural baggage come to light. The differences of age, taste, culture, tangle and are melded harmoniously mostly, with doses of snarky humor and a deeper understanding of where we come from, who we are, where we are going.

Those of us who kind of ended up in charge of picking music and such ponder these things together over dinner once a month, seeking truth and sight within our respective blind spots and the ways in which our personalities respond. A lot of other people came from more charismatic backgrounds as opposed to mine, and sometimes express dismay at the lack of emotional engagement on the part of many, but there's a lot of introverts where I go, some others who came from a similar tradition as me or others who were burned by a misplaced emotionalism in the past. Being introverted as a rule, and wary of gratuitous displays of piety, my prayers are rarely spoken, existing scrawled in notebooks in ballpoint, or scribbled on canvas with paint markers bleeding into acrylic, wordless spiraling from a guitar neck.

As much as I couldn't stand the deadness that was going to Mass and mumbling through a liturgy so rote that the words ceased to have meaning, I'm still profoundly wary of emotion for emotion's sake, when the lines blur between emotional and psychological euphoria, because that stuff is real, especially when everyone else is having this collective experience and inevitably you get swept up in it.

Sometimes it's in a religious setting, but I see the same dynamic at play in other crowds, be it watching your sports team score or when you're watching a really good band play and are absorbed with the crowd in the sound or when Obama's inauguration was on tv and everyone on campus was bawling and I found myself getting misty-eyed too even though I didn't vote for him or whatever, and I knew this was purely a collective emotional wave more than anything connected to what I was thinking. I can step back after the fact but there seems to be something to that shared experience that wells up. I never delved into psychology but I'm sure someone's subjected this to analysis.

One of my good friends in high school was really charismatic and the whole 'slain in the Spirit' passed out on the floor was a normal thing to her and I can't doubt what she says but when I went to her church, my lack of outward expression and movement was taken to be something akin to spiritual frigidity or utter lack of faith and led to some very weird prayers being said for my soul, probably out of the best of intentions, but I left feeling a little pissed off nonetheless. When my friends from more Pentecostal backgrounds want to know why others aren't more "into it," I want to say, how do you know that people aren't, and how do you know when someone isn't just showing off?  Who is anyone to say that maybe one's experience of God might be expressed differently? Heck, even when I go see one of my favorite bands play, I might sing along, but I don't move much. I'm just trying to take it all in.

I can't tell if that's just personality or culture, but ever since this whole faith thing went from my parents' religion to my own way of life, it's always been expressed in a way that's still emotional as anything but shot through with a whole lot of thinking, because my weird brain and my gut/heart/soul have a strange and tangled relationship.

I went to a small conservative college for one lonely year and there were people I met who liked the pray in public but sounded phony and canned like a tv preacher or a motivational speaker lecturing us rather than communing with something higher and greater, and others who avoided the microphone but when they did speak aloud to God it actually sounded like they were talking to their best friend who knew them as well as they did themselves. Who am I to judge either heart, there are only my preferences and I know I've been wrong at times.

But I've always had more of an inward meditation than visible expression, not that I don't talk about it, or that it doesn't come out in the artwork I do when I'm home by myself, or drenched in reverb from an electric guitar on Sunday morning, old words resung like Billy Bragg channeling Guthrie, but I don't want to be the focus, I don't want to be the center, and I just put what I do out there, and leave it to others to connect with the divine in the way that they see fit. I don't want to manipulate that, because it's beyond what I understand and what speaks to each of us is so different, and I respect that, and only want to please the only one to which it all matters as it is.

heavens on earth

My church doesn't look like this, though there are highly unrealistic clouds on the ceiling and hand-painted flags of places like Pakistan and Syria on pieces of paper lining the back. It's true that these are just buildings, that the church is the people, but these buildings that I someday hope to see still move me profoundly the way it does when I hear the music of Part or Bach, or read the psalms or Eliot's musings on the divine. Jujol, Gaudi's partner, is responsible for such beauty, and I can't help but envy his sublime visions.