From a personal standpoint, I may be seeing some light in the darkness.

Not a lot to say about it (I’m still working through what’s going on) but here are some pictures.

An abstract picture of Christmas lights

A light burning across the back yard

Monroe Street at Night

I’ve been playing with doing some long exposure pictures lately; this is one of them. It’s Monroe Street, the main street that runs through campus, and is about a 7 second exposure. (It was cold so I wasn’t as diligent as I should have been about tracking my settings.) This is how I feel about my faith at the moment. I can see where it was. I can see the trails left by others’ faith, and I remember when I was there. But I don’t seem to have much of my own.

Or maybe I do. “I believe in God, and I believe that God believes in Claude …” or something like that. I still believe in many things, but I don’t seem to be able to make them real to myself anymore. I can recite the Nicene Creed and mean it; I do believe in one God, I do believe that Jesus was born of a virgin, that he suffered and died and rose again. Currently though, it feels like I believe those things the way I believe that Eisenhower landed at Normandy in 1944, or that Abraham Lincoln gave the Gettysburg address. I know they’re true, but it doesn’t feel as though they mean anything.

I want them to mean something. I want to feel God’s presence the way I have in the past. I want to feel his love. I want to hear his voice. I want to feel … something. “You can treat me like a dog, if you’ll make me feel what others feel …”

The sands of the desert were cruel and stark
They burned in the day and they chilled in the dark
On that vast battleground, on the eve of the fight
The candle that burns inspired them that night

The candle that burns
In the chapel will be
Left to burn where it stands
In a world that is free

John Edmond’s song, “The Candle That Burns” is about valor, courage and perseverance. He uses the image of a candle in a chapel to stand for the bravery of Rhodesian forces in WWII, and as a call to further bravery in the fight against terrorism. Like many of his songs, it’s maudlin in places (“Do not cry little one/for no one will take/the candle that burns/on your first birthday cake”) but I can’t get away from that image of the candle burning in the chapel. I imagine a chapel in a medieval cathedral, a single candle on the altar, flickering in the drafts. The light dances on the walls, now advancing, now retreating, giving glimpses of the chapel but never revealing it all.

A single candle. Never quite going out, but never fully illuminating the room either.

I think that’s where I am. I don’t have enough faith to shine brightly. I don’t have enough faith to illuminate the room. Sometimes, I don’t even have enough faith to pray.

Perhaps my candle has gone out. I hope it hasn’t, or at least, I wish I could hope that it hasn’t.

Foggy Street

Theta Pond in the fog

(and by “cold” I mean “unseasonably warm weather”)

The cat (we’re tentatively calling him Mr. Kitty) came in for about 15 minutes today. I was going to feed him this morning, and instead scooped him up and brought him inside. We sat on the couch for a while and I patted him, which he seemed to enjoy.  Then he explored the house for a bit.

I was shooting without flash to avoid startling him.

 

He went in the back room where we iron clothes and laid down by the basket for a while.

Cat and laundry basket - a still life

I then took him into the bedroom so he could say hello to my wife. He appeared to enjoy the bed a lot. Then he was ready to go out again and have breakfast.

I think maybe he’s going to let me move him inside, if I don’t go too fast.

Following an oil truck down a dirt road

A paint horse grazing

An abandoned farmhouse

Barbed wire

Railway bridge through the trees

Rising sun
Shower good
Cat on porch
Wants some food
Walk to work
Chilly air
Watch the leaves
Say a prayer
Make the coffee
Try to think
Pour a cup full
Take a drink
Time for work now
Can’t be bored
Time to honor
My only Lord

Labora et cogita sunt ora

Prepare you sweet flowers
For winter advances
And drink well the sunlight
That touches your forms
Draw strength from the earth
And repay her with beauty
For the dark days are coming
Oh, and they’ll do you harm
When the chill eastern winds
Replace summer’s breezes
And the long summer days
Are remembered no more …
–Silly Wizard, “The Chill Eastern Winds“

The past few weeks have not been good weeks for me. Metaphorically at least, the chill eastern winds have been blowing through my life, and I’m not quite sure what to do about them – or if there’s anything I can, or indeed, should do about them. I’m sick of so much that I see around me – fights among believers, foolish doctrines, American wastefulness, lies and hatred and viciousness. And I’m even more sick of what I see in me, the desire for justice perverted into the desire for revenge, the wish for reconciliation that becomes the wish for my way to prevail, the lies and the hatred and the viciousness that so easily fill me. Greed, desires for things I don’t need and can’t afford, all of this fills me at times and I can’t seem to break free. According to my Pentecostal brethren, it’s probably because I don’t have enough faith. If I could just really believe, just this once, if I could say “I believe Lord!” without following up with “Oh please, help Thou my unbelief!” maybe things would be better. But I doubt it.

I haven’t written for several days now because I haven’t known what to say. Every time I try to put together a post about the turbulence in my head, the waves overwhelm me and I don’t know how to finish it. What lesson can I draw? What parallels lie between me and, say, Peter? Or Paul. (I like Paul, if only because he too has the spiritual gift of sarcasm.) So how do I post about the confusion in my thoughts, the confusion that makes my prayers chase themselves in circles like wounded dogs tearing at each other?

Michael Spencer over at Internet Monk has, as he so often does, said it better than I can :”Christian writing on the internet has the tendency to sound as if it is always coming from the warm glow of the study, with drippings of devotional gold appearing on the page after hours of prayer and meditation. I’d judge that to be, almost universally, a myth, and I’m not much on mythologies in my Christianity. There are times that one may be writing out of boredom, other times out of emptiness or despair, and even holding onto the crumbling edge between faith and unbelief. There will be times I will write from a season of joyful usefulness and other times I am writing in the slop of my own sinful pigpen.”

Today, it’s from the slop, and it’s sloppy. Today, I had a decent prayer time, although it was far too short, and far too filled with “Lord, please give me this”. Why was it short and self-centered? Why isn’t my time spent with God better? Because I am deeply stained with sin and it colors everything I do. These past weeks, I’ve been angry. Angry with a lot of people, angry to the point that it’s starting to show in ways I thought it never would again. Angry so that my thoughts are dark thoughts of hurting and torture and murder. Angry.

Some of my anger is justified; people I know have done some very wrong things, but I am doing a worse one by allowing my desire to see justice done to become a burning lust for revenge. I don’t want an eye for an eye; I want to drive my enemy before me and hear the lamentations of his women, as Conan puts it.

My enemy? These are people who are my brothers and sisters, not my enemy. They are not my foe. They are not even my opponents. They are followers of Christ who have fallen, because they, like me, are deeply and completely stained with the mire of our Fall.

Here’s where I should forgive them, and I wish I could. Or at least, I wish I wanted to. Maybe I just wish that I really wished I wanted to.

Father of us all
Who lives surrounded by boundless fields of grace
May we all see Your name lifted up and made even more holy
May Your rulership flood through us and our surroundings
May Your desires be accomplished here in our lives and homes as they are in yours
Father, I thank You for all You’ve given me, for sun and food and work and play and friends and family
I ask humbly that You continue to care for us
Forgive me my sins in the same way that I forgive others (and oh, teach me to forgive others the way You forgive me)
You are the ruler
You have all power
To you be all glory
Until time itself ceases
And there is only You

Trees in their brightness

Autumn Leaf

Tree burning with color

A leaf among its evergreen brethren

I found out this past week that some good friends are getting divorced.

It’s a hard thing to learn, that a marriage that looked strong and solid and good was not really any of those things; that the relationship that you thought you saw was, in many ways, a sham, covering up a lot of distressing weaknesses. She says she still loves him, she just can’t live with him. He’s got issues of control and anger and has been psychologically abusive (it seems) for the whole time they’ve been married. I always knew that he was given to throwing tantrums over things that he couldn’t control, but hadn’t thought about what it might be like to live with that …

I hurt for my friends, both of them. He’s facing the loss of a support system he relies on, and a serious blow to his pride. As someone who takes great pride in fixing things, in making stuff work, this public failure has to hurt incredibly. Whether he’s capable of realizing his responsibility or not is likely to have great effects not only on him but on our friendship as well; if he is unwilling to accept responsibility, he’ll slide more towards the unpleasant side of his personality, and will become someone I don’t wish to know. She’s looking at raising three kids without their father, at suddenly being alone and on her own. The relationship is now broken, and how much, if any part of it can be salvaged remains to be seen.

I pray for them, for reconciliation, for a change in behavior. I pray for trust renewed, and especially for trust justified. I don’t know what else to do, and I wish I did. I’m also a fixer, someone who likes to make things whole again. It’s difficult for me to admit that I can’t, and that (in cases like this) I shouldn’t even try. So I pray, and hope, and wish.