Longest Night

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In this time of preparing our hearts for the coming of the light, we notice the darkness around us.  As we await the birth of a sacred innocence powerful enough to change everything we lament the dis-eases that persist. In the midst of socially acceptable saccharin illusions of hope we called together a small group of counter-culture companions on the journey in a series of three evenings called Loss, Lament, and Letting go.

The Christ Child was born on the fringe of a global Empire. His coming was foretold and yet unknown to his own people. They had not seen a miracle since the temple candles that burned without oil six generations earlier. The customs that once held together the tribe, the family, and body and soul were now supplanted by an armed economy swathed in a religion of priviledged power. Their own faith had been seduced by “the way things are” into a passive, safe, spiritualized conformity.

The coming of the Christ was announced to all - but the only ones who heard it were stargazers and shepherds – awake to the night’s voice.

And so, with our small group of companions, we dared look into the growing dark. We spent time sharing what lay heavy on our hearts and the despair that can deafen  our listening souls.

The following is my offering to the group – combined with Jo’s – which we share with you now.

God who is weak

God who doesn’t know

God who cries and wails with us

God without answers

God how I hate the silence, the dark, the questions, the insecurities that bind me

God how I hate this tide of conservative fear that cuts and sweeps and smothers the social good.

I am terrified of our estrangement from the very life force that is constant on this gorgeous planet where we may find ourselves.  Daily I monitor on line the encroachment of radioactivity from Fukushima into the Pacific.  The nausea deepens. 

No bad words are bad enough to use!

I mourn losses – the blindness that affects us, the crazy climate we now know, the black violence erupting from the cold white alienating violence in Ferguson, the Israeli squeeze on Palestine, the on-going chain-store style militarization of the world by the U.S.. All in the name of a peace that makes enemies out of desperate and angry people who need bread and not bombs.

How many replacements for real Love are there?  Christmas is a nightmare – Satan’s Claws.  I try to skitter out of that dark denial with some hopeful jingle…How has the birth of the truly human, which is as divine as any existent thing, been so defiled?

Across the country, across the globe, there is a tightening of public purses in the name of fiscal restraint that serves to fatten the Golden Calf.

This tide, this wave, this cancer of apathy and cynicism and fear smothers me too.

God make me a fish

who can swim in the dark silent waters

and breathe in the worst of our natures.

And God let me be of a school of such fish.

May we together

            discover courage

            discover the belly laughs

            discover in the midst of what’s failing

some ways to adapt, evolve, exist until this tide turns

            as it must.

We breathe under water - by grace and on purpose. We breathe in the terror and dread. Inside our bodies the sacred alchemical healing we are all born with happens - and we breathe out our ecstatic exaltation of being alive and a conduit of the love that connects every thing.

Already that tide is spending its last.

breaking on the rocks of time’s give and take

and the moon will pull back

those merciless waters

to reveal the naked truth

We need one another.

In our enemies hearts lives our salvation.