christian sex cult

As a former member of the Christian Sex Cult, I highly recommend reading and reflecting on this article: http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=226.

Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen seems like a good soundtrack for today. It is rainy and sad in Seattle, and yet, I'm murmuring still...

If it be your will
if there is a choice
let the rivers fill
let the hills rejoice
Let your mercy spill
On all these burning hearts in hell,
if it be your will
to make us well.

In times like these, all we can do is ask for mercy to draw us close and bind us tight so that we can stand - somehow - in these rags of light.



I recommend Leonard Cohen's Famous Blue Raincoat and, of course, If It Be Your Will - haunting, beautiful, rich.

empty

As we celebrate comings and goings, death finds us in a courageous dance like embers in a subsiding flame suddenly breathed to life. I want to dance. I don’t want to miss this. Yet, there is a sudden sense that the stage is shifting beneath my feet until almost unrecognizable. I never knew this could be so lonely.

In six weeks I will be married. At the moment, though, the more monumental shift seems to be that in six weeks I’ll be moving. Marriage feels natural. Moving feels terrifying – like a violent birthing – and yet it is also exciting as I know that my move into the unknown is preceded and motivated out of love, faith, hope and joy.

Perhaps I am less terrified as I am sad. It hurts to leave what is known, and yet rapidly feels foreign and fading: the people, the places, the tall mountains and dark soil. It will never be the same again, and the call – always – is to keep moving, further up and further in, to travel deeper and wider than I ever thought possible. But how this transience aches. Nothing lasts forever.

Still, I have to get on with the business of life. It is heart wrenching work: surrendering to this ebb and flow.

Why this blog?

Writing is my way of trying to touch that which is impossible to touch, to hold that which is impossible to hold. It is frustrating, ineffable, fragmentary. In the end, it is only a momentary trace, a shadow, a flicker, whose meaning is endlessly translated and transmitted until it is no longer recognizable. Yet, it still somehow seems worth it to me to put life into words, to put my life into words; though, when I return, I find a terrible emptiness. This emptiness is both friend and stranger, and yet it is through fragmentary words that I draw comfort, beauty, grace, clarity, courage – no matter the pain. Wisdom miraculously appearing. And because I know she is not mine to hold, I only want to share her.