I'm so far down I am beginning to breathe...

I’m afraid I’ve lost the piece of me
I need the most you see
This puzzle is really just about the need
To be somebody

I’m afraid
I’m not all that you see
All along the coast of me
I’m camouflaged, a desert mirage
A nobody

But you came so close and I assumed
You were looking
For the piece of yourself that’s lost
It is the hiding place inside everybody
And though we love to numb the pain
We come to learn that it’s in vain
Pain is our mother
She makes us recognize each other

Sometimes I feel so all alone
Here in this city I call my home
They say, Hey, you’re one of us
Funny, I should feel so anonymous
But I’m drawn to you
And that still small voice is talking too
And that’s the voice that so seldom can get through

You can’t put no bandaid on this cancer
Like a twenty note
For all the things you offer
You need questions
Forget about the answers
Do you really want to die this way?

I thought that we would be
Further along by now
I can’t remember how
I stumbled to this place

I loved you like no one else
On a bad day maybe I thought why bother
I’ve seldom seen so much anger
In a face

I want to do better
I want to try harder
I want to believe
Down to the letter

Jesus
Can you carry us
Across this ocean
Into the arms of forgiveness

I don’t mean to laugh outloud
I’m trying to come clean
Trying to shed my doubt
Maybe I should just keep
My big mouth shut

More often than not
When it comes to you
You want whatever’s not in front of you
Deep down I know this includes me too

So tell me your troubles
Let your pain rain down
I know my job I’ve been around
I invest in the mess
I’m a low cost dumping ground

Trouble is I’m so exhausted
The plot, you see, I think I’ve lost it
I need the grace to find what can’t be found

Emma and I, together.
We are committted to a tempestuous, adventurous, rambunctious exploration of lost innocence and more.
Hopefully that will answer your question.

Exit

I have to leave the city now, she said,
Or dash my soul against my will instead.
I do not wish to have the quiet part of me
That once could rest (the part
That could just be) tossed
Aside and left somewhere
For dead.
Tonight it seems to me
That what some friends call energy
Is nothing more than a phenomenon of nature known as
"Incurable Whirling Disease."
Please, take me far from here, she said,
The buildings sting and echo
With the fumy cries of yellowjacket cars.
I took her hand in mine and said,
I'm thinking of a place now
Where I used to have to tell myself
Aloud,
Those are not clouds,
They're stars.
Copyright 2007, Linford Detweiler

Gentle Wounds

Entertaining visions of a lucid nature
Emotional precision, it's our best behaviour
Rattling the streetcars on forgotten streets
Making a connection with the bittersweet
Crawling into your mind for some radiant reunion
Tapping out the messages that signify communion
Pressed beneath His folded wings
The ground around receding
Feel love's stinging sword cut deep and catch
The joy that's bleeding out of Gentle wounds.

Feel the pang of hunger, feel the new life awaken
Restoring everything that once was taken
Symbolizing agony that made the women weep
Feel love's stinging sword slice deep and catch
The joy that's bleeding out of Gentle wounds.

Bruised and beaten torn apart
The price that's paid for love divine
Can't spare your life don't spare your heart
Just feel the joy that's bleeding out of Gentle wounds.

Gentle wounds, gentle
Gentle wounds, gentle wounds
Gentle wounds, gentle
Gentle wounds.

Dirty wee tramps...

Our Gomar had gone home...Emma and I where just sitting, talking, watching and waiting...it was raining, we were wet.

I had just asked Emma, how do we become a Gomar, without actually becoming a Gomar...how do we become acquainted with their grief? I realise today that what I asked Emma on Thursday night was actually to tell me of Jesus...

There was nothing attractive about Him, nothing to cause us to take a second look. He was looked down on and passed over, a man who suffered, who knew pain firsthand. One look at Him and people turned away. We looked down on Him, thought He was scum. But the fact is, it was our pains He carried— our disfigurements, all the things wrong with us. We thought He brought it on Himself, that God was punishing Him for His own failures. But it was our sins that did that to Him, that ripped and tore and crushed Him—our sins! He took the punishment, and that made us whole. Through His bruises we get healed.

A car with four girls came down the street...as they drove past, they slowed down, winding down the window of their car...'dirty wee tramps'...they shouted. Ive never been called a dirty wee tramp before. As the girls drove off, Charlie came round the corner...he wondered what I was offering and how much it would cost...I told him I wasn't working, he said fair enough. As this lonely older gentleman walked off, Emma and I offered him conversation...he wondered how much that cost too...I could hear his silent pleading, I could feel his desperation. His desolate sorrow echoed in my head. I didn't know how to respond to Charlie...communication had failed me...any efforts to reach across this great gulf where beyond me.

To crush Him with pain. The plan was that He give Himself as an offering for sin so that He would see life come from it—life, life, and more life.
And God's plan will deeply prosper through Him.
Out of that terrible travail of soul, He will see that it's worth it and be glad He did it.
Through what He experienced, The righteous one, The servant, will make many "righteous ones," as He himself carries the burden of their sins.

Those girls in that car, looked down on us and thought we were scum. It surprised me how much could be conveyed through their words. The emotional territory of a marginalised people becoming very real to me. May it be our Gomar's pain that we carry— May Your plan Father deeply prosper through us, Your dirty wee tramps.

Excuse me, we are making a program about prostitution.

Anne Widdencombe. Wednesday night.

"Excuse me, we are making a program about prostitution"

"STOP THE SEX TRADE...I am sending out a blunt and unbending message...but when you see the problem first hand you will understand why...pleasant leafy part of ? popular with families but sadly also popular with a very different type of person...women who sell themselves for sex...women like these...shameless, desperate and probably on drugs...blatantly out on the streets, all hours of the day and night, with no regard for the decent families that live here..."

"Are you Colette? Are you doing it again?"

"There has got to more to life than this?"

"I would love to talk with Colette about this sorry life she has chosen"

"1 in 20 men have used the services of a prostitute...that's a lot of punters"

"Initially i did it out of curiosity, I thought it was one of those rights of passage that perhaps any curious young man should find out..."
(Piers Hernu)

"Did you think about their lives when you are using them?"

"Am I really taking part in someone else's downfall...or am I just entering into an honest contract between someone who is selling and some one who is buying?"
(Piers Hernu)

"You are in your mid twenties...you are a young woman, you have got your life ahead of you, child bearing years ahead of you, opportunities ahead of you...don't you sometimes wake up in the morning and think, that's it, no more, I am going to get clean, I am going to live normally..."

"You go home, your mother WILL want you...she gave birth to you...ring your mum..."

"Ive got a feeling we will say goodbye to you and will be on the streets tonight...I don't want you on the streets tonight...I want you safe tonight..."

"this place is teeming with prostitutes"

I don't think I can narrate any more of this documentary...I don't know if I want to.
I cannot deny the sorded reality of prostitution exposed here, but I shudder at the language used to describe, label and inform.

If I came out of my front door and found a woman lying there with a needle in her...I wonder what I would do? I wonder would I screw up my face in disgust, in ignorant pity and leave her there in a heap of her own bad choices?

Or would I kneel down, lift her head out of her vomit, wipe her hair back from her face and carry her through an open door?

When i look at me, do i see you Gomar?

"I wonder what the homecoming of the human spirit will look like? Will it be like, as Father O’Donohue describes:

‘As stillness in stone to silence is wed

As a river flows in ideal sequence

As the moon absolves the dark of distance

As the breath of light awakens colour

As spring rain softens the earth with surprise

As the ocean dreams to the joy of the dance

As clay anchors a tree in light and wind

As twilight fills night with bright horizons

May beauty await you at home beyond.'

I’ve been trying to get my head round the Almighty...I live journeying this circle...went to church last night...the only conclusion my thoughts have given me is that the more I know the less I understand.

Life, with all its concurrent struggles and painful beauty, has brought me to the point where all the things I thought I knew I am now having to learn again. In the long run (and the long run is all there is), when everything is said and done, James was right; by their fruit shall we know the truthful ones.

Shaped by the practice of church culture it just may be that I (and I don’t think I’m alone) have limited the context of the road to God. What do I mean by that? I mean that we have made God way too small. Mystery is something sadly lacking in Western Christian spirituality, sure there are pockets of it, but they are pockets at best. Put bluntly the church’s response to Modernity put pay to that. We became the finest example of a culture preoccupied with answers rather than one who would embrace questions and mystery, and I would propose this is one of the major reasons as to why many people in the post-modern, post-Christian West struggle to connect with our Institution, and so consequently God.

Where do I invest my love, passion and energy?
I may go, but I don't live in the margins – the edge – partly due to the fear of what I will find, or is it because I am so conditioned that these are not the kind of landscapes that good Christian folk should be traversing.

So often we are not looking...and because of that we become convinced that it is wrong to look. Unfortunately this is rather indicative of the lack of any mysterious, creative, imaginative, incarnate and relational connection that may possibly exist with those perceived to be outside.

In reality we fail so often to authentically allow God’s presence in many a marginalised person’s world. Examples of this are littered in the Scriptures. I will vindicate my statement with the example of Peter. I was reading in the car before church, I started in Acts 10. His reluctance to partake of specific foods was consistent with the Jewish tradition of holiness. This grew from a separatist approach to piety – that which divided, in church speak, the clean from the unclean. Here was a man who has followed the Christ in a way beyond even my imagination – but who didn’t realise the implications of the message of this same Christ until he met Cornelius.

I want to always be rediscovering the mystery of what it means to be a friend of tax collectors, prostitutes, and drunkards. This will be messy and will not happen without a certain degree of theological tension. True holiness, real passion for humanity should not keep us from the margins of mystery – rather it should drive us into them - saturated in the faith of the one we follow. For within the margins we find God very much alive in places many of us would say He doesn’t belong.

‘some may think this is blasphemy, but I believe it to be true. God lies here beside you in the gutter, while grace, like a mother, holds you.’

I love these words of Stocki."

Before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear.

Isaiah 65:24

My mind is still withdrawing from this unique community that I call home. Where I feel such a sense of belonging. Funny how I nearly need to switch from one community to another. Just getting used to it because I feel that generally, I am more accepted by people there.

Beautiful imperfection

You understand me now
If sometimes you see I am mad
Don't you know that no one alive can always be an angel?
When everything goes wrong you see some bad

It describes who I am and what I want to be. It describes a Gomar, who she is, and what He wants her to be.

I know a lady, who lives in a very beautiful home.
Her house was full of the most expensive things a man could own.
But her heart was empty,
so very empty, deep within.
I know a lady who humbled herself before her Lord and King.
Her heart was willing to bow down and surrender everything, everything.
Her heart is full now, righteousness, peace and joy dwell within, Halleluiah!
She heard him say
Come unto me all ye who labor
Ye heavy laden, come and find rest.
Cause if you loose your life in this world
You will find new life in Me
Are you willing to give up the good things
for the best?

"So I'm just thinking to myself, right...
I'm thinking that John Lennon said,
'Imagine there's no heaven...
'But I'm thinking,
'Get lost, John - I think I
might imagine there is'....

I'm thinking of a place where nobody notices
their nakedness
and species aren't endangered.
Where you've got all shapes and sizes...
but no one great or small.
Where people meet you
and don't even notice your bone structure
or your colour
because they're so struck by your soul.
Where they hear your spirit not your accent
and everyone knows that everyone's only a mere immortal.

You won't have to pray because you can talk.
There is no need for churches,mosques or temples.
No one tells you how to live your life
because no one needs to.
There'll be no-streets of gold
or pearly gates or harps,
no big dad god and little boy god
on matching thrones.
No regrets
but a place where every time you bump into a
"why"
you can feel a "because".

I'm imagining a place called heaven.
A place where you can
cling through the air on wings like eagles,
run but never get tired."

(Martin Wroe - When You Haven't Got A Prayer: A journalist talks to God, Lion Publishing, 1997)

'The nature of love is this, that it attracts to beauty and links the unbeautiful with the beautiful.'
(Marsilio Ficino)

"While beauty gladdens our hearts, it makes us lonely too for what cannot be. True beauty is woven through the heart of life and is ever engaged with forces of ignorance, darkness, ugliness and negativity; yet domination and power are not beauty's way. beauty works from within these conflicts of forces and her brightening may or may not appear.Where beauty seems absent she is often hidden and still at work in the slow industry of transformation. So much of beauty is not immediately apparent and indeed it could take a long time before it becomes visible. it often takes a lot of struggle and committed attention and generosity, even sacrifice, in order to create beauty. This work of beauty is slow and patient; it is the transformation through which the darkness of suffering eventually glimmers with the learned refinement of true radiance.Ths soul that struggles for the emergence of beauty reaches towards God and labours on that threshold between visible and invisible, time and eternity."

emma read to me on thursday night past...to you Emma thank you.

Isaiah 53
1 Who has believed our message?

To whom has the Lord revealed his powerful arm?

2 My servant grew up in the Lord’s presence like a tender green shoot,

like a root in dry ground.

There was nothing beautiful or majestic about his appearance,

nothing to attract us to him.

3 He was despised and rejected—

a man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief.

We turned our backs on him and looked the other way.

He was despised, and we did not care.
4 Yet it was our weaknesses he carried;

it was our sorrows that weighed him down.

And we thought his troubles were a punishment from God,

a punishment for his own sins!

5 But he was pierced for our rebellion,

crushed for our sins.

He was beaten so we could be whole.

He was whipped so we could be healed.

6 All of us, like sheep, have strayed away.

We have left God’s paths to follow our own.

Yet the Lord laid on him

the sins of us all.
7 He was oppressed and treated harshly,

yet he never said a word.

He was led like a lamb to the slaughter.

And as a sheep is silent before the shearers,

he did not open his mouth.

8 Unjustly condemned,

he was led away.

No one cared that he died without descendants,

that his life was cut short in midstream.

But he was struck down

for the rebellion of my people.

9 He had done no wrong

and had never deceived anyone.

But he was buried like a criminal;

he was put in a rich man’s grave.
10 But it was the Lord’s good plan to crush him

and cause him grief.

Yet when his life is made an offering for sin,

he will have many descendants.

He will enjoy a long life,

and the Lord’s good plan will prosper in his hands.

11 When he sees all that is accomplished by his anguish,

he will be satisfied.

And because of his experience,

my righteous servant will make it possible

for many to be counted righteous,

for he will bear all their sins.

12 I will give him the honors of a victorious soldier,

because he exposed himself to death.

He was counted among the rebels.

He bore the sins of many and interceded for rebels.

He was counted among the rebels.
He bore the sins of many and interceded for rebels.

He was counted among the rebels.
He bore the sins of many and interceded for rebels.

He was counted among the rebels.
He bore the sins of many and interceded for rebels.

He was counted among the rebels.
He bore the sins of many and interceded for rebels.


Some men think they can own their lives.
But these men, they never make any sacrifice.
Demons they are on her trail.
She is standing at crossroads, at the crossroads of hell.

She looks to the left then she will look to the right.
There are hands that grab her on every side.
All these people think she gets her price,
At which she will sell all that is hers.

Does money rule when all else fails?
Go sell your soul and keep your shell.

Some say the devil be a mystical thing.
A fool? A liar? A conjurer? A thief?
I say the devil was the man that pulled up beside me this week.
He was a fool, he was a liar, a conjurer and a thief.
He tried to tell me what I wanted
He tried to tell me what I need...
All in the space of two minutes,
all through a wound down window.
I was standing at a crossroads.
He was parked on the crossroads .

Standing at the point Gomar,
The road it cross you down.
What is at your back?
Which way do you turn?
Who will come to find you first?
Your devils or my God?

Alone

Heleen Vriesendorp

No Rose Without Thorn

Heleen Vriesendorp

Overblown Roses

She held one up, twirling it in her hand
as if to show me how the world began
and ended in perfection. I was stunned.
How could she make a rose so woebegone,
couldn’t silk stand stiff? And how could a child,
otherwise convinced of her mother’s taste,
know what to think? It’s overblown, she smiled,
I love roses when they’re past their best.

‘Overblown roses’, the words swam in my head,
making sense as I suddenly saw afresh
the rose now, the rose ahead: where a petal
clings to a last breath; where my mother’s flesh
and mine, going the same way, may still
be seen as beautiful, if these words are said.

Mini Khalvati 2006