Dis-Spirited

Your carcass lays dispirited

emptied of life

like the bottle in your hand

searching for the Spirit

midst highs that drown

cloaking your suff'ring

dulling the nightmares

 strolling by

You swill with a similar someone

that laughter might rise

and your garbled talk supply

what's missing all the time

Now laying drunk on the  ground

you witness to your flight

and the shallowness of brotherhood

bottled against the Light

*Thoughts of Alan Jones:

  -Can we hope to get away from self-preoccupation altogether?  We can try.  The effort is worth it, because  in seeking to pass through the narrow gate  one begins to learn a little of what it is to love.  It is hard, because it means looking and being temporarily blinded by what one sees. "There be in God, some say, a deep dazzling darkness," wrote a seventeenth-century poet, echoing the earlier tradition of the Eastern Christians.  This darkness forces us to talk about God only in terms of negatives, of what God is not.  When we use positive terms, which we must on occasion, we must remember then that we are actually talking about an idea of God - just as when we see moonlight, we must remind ourselves that we are really seeing the sun's reflected rays.

  -We can only say that God is both unknowable and inexhaustible.  The Christian believes that this unknowable and inexhaustible God has been revealed to us in Jesus Christ, and that it is after his image that we are made. That is a lot to swallow.  To really believe we are made in his image means a revolution in self-understanding.  "I" would have to be understood in terms not only of the life death and resurrection of Jesus; "I" would suddenly become unknowable and inexhaustible, and so would everyone else.  It would means giving up my patterns of knowing and feeling with regard to God and the world.  The implications of this for self-understanding are momentous.  Just as God is "hidden" from us, so too are we "hidden" from ourselves and from each other.

  -Any attempts to trap God in an image, form, or figure is both futile and dangerous; dangerous because God becomes "God" - and terrible things have been and are done in the name of "God".

  -...the formlessness is for the sake of freedom and expansiveness; because the things that matter, like love and truth, shrivel and die when they are held captive too long in an image or idea.