Advent 2019: When Bamboozlement and Conformity Assault the Senses

It is so easy to lapse into thinking that everything is mist. That it's all a subtle long-lived lie. The way things are, they way we are, it's just all laid out and waiting. And we more or less stray within these borders of acceptable tolerance. From trailer parks to Beverly Hills. From career-homelessness to real estate developer. The addict to the accountant.

And maybe it is just a plague some of us endure. Some tribulation of the mind like sleepwalking. Sleepliving? The curse of the conscious, or the overly aware. Sensitive to things like repetition and command, expectation and culture. We might not push back on these if they weren’t forced.

We rub up against the normalcy of life and recoil at its redundancy. It's nothing against tradition or familiarity. And practice makes perfect. But that cuts both ways. We can perfect becoming inhuman.

And for some, there’s a visceral response to the omnipresent expectation of conformity.

I say conformity, not similarity. Conformity is sameness for the sake of efficiency. Similarity is a flourish of expression given the same means.

So conformity is death to the free mind and spirit, and assimilation serves no great purpose other than production.

And I often wonder if this is the mist. The need to be the same, to be efficient, so that someone else can reap profit and power.

Maybe this is the root cause of a dreamlike wandering through a tepid and absurd world where people take life away for things like new shoes or fossil fuel. Where entire systems exist to preserve stratification. Invisible and also visible bondage.

Do the colors seem faded? Or is it simply that they are familiar, and therefore no longer brilliant to us? Washed away by pixels and fiber optics, living inside a screensaver. Real like a projection is real. A rendering of something, but not the actual thing.

Is the candle burning? I smell the ozone and smoke from a match struck. I feel the heat when my hand is closed around the flame. It feels real. Like maybe I should wrap my whole self around this small burning thing that looks like a promise. If I listen closely I can hear the flame whip the air.

If I lean in, I can almost taste emancipation.

Advent 2019: When We Burn the Tide and Outshine the Sun

The lighthouse was swept away years ago. Tide and turbulence gnashing at the granite, jawing at the stone seat. Gulls, restless and pitching on drafts around the sentry.

And why were we there? To watch, no doubt. Watching the watcher.

The grass and thatch atop the small island overrun by the waters. Steel sea. Steel sky. The deep surging against this monolith. Wave by wave. Her lamp, the pulsing glow, exhaling in bursts of light between crests and crashes. The gasping brilliant beam, shot across a breaking expanse. An ember and glow, a patch of illumination fading below a boiling frothing tide.

For what it’s worth, she never sank. The sea simply took her.

And now, holding the same light, that same burning, we survey the same waters. The very darkness meaning to hold us under.

Those same dark waters often covering us. Roiling. Breakers slapping at bare skin. Faces streaked with salt and spray.

We lift our arms. Lamps high. Water rising. Mouths shut. Eyes ahead.

If faith is a flame still breathing in the damp heavy tempest of time,

If love is a beacon still jubilant amidst the surging sea of loss,

If trust is a triumph in the diaspora of the not yet,

Then the lamp is still burning, regardless of our depth.

We'll turn the ocean into fire and rend the world with its light, outshine the sun, burn the tide.

Advent 2019: When Hope Looks Ragged and Raw

This is some ragged hope.

Still breathing by some miracle. Dragged through hell. Clawed it's way back from the grave more times than we care to remember. Up through earth and root and stone. Through social anxiety, failed marriages, lost children. Trips to the ER. Envelopes stamped with "Past-due". Through riots and brutality. Through violence. Loss. Incineration.

This is no wished-upon star. This is no delicate murmured prayer.

This is the flogged hope that comes to us, rises to us, that is us, that is the spirit of the somehow-I'm-still-alive.

This is prophetic hope with a spine rubbed raw from all the carried crosses. Broken backs from carrying the truth to power. From marching to be seen, yelling to be heard, bleeding to be known. Blood the color of royalty.

This is the buried hope that was beneath all things. That was planted deeply. The darkness of the earth pressing it into a new thing. A burning thing. Compressed fear, rage, and promise.

Ignition.

This hope is the flare and flame. Refusal to go quietly into the night.

Some rebel, this hope. Some specter of what should have been extinguished. Buried alive. Returned. Ignited. A burning thing.

Sister, don't you know that resurrections and revolutions are heat and fire - the same light?

Brother, don't you know that saviors and rebels are buried and broken - the same indignation?

This burning breathing hope comes swaddled in grave clothes. Reborn. Rebuking the reaper. Refusing the sentence. Rebelling. Reclaiming.

This is the rising hope.

No candle, are we. No flickering flame. No spark.

We are the bright fiery tide.