Jumbled.

I'm completely making this entry up as I go along. (Why should this entry be any different?)

I thought I'd set the standard of profundity for this year's blog by discussing the contents of my solitary afternoon in my Brooklyn apartment. I'd like to make the following points...

1. Playing by Heart is an astoundingly bad movie.

2. I cried anyhow.

3. Despite the banality and bathos of the film, Jon Stewart as a romantic lead is a stroke of genius, and why can't they do that more often? *obligatory swoon*

3.1 How can Gillian Anderson score this calibre of leading men, and remain so solidly B-list?

Thank you.

I am currently listening to a CD entitled:

"CD 4 U ♥ TONY"

from one of my stalkers. It is a very good mix CD with a great version of the ballad Matty Groves sung by Joni Mitchell, and also the incongruous, blasphemous, but astonishingly apt "What if God Smoked Cannabis"

...

Oh yes, now for the Quaker content. I went to both early and late meeting this morning. I am feeling so tremendously lazy at the moment I don't even want to start on my reactions and all, but I'll give it a wee go anyhow, because I'm just that dutiful.

The most important thing that hit me, I think, was when I was sitting in meeting thinking about the command we have to love one another. This is something I can get a bit arch about, feeling as if I have an infinite capacity to love. I thought, how long can we dare to ignore this command? Who, I thought, do we think is meant by this command - Osama Bin Ladin, some blue-eyed orphan we see on TV? Then I began thinking about some people I can't stand (well, I'm not ALL sweetness and light) feeling strongly the temptations of hermitism, and remembering that line attributed to Fox: "I love that of God in him, but very little else." and I was thinking...

I say that to myself all the time as if it is a kind of license to be annoyed and disgusted by people. What exactly IS "that of God" in this or that person? I realized that I was visualizing it as some clean, glowing, yellow ball of light floating just over their foreheads. Unthreatening, disembodied, undemanding. Just an abstract little halo that I could say I loved, and leave the rest. I realized that this was hogwash, and my stomach turned over. It's so easy for me to have abstract love for everyone from a newborn baby to an exhumed evil dictator. But a real, bloody, in the flesh heart-love? That I reserve for very few, if any.

I remember having a temper tantrum before God when I was a young teenager, and very lonely, spitting God's disembodied abstract love back at Him. What good are moonbeams like that when all you need are a pair of arms?

I wrote a very sad little poem named Gepetto's daughter when I was 18, a mixture of children's fairy-tales Pinocchio and The Velveteen Rabbit about what it might mean to love a real person for the first time, instead of all the millions of daydreams and fairytales I had loved, and one bit went...

Puppet, we will barter all these
blue light specials
from an old blue fairy,
for you, real boy.

You are a real boy.

Flesh and blood breed fleshly fear
Real brings broken whiskers...

It was a slightly overwrought way of discovering before I understood it what it means to try and love the reality rather than the abstraction, whether it's a life partner, a friend, an enemy, or a God. Every time I come back to it, it is a rude shock. I am dying to raise my face to a celestial idol-God, ask Him to lift me up, take me away....disembody me...and all the time I am learning that often I must stoop down to Him, in the oozy, smelly, weepy primordial muck of us all. Just that sentence can show you how good I am at this.

I do rapture quite well. It is this knowledge that is making me so beastly strict with myself in opening up the religious sensations I may have. I can forfeit a true knowledge of God, what I say I want, by substituting my own glowing halo for the face of flesh He has taken on. All of this is not a matter of "I must do this to be good" but - "I must do this for my own good." As long as I refuse to love the incarnated God here with me, I will never truly experience the spiritual God. My worship will continue to be empty, and I will continue to be disappointed by the emotional idols I build in my imaginations of Him. How many times have I thought in despair "But just last week God was so REAL to me and now I can't feel anything!" and thought I was being abandoned? It always turns out to have been some unsustainable fantasy God that I had cooked up out of enough eye-squinching and soul-straining. If I truly hunger for the Real God, I know where I have to find Him.

When I think of Jesus, that troublemaker, I think, Why? There's a lot of the Gnostic about me - half the time I wish He had stayed Up There, where I could handle Him - then I'd know where He was and I wouldn't have to trouble myself with the sniveling reality that humanity (and I include myself, of course) can be. But when you truly think of it, where would that leave us? If I didn't have to find God in my fellow man - if there were no God buried somewhere in side each of them calling out to me, would I spare them a thought? Would they spare me any love? We'd all be lost in abstraction and that pale moonlit love that I found so unsatisfying as a child.

Even that last bit is off the mark - God is not buried somewhere inside these people I must struggle to love - He's in every cell, gesture and tic, in every phrase that makes me bristle, every expression that makes me wince, in the very things that irritate me into a state of confusion. It is these very things that I must learn to love, or it will go badly for me.

Drat!

The horrifying image of St. Francis scooping the pus from a leper's sores into his mouth in love, because he found God there, still nausiates me, but isn't that what I must do, metaphorically? My worries that trying to love someone I find distasteful will be an exercise in pride are shattered by this idea. In this shocking example there is no pose, no room for pomposity. What kind of transformation of soul would be necessary to reach that level of humility, passion, lunacy of love? St. Francis didn't MAKE himself do that, he was compelled to, by the strength and reality of his passion. I can only pray, because I DO have to force myself - although I define myself first and foremost as a loving person - am very proud of my lovingness, in fact, I have no overwhelming bottomless well of divine love that makes me react that way automatically. How am I to find this capacity for Love?

I have often prayed, "Fill me, O Lord!" and then, later, I realized that I was filled - filled with my own memories, resentments, predjudices, pain, anger, experiences, judgements. And so I prayed, "Empty me, O Lord!" waiting for some divine dumptruck to come and cart it all away, and leave me ready to receive Him - I remember the words from Ezekiel:

"A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you; and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh."

But rereading in context, I see this promise is part of a covenant - in fact, five verses later -

"And you shall remember your wicked ways, and your doings that were not good: and your iniquities, and your wicked deeds shall displease you.

It is not for your sakes that I will do this, saith the Lord God, be it known to you: be confounded, and ashamed at your own ways"

I see it is a long process of repentance on my side...as well as grace on His side. Bit by bit, all of those things filling up my heart must be transformed- because they cannot be taken away without doing violence to reality. My new prayer must be "Transform me, O Lord!"

The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.
Pearl S. Buck