Holy – Page 6

Holy Ground! Come No Closer!

Monday, December 6, 2021

This Could Be

The Hermit’s Holy Ground,

If One is Faithful

And Ears to Hear and Eyes to See.

Exodus 3:5

Then he said, ‘Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.’

Hebrews 12:28

Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us give thanks, by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe.

Words of Grace For Today

It was 2 am, and every sensible person was asleep or working the graveyard shift. Not Porgy. An alcoholic for decades with more than enough DUI’s to prove it, was drinking with his friends and when they all left at midnight he kept up by himself on the way home. At home he grabbed the left over beer and shifted from his pickup truck to his jeep. He set out to ‘run the muck around’ on crown land, except it was a foot and a half deep with snow. The better the challenge and the more fun.

He had toured all through the regular routes and left the run out to the hermit’s place for last. At 2 am his headlights off he winds onto the high road, now no longer on crown land for a ways, and follows the tracks that wind around an old basement filled with garbage and 20 year old trees, past the blocked off road above the illegal campsite sitting just 10 feet from the water of the lake, a road that can still be walked and from which the best views of sunset and fishers are enjoyed and captured by the hermit photographer. As he rounds the old deserted and abandoned camper and add-a-shack for a wood stove he guns the engine to ensure he wakes up the sleeping hermit and 50 yards later drives right through a wire that the hermit setup to slow down quads stealing wood from him. Up in the hermit’s wood yard Porgy’s jeep suddenly dies. It just stops. There Porgy sits, tries to turn the key to start the jeep but everything is black, dead, quiet.

The hermitage is holy ground. (Porgy has forgotten everything about ‘removing his sandals’ or giving God God’s due. God reminds Porgy by disabling his old jeep.)

Porgy has heard the ground is holy and not given it much credence. Now, completely dark, shut down silent, Porgy reconsiders. A light flashes down out of the sky. Porgy jumps out of his skin and prays earnestly for the first time since the last time he was drunk, “God save me!”

God has found a way to ‘speak’ to Porgy, even in his drunken haze.

It’s actually a military helicopter on an exercise, testing electronic surveillance, that God has put to use. Knowing all about Porgy’s DUI’s and alcoholism, the helicopter crew has been following his truck and then jeep for the last half hour, and having heard that the hermitage is holy ground they decide to play a bit with Porgy. They’ve remotely, temporarily shut off the jeep when they’ve known it would be safe. It was a good test of their equipment, logged and certified as effective at 500 metres.

As if in response to Porgy’s desperate prayer, the jeep lights up again. He starts it, and drives out as quietly as he can. Within days everyone hears a version of the story, Porgy’s version, how he went to visit the hermit in the evening and how God shut down his jeep as soon as he got on to the hermitage. He told everyone it must be holy ground.

Within days the military few know a different story, and they hear the story from Porgy. Only a faithful few realize that they played a part in it all, but God was at work. They realize that the hermitage really is holy ground. Humans (from his ex, the girls, the lay-pastor and bishop, the wealthiest people in town, the cops, lawyers, and more than 2 dozen judges) have sought to destroy a good, kind, and honest man, and they have only created a holy martyr, a hermit more safe from Covid than anyone of them, more blessed every day than any of them. Their practice surveillance of the area has long since established the hermit’s hard work to survive, his ingenuity, and his kindness to anyone who treads on that holy ground … and his efforts to save anyone from intruding in unholy ways on the holy ground. Their investigations of records they ‘practice’ accessing for ‘national security’ have given them enough of the completely unjustifiable effort of many different people to financially ruin him, to drive him deep into debt and poverty, and to even kill him … and the hermit’s blessed response of forgiveness to his mentally ill ex and the children and the binding of everyone else’s sins – putting their deeds over to God for judgment and offering them forgiveness if they would only but confess.

No one is holding their breath for that, since all the guilty people think no one will ever know who has done what or how.

But God knows, and a few intelligence people know, and a few honest people who listen carefully, and a whole lot of guilty people know.

That morning at 2 am, the hermit did wake up to the jeep’s engine noise, look out the window, and saw the jeep, and the light. He heard the near by helicopter and then saw Porgy start the jeep and drive away. When daylight came he went out and repaired the wire. All along, as for so many other things, the hermit gave God thanks, knowing that since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, we can give thanks, by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe.

Trees, Trees, Light, Water, Hope

Trees, Trees, Light, Water, Hope

That’s the spot, where the borrowed trailer sits for the nights, when for a few brief hours the sun sets and the coyotes howl and the rains … well they did not do anything, but the bugs invaded like the empire’s drones.

The marvel is the trees and trees and trees backlit by the sun and water reflections pouncing in upon one’s thoughts as if …

As if the forest of trees and under-bush had come alive to welcome one to the healing refuge of nature or to warn one of what the (2 legged) wildlife had planned for one.

Drawn to the light like moths to a candle the breathing of the light overpowers ones vision and capacity to see clearly what is in store … What will the process ahead entail?

Will Grace and Forgiveness win out, or will judgment and condemnation ruin the days and lives of so many?

It is much more difficult to see the simplicity of love which unconditionally takes in everything about the other, every nook and cranny of Scheißheit and still turns, to give so that it is as if the Schieße Idiotische Irrtümliche Freaking Blödheit simply was not. Not to demand anything, but to make, out of one’s own sacrifice, the reality that the other is acknowledged to have done exactly what is done, and yet the other is treated as if … as if it were not so. It is much more difficult to see the simplicity of love so far beyond the complexity of horrendous things done redeemed by one’s own sacrifice … this is so much more difficult than it is to take in the lies as excuses to create more lies of false condemnations. Girard saw it clearly; we like teenagers gather for mass attacks and derogation of a poor victim who has done nothing other than be, we even adults swarm upon the one selected as our collective victim and against all logic viciously ruin that one. And released of our mass hysteria hidden so well in our civility, we feel we’ve done right to end the stress and we return to peace. A peace more dangerous than outright war, for the real villain lies within us hidden and nearly undiscoverable, ready to direct us against yet another unaware victim.

It used to be women. Now we’ve become politically correct and we do it to men. Especially men who are honest about what they’ve suffered.

The light, on the far side of complexity is revealing that lives are at stake.

Even knowing all that we are still surprised by the light upon the water from which life arose and upon which life depends each day, even hour. This light dazzles us and charms us into forgetting.

Forgetting is not forgiving. Forgetting is to have plaque on the brain, or plaque on the heart, so that one lives in a fantasyland, as if things were somehow different than they are. Truth is each of us beyond hope, lost from any blessed acceptance by anyone who ultimately matters.

But if we do not forget, if we remember, if we remember not with the poignancy of the pain of the Scheißheit that has been done to us, but remember knowing that it does no longer determine one’s life, nor need to determine the other’s life, so we remember without feeling the pain still, but knowing then and now we choose to move into the next moment of the present moving into the past, to move with grace and acceptance, not of the Scheißheit, but of the lovely person who did it to us.

And that

That is not simple, it is not the complexity of reality good and evil, it is past all layers and webs of complexity of black holes and supernovas that destroy life, back into the blessed breath and wind that brings new life even to the ravages thought to be impossibly lost, dead and gone.

This Simplicity is the light of truth; harsh in what it reveals and delicately soft in how it reflects each of us to the other, as a slow waltz encapsulates the love of years, new this moment again.

And then the water, the water that gave and gives life beginning and sustenance. Water that surrounds the rocks that could and would destroy everything, including life itself, allowing the water to swallow what it gave birth to. Water that is the cooling best of a hot hot day, and here the relief of bugs biting literally sucking the essence of life out of us.

The water gives and sustains life …

But the light made visible in the clouds spanning the sky draw wonder from our burden laden hearts, until

Until we see the light

And seeing the light we see the clouds

And seeing the clouds we know the storm to come

And knowing the storm to come we breathe easy in our preparations and survival of the last storm of chaos.

And

Breathing easier for the last survived and the next prepared for we hope …

And hope

Hope

Hope is the spark of life without which we die, shrivelled up in apathy and disregard for the life of others.

Hope is the spark of love that saves us from the animal survival instincts that turn others into prey and ourselves into combatants that must win at all costs to whomever.

Hope, we see hope in the world, and we can breathe.

But it is the other, committed to love and life,

Forgiveness even through the possible future of forgetfulness of age,

To making the other’s strengths shine and their weakness compensated for, so that life is GOOD!

It is the beloved who honours life, not out of irrational fear, but out of hope in self and the beloved. Standing shoulder to shoulder, taking on the challenges of life even when they seem insurmountable, and hoping against hope that all will be well, all will be well, all manner of things shall be well.

Sky Dark but by North

The night is come swift
Leaving only the north
Cloud swathed and light twinged
Reminding us all of the persistence of
Trust
The basic building block of love
To hang out there
If not present powerfully
Then as wisps of remainder light
Enveloping even the deep darkest
Whole
Life lived so partially
Afraid to offend.
Bursting rather vivaciously
Through
The ragged
Cracks
To keep us ever northbound oriented
By
Grace
Dancing an easy waltz so elegant.
Begging
Hoping
Come dance.
… still…

Waking Warm in the Cold

It takes an experienced eye to note the effects of the cold on the view out the window.

But they are all there.

Clarity, steam, bright sky, sharp snow, shadowed exhaust from the roofs, and quiet stillness.

No one wants to be out and about when it is nearly 40° C colder than a week ago.

And then of course there is this clue, if you take the time to read it:

A thermometer.

Remember those old things that used to tell us what the temperature was, instead of reading it from a dumb device hooked to the internet, repeating to us through the ether a thermometer’s result from somewhere, maybe, close by pumped to the internet via another dumb device. Sorry, “smart” is not what happens to a thing when it’s hooked to the internet; “hacked” is, which makes it really dumb and the designers even more so.