Utterances

"And many other similar thoughts passed through my mind. I didn't try to hold on to them, since I prefer not to dwell on abstract ideas: where do they lead you? As a boy I was a dreamer: I loved to caress the images, now gloomy, now irridescent, traced by my restless and avid imagination. But what did that leave me with? Weariness - as if I had been struggling all night with a phantom - only weariness and some dim memory, filled with regrets. In this hopeless battle I exhausted all the ardour of soul and constancy of will required for life; I entered real life only after living through it all in my mind and I felt bored and disgusted, as if I were reading a poor imitation of a book I had known for a long time." (The Fatalist by Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov)

God could not be any more beautiful. My skin, my flesh limits my ability to express. Ah, my mind and heart explode with wonder. Lost in wonder I am at I AM. So much so that to say so does not do it justice. My senses are alive like never before. - God allowed me, on my birthday, to approach a beautiful wild cat, one of the elusive creatures that live in the bush outside my home. They never let you touch them, and yet I made it a goal of mine to befriend and stroke one of these creatures during my time here. God speaks to me through cats, but only certain cats, and I know which ones.These wild cats are white with startling blue eyes. And later that day, after I had stroked the cat and been vaguely puzzled that it had not run away, I realized that God was calling me to intimacy with Him. Him, the wild cat of orchards and bumble bees, the Lion of Narnia. He let me, just for a moment, rub my fingers in his soft white fur and experience his tangible intangibleness. - My mind once again craves knowledge, but something more than knowledge, that which proceeds knowledge - to wallow in revelation. But it goes beyond even this. The ultimate outlet of this inward explosion must be praise. It must be praise. There is no higher expression of joy or outlet of ecstasy than praise of God! That is the end of man. That is where I end. God I praise you, for we are fearfully and wonderfully made! I cannot fathom the intricacy and subtlety and beauty in one person; the reflection of your face. God this is all so silly and inadequate: "I need words...and I need a language large as this longing inside". The ecstasy I experience in beholding and unpacking a single person is unbearable. do I stand in awe? Do I shout? Do I create something? In the end I simply do all and none of these at the same time, head and heart pounding in expression and yet still, as still as ever, in absolute euphoria. Undeniable God. You dwell in unapproachable light. I fear You. "In the beginning God created."

Before I sit down to work I must clear my mind of all these tangled weeds that are disturbing my vision. Today I will not be clever with big words and great adjectives like great. (Everything is 'great' in Grahamstown, and so is God). I just want to write a bit. - My thoughts are rattled and confused. How am I supposed to be excellent at what I do, and improve at it, and yet value people over work and loving people over work and give them so much time and yet still be excellent? And how am I supposed to stop striving and yet be always active? Where is God in all of this you know? All these things are so 'important' and yet at the end of the day I feel I have done nothing, loved no one, prayed nothing and stumbled around in grace living what feels like a mediocre ineffective life! I just want to love God and then everything gets so complicated all around that so that when I sit down to listen to him all these secondary issues come flooding in and deafen my spiritual ears with their facts and questions and intellectual stuff and I just want to clear it all out of my mind and remember my beautiful God. I want a simple life. And yet of course I want to venture off on little adventures off the path and explore and discover and come back to the path having been always on the path and going in one direction, even when going backwards within the detour. God is in the detours; it's the secrets and details of God that are hidden in the bushes that many never think to part. I love exploring the details of God, but sometimes, as in now, there are too many little detailed bush-options all rustling their leaves invitingly and all waiting to reveal to me more about my God. I am standing in this tangle of branches and leaves somewhere between the main path and a hundred detour paths, trying to choose one and not knowing which one to choose simply because I haven't sat down, right where I am, and listened to God. There are twigs in my ears and leaves in my mouth and they're making me afraid to sit down and find my bearings. They're making me claustrophobic. They're making me panic inside. - So, what I have realized is that I must put all of this aside and just sit in nature and be with God. Forgetting expectations I put on myself and that I think God puts on me (when really I just make them up) and continue to live in grace and yet act in love. This constant tension between the two. Like a friend said to me tonight: always look at the extremes of God's nature in balance: His wrath and his love, his gentleness and his power, his majesty and his humility. I'm just going to go be with God.

So it's been a while. people tell me I should get a different blog. I couldn't be bothered really. Kinda sucks not being able to make paragraphs though, I must be honest. Something about grahamstown inspires me to write. It has been raining all day, and I have been sleeping all day. This rain is beautiful. I think I'll be blogging a lot more from now on.

A recent song I wrote: You appear beside my bare feet, padding / Behold, from a locked up garden, you emerge / Elusive teacher how I fear Your leaving / And eagerly await Your priceless words / When will the Lion bite me with His kiss / Strap me to His back and run me through His fields / When will the Lion hide me in His mane / When will the sky that breaks open to reveal / Needle-prick hopes of promises made be real, real to me / O Great Cat of the wild orchards / Hunter of blackbirds and bumble bees / So solitary in majesty / Leave Your wake of beauty in me / When will the Lion bite me with His kiss / Strap me to His back and run me through His fields / When will the Lion hide me in His mane / When will the sky that breaks open to reveal / Needle-prick hopes of promises made be real, real to me / As real as the blackbirds sings, as the poppies spring / As real as the bells in this great old cathedral ring / Oh, let these bells ring / The bells of my heart must ring...

"I was at ease and He broke me apart" (Job 16:12)

"I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought. So the darkness shall be light, and the stillness the dancing."

This whole Christian thing is way too hard for me. But this is it, there is no other option. This is the truth. I am so confused, I know nothing. I come to some conclusion and there are a million other options that it opens into, and I am tired of my own mind, and so tired of not understanding. My heart, mind and soul as well as my ears and eyes are all out of sync with each other as well as, it seems, God. I am hearing nothing, but perhaps I don't know how to listen? I am sad. Sad sad sad because I don't seem to be able to hold onto friendships and I always just fade out of people's lives. I feel like there's something everyone else knows that I don't (or maybe I even do, but it's just how I am), and slowly people get to know me and they catch onto this knowledge and they just get on with their lives quite happily without me in it, as if I make no difference in their lives at all. Perhaps I am believing the lies of my mind, or perhaps this is the sad truth, how can I know? My Bible tells me so, supposedly, but what if I don't understand the Bible? What if its words aren't penetrating and I'm not changing? Ah, whatever.

Is it possible to be "carried" by art? I wonder. I am referring to art in its broadest sense. It is said that one of the purposes of art is to bring healing and beauty to the soul. It is also said that it is used as an escape, both by the artist and the viewer. So, then, the question is, is it ok to 'escape' into the world that the artist creates for one, instead of dealing with the pain of the real world? Is there some kind of balance, or is it a "yes/no" kind of thing? Because in my mind is can be a positive or negetive thing. The reason I've been thinking this is that I have been feeling rather emo this past week, and so I've been thinking about things, yes, but there comes a point where I have to offer them to God and then stop myself from thinking any more otherwise I just drive myself insane and become intensely depressed. So, I filled the time with art, and I my mood totally changed. I became once again inspired for life, and I gained perspective. I created some things myself such as a song, painted a surfboard, did some writing. I read my beautiful novel (The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky), watch a movie on art called The Shape of Things, went to a Freshly Ground gig (wow), and browsed a cool site my buddy Sarah showed me called Threadless. And somewhere in all of that I wanted to live again. I am not saying that it was art alone that lifted me (or carried me), but that God used art, just beautiful things: words, sounds, colours, images, to remind me of my calling and the exciting plans that He has for me. And it wasn't that there was anything specifically prophetic or meaningful in any of them (though Freshlyground did awaken a fresh patriotism in me), it was simply that they were beautiful, all beautiful, and they made me think, and created my world for me, my parallel world where I fit in and everything unites gloriously to praise God. So what of this parallel world? Can I continue to create it, exist in it, share it? Or is it something of a childish idealistic dream which should be extinguished before any (more) damage is done, any more lies lived in? To be honest, I don't really care if it's real or not. I am an artist and I want to escape to it. If I didn't escape there, to that place of beauty and imagination, I wouldn't be effective in the "real" world in any case.

I seem to have come to another "crisis" point in my relationship with God, where I am confused and unsure about everything again. I am unsure of where I am, and of where I’m going. The challenge seems to be in the plodding on, the practicing of spending time in God’s presence. Lord, know my confusion. Have mercy on me in my fear and laziness and striving. I resign myself to mystery, yet still I search. All the time I am training. I am tired of not writing, of not figuring out my thoughts, Your words. I think I’ve been overwhelmed as there have just been way too many creative thoughts in my mind, and I think to start to write would be silly because I would never get it all down. And there have been many little songs flowing from my heart, but songs that are just to You – that only You will appreciate, and that frustrates me, but forgive me God: it shouldn’t! It is a difficult thing to be at peace on my own, without any confirmation from anyone around me, without anyone telling me where I’m at. And there are these thoughts that just jab me constantly. These struggles are good. Lord, may they grow my stagnant, limited understanding of You. I am afraid to act, Lord, I am afraid to create. I am afraid to start up projects, and afraid to join them. I am afraid because my faith is smaller than a mustard seed. I am afraid because I’m not sure I can do what I feel You asking me to do, even though I don’t know exactly what it is – it’s just a feeling that says, “yes” or “no”. And I’m going through life on this feeling – I pray it is your voice – that says “yes” to Grahamstown and “no” to advertising. It says “yes” to the poor, and it says “no” when I try to become too specific. Etc etc. What am I to do with such broad variety of passion and ability? It is a burden to me, God, a burden, do You hear? A burden which You have said you will carry, and so this is my invitation to You to take it. It is not that my heart is ungrateful, only that I fear I cannot use it all, and will therefore not be fully satisfied, and You not fully glorified, for why should any of what is in me go to waste? It is like a great fire, and when it is released into the world through the confines of a song, verse or painting, it becomes a flickering, waning match-tip alone in a blizzard, being blown, tormented by wind and rain, and finding no dry wood on which to attempt to transfer it’s dying passion, its little light. And so the rain eventually overcomes the little flame and what is left on the outside is simply more wet wood, added to the pile. But the fire in me keeps raging, consuming my insides, my mind and heart, desperately seeking an outlet before I burn up with words and colours and textures and metaphors, before I am consumed by this “liberating destruction, this disease of tenderness”. (This poem only makes perfect sense when I feel this way – that is, so totally overwhelmed by the calling to be unique, to embody many cultures, sub-cultures, styles of art and music, types of people and personalities…the list seems endless.) And all this that the very diversity and character of God be expressed through me, a taste of the ability that God possesses to enjoy such a diverse range of people and art and life. It stretches me beyond the confinement of one human being, and if only I knew the reason for this creation that is me, it would make this “contradiction within” somewhat bearable. I am “broken bread…ripped out from within…furiously torn from this flesh…” I fit nowhere, I am owned by nothing, no one but God. "I am a slate of world-composition, on which the faces, the places, the trend that I despise (and yet, without it, am disconnected) are projected." And God has me at His mercy, and He does what He likes with me. I am not afraid to argue with my creator in times like this. "Though He slay me, I will hope in Him; yet I will argue my ways to His face." (Job 13:15) Oh, He has blessed me beyond measure, and my heart will continually live in hope and gratitude. It is not that my praise and gratitude will be overcome by my arguing with and questioning God. It is simply another one of those contradictions within – that my heart simultaneously praises and questions and argues and somehow maintains a deep joy despite the great war and despair within me. I am a character of many facets, many subtleties and complications, and I argue with God for expecting such a being to be content in this world, to find a place, to act, when I am constantly torn. And all my heart longs for is not to be torn – to be radically focused and decided on one thing and to pour my life into it. But I am not allowed this pleasure. Of course I pour myself into Christ and the coming of His Kingdom, but with so many channels screaming at me to “pick” them, it seems difficult to go all out on any one. What is the use of being transparent when I waft around the world but seem to have no solid way of transferring what is in me to people in such a way that it will be of great influence and long-lasting impact? What is the use when no one gets it at all? No one understands how such a calling could be beneficial, least of all me, or how it could possibly be so painful when it appears as such a blessing. It is so vague it is unbearable! God, “how am I to shine this beautiful light? And how am I to live when there’s no place in this life for me?” (the words of a recent song I wrote). Am I exempt from “doing” anything my whole life? Does my creativity, my uniqueness in itself justify my actions or lack thereof after all, as Ananja assures me it does? Is my only calling to be? To be as I AM? I have a feeling not, but how I wish it were true sometimes…