Sunday, February 24, 2008

but a second hand emotion...

Love stings: it's messy and complicated. God's love seems to be a bit different. I really can't talk on this topic. It's late, my stomach hurts - and there are other things I want to do before the "day is done." Nothing really in my world seems to be black and white- I don't know how God's love works - I can't tell you its nuances - I can't tell you in situation A it will feel like Y. However, it's the one thing that I think oddly is the most clean, cutting, pure, element of life I can think of. It is very much an emotion, and yet, unlike our emotions, God's love seems to atleast be more consistent, solid, determined in it's motive, and direction. It hurts, it slaps people in the face - and then offers the hug. I'm not trying to be poetic, and not trying to conceptualize what people have done far more eloquently in times before. I'm trying to understand the situations around me. I'm trying to figure out why a CD has affected me so much. Why I've responded the way I have tonight to certain people and why I believe more than right and wrong, more than good or bad, more than anything else - we just need God's love.


"right now I'm so afraid and I don't think I've ever heard you, say my name. and I need to hear your voice, I need to hear you say my name. because these people want to kill my wife, my kids, and all for what? for a God who can't even mouth my name."
And he just began to cry.
And out of the silence he heard the voice of his father for the first time: "Never alone Martin, Never alone Martin. I never leave you" over and over - the song built and built - just that phrase. The first time Martin Luther King heard the voice of God.

The song now runs for 11:47 seconds. It's nothin more than this phrase over and over - some variation, some piano fills. And yet I've found it to be one of the most challenging songs I've heard.
I don't think you would like it. Baby grand, funky drum kit that's kinda poorly (read: cheaply) miked, a bass player and an odd flute. Songs are either 2 minutes long or 10. There's the canned prayer/talking - not stuff that makes for a good listen. But it's real, it's basic and it's true. It conveys something of God's Love.
And I know I'm bitting more off than I can write about - when I say that we don't know what God's love is like - we don't know how true a phrase like 'never leave you' can mean - because it's been splayed out like bullets of a .22 in the shotgun hollywood movies that surround us. 'Do you know your a child of God' to me - to take a rubbing alchohal analogy - stings, is clean and ultimately what we need to know more and more. But itseems like moreover we're content with hearing the opposite. Of having our wounds - our very real wounds - no matter how 'important' or 'minute' - but our wounds covered by a bandaid of sorrow.
There's that scene in Good Will Hunting where Robin Williams says to Matt Damon : "It's not your fault" and Matt responds with a laugh and a "I know", Robin repeats "it's not your faut" and Matt laughs "I know" , again "its not your fault" Matt, getting angry responds "don't fuck with me" and Robin grabs on, holds while Matt cries - "it's not your fault, it's not your fault, it's not your fault" - and I again as I'm listening to Upton repeat "do you know your a child of God, in the midst of anger, your the child of God, sons and daughters of a living God" over and over and over - and it's not an easy song to hear.
This is the kind of Love that I am in awe of - this repeating, free form, improvisitory - Love that is ultimately unachievable by me. And I mean that. Not "It's only achievable with God's grace, kind of Love" - Flat out - it's just not in me. At best I want to convey it. It's not mine, but maybe I can show people whose it is.
It's what more than I know, we need to hear over and over and over. Something about this Love doesn't allow me to stay where I am in my sorrow. Something about this Love can't allow me to listen for too long to lies. It's an uncomfortable love.
it's more than I should be writing here, now, on this topic that so many have written so much about.

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