temptation

Hey Jesus,

Paulo Coelho said – the warrior of light is ever ready to plunge into the river of passions. I, tho’ would like to be counted among the warriors, am filled with dark. Temptation is something which sounds so archaic in this 21^st century since your arrival. It arrives on wings of suggestive seductiveness. And asks me to postpone coming home to your face for another day while I indulge in this or that pleasure along the way. Usually I fail lord. And wander off road – at times with the fixative stare of a demon who is hell bent on proving his own evil.

But now I listen for the drum beats, hidden under the jungle throb of our concrete lives. If I am coming home for me, I will never make it. If I am coming home because of you I will never see your face. I can only come for my dream, which you have spitted and roasted and salted away in your cellars of eternity. And my friends. And my loves.

hypocrisy

Hey Jesus

Writing a prayer blog is kinda like working at cross purposes. A personal blog shared with the public has certain elements of ‘closedness’ to it. We don’t say every little itsy bitsy thing out loud. Especially the things which are unflattering and in some cases downright evil on our part.

When I look at myself in the mirror of your wisdom I don’t see anything which resembles anything likeable. With our burden of cupboard skeletons and a reticent will to seek perfection, our prayers become that much more hollow. More lovelessness lord. I like to think that I hate hypocrisy – so when I see that in me it becomes all the more damning and deserving of your wrath.

Fighting off my weaknesses lord is a constant uphill struggle. I resolve to correct something and my mind snickers. And then as if to prove my mind right I go ahead and do the thing that I swore off. And regular as clockwork follows the guilt. I take refuge in your blood to quell the accusing within and Praise God! It works! But that just silences the accusation. It still doesn’t touch my diseased will. Should I next ask and claim healing? I ask lord. Claiming seems so alien. It is your pleasure to give and also your pleasure to withhold.

Amen.

the way, the truth & the life

Hey Jesus, today is a good day for me. But then, it’s always a good day whether we acknowledge it or not. At times like these, it’s too easy to forget that you exist and carry on with our life and slot you into a cubby hole of affection to be contended with at some future time. But as the alien in the The Fifth Element said, time is not important only Life is. And you are Life. Strange don’t you think? You said you are the Way, the Truth and the Life (And no one gets to the Father except through you). Once we admit that ‘the Way’, ‘the Truth’, ‘the Life’ and ‘the Father’ exists then next bit of obstacle is the validity of your statement within the evidence-proof debacle of our empirical soliloquy. Some will question the insufferable, megalomaniacal egotism implicit in your statement. Others will deny that a ‘mere’ man can lay claim to a vista, which is the purview of God(s). And of course some will state that it is just delusional nonsense that none should hold truck with.

Faith assault? I trust what you spoke. It makes sense and not just by the support of a large body of belief (or mass hypnosis as some would call it).

It doesn’t make sense but it does. It doesn’t make sense from within the empirical evidence-proof borders we live in. Here, every bit of statement has to be backed by an enormous structure of evidence and ‘hence, it is proven’ truths. For this crowd trying to build a structure where I can hang your statement and make it shine is almost impossible. But that’s not the point lord, its boring and oh so bone-wearying.

If you don’t dig it, no amount of proofing will get you to accept the evidence. It makes sense when I dig it. When I dig you. Mmmmmmmm.

Sad aint it lord? That we get trapped by our own nonsense and refuse to look up and tramp about in self insistent ardor: “This is way it is and this is the way it should work and I’ll be damned if I let any other way get right of way”.

You could ask this question of yourself you know. The disbeliever echoed.
Say again.
There’s nothing in all this rant to endear you to my thought lines. Nothing to make me change my stance on the superiority of the evidence-proof approach to life.

Hmmm. It’s a simplistic model and shouldn’t be treated as more than an opening teaser.

So what is the proof of the validity of my statement? you ask. I could just as well be jerking you around (and the entire human race) and trying to trap you into a referential view where you are subjugated to the tyranny of my lordship.

*smile* mmmmmmmmmmmmmm sounds good. Ok, I’ll put aside the horseplay and try and answer it ‘straight’.

‘External evidence’, that is objective discourses by ‘non-Christians’ does not even acknowledge your existence. So, you could as well be a mythical creation by renegade Jews who were trying to challenge the Levite authority established since Moses. And all the peace and ahimsa talk were just that.

It seems strange that there is nothing in external texts that refers directly or indirectly to you. My paranoid bent makes me suspect some vast conspiracy of the devil to suppress such literature. It’s an easy leap for ‘Christians’ to make. And not wholly unreasonable when you agree that the devil, ‘god-of-this-world’ has been given his marching papers. Still, from within proof validation evidence of your having walked this earth is flimsy. This I suspect is more your doing than the devil’s. Hmmph. Want us to trust you on you word now don’t you?

So what makes your statement valid? Other than the ‘because Jesus said it, its true.’

I can think of only one: that your mission on earth was to die on the cross and rise again in three days. To take on the burden of sin and do away with that entry barrier to God once and for all.

This makes sense: Sin had estranged us from God. The disconnect was seemingly permanent and irreversible. Till you came along and did your thing. Ergo, eureka, hence, therefore, so:

You are the way to the Father

1. You are the truth that illumines the way to the Creator of all Things
2. You are the Life that animates the truth

mmmmmmmmm. Sounds good huh? I think so too.

mmmmmaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh

approval suck up

Hi Jesus, good morning. If I try to look for anything specific to say I draw a blank. Like a prisoner locked in a room unable to see the sun. I can stare at the locks on my cell and will them to open. But you are the jailer and am still serving time. I have finished with raging and ranting against the system. I am done. But don’t expect me to play kiss ass just because Paul said it. But that’s self-delusional posturing, since I hate to rub the grain of culture in any other direction but approval. For a time I sought approval from my peers, at other times approval from Rock n Roll, at yet other times approval from the intellectual community, and then of course played the classic rebel card and thrust away all these approval seeks as vain if not wimpish. (Approval seeking has one undercurrent dragging this ship of dreams – a sense of a lack of legitimacy.) I haven’t quested for approval from parents, brother, sister, wife, son or daughter or from family. At this I run smack dab into the question – what about your approval?

You call me lord, lord and expect to be rewarded? Are you doing the will of the Father?

And what is the will of Father lord? Nobody seems very clear on that bit – all the teachers who run the highway home. Telesales pitches are full of how glorious and the rest of the blahs you are. Somewhere along the line I dashed that picture perfect figurine portrayed from the pulpit and since then I have been crying. I cried myself to sin. My tears hollowed out my soul and left me empty. A resounding gong and a clanging cymbal of 1 Corinthians Ch 13 fame. Loveless. Or at least it feels that way.

Didn’t listen to your wise men sir. Storin water in the cisterns? I pushed the envelope on altruism and earned the time. Somebody will say that this prayer is too overloaded with ‘I’. It is. Am a sinner lord. Scared to say – I repent. Scared that I say it more from the love of hearing my own pretension at righteousness and not actually repenting.

And yet the will of the Father is as plain as day: Jesus, Jesus, be thou glorified!

it's not easy to pray

It’s not easy to pray, you know. Most times my mind would flit away from you. Other times I would be over enthu in giving you glory and praise swept up in the moment but then falling back out of it. So jesus, here I am again, after many a long sojourn in this and that and every which have you.

Silence…

But then that is yr prerogative. And besides am the sliver of a man. Easy to go into ‘woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips, heart and actions’. Tougher to deal with it and come up with something than just a holier than thou attitude. Or even worse beat my chest in a show of woe while secretly congratulate myself on the ‘righteousness’ I exhibit by denigrating myself – your creation.

And then at times my heart rebels. My planet being carved up into something unsightly and evil. At the heart of ugliness stands evil. But our sights are skewed and we would as soon as label one your creations as ugly as not recognize the depth of the ugliness we hug.

The world moves on. A construct of Babel in the offing and us none the wiser that this is all just an illusion at your behest. And I fear. That you will be forgotten. That you are just an illusion. That the empirical blockade will win and we will become slaves within the WYSIWYG format of our perceptions. More unwilling than less unable to look beyond what is presented by the powers of our intellect as ‘the whole truth and nothing but the truth’.

And so I hold myself in check, in your silence, waiting. Come Lord Jesus, come.