give: joy
give everything: total joy

today I belong

to start I jotted down a couple of additions to my latest piece which goes nowhere and something twigged:
if it doesnt want to go anywhere then it doesnt need to.
thinking back to yesterday: wild joyful improvising around merlin.
the juxtaposition is startling but important.
also the discovery this week of the joyful nature of far more of the psalms than I had previously realised and the need to sing them in the light of this.
singing presently essential even when the sound becomes atrocious.
the struggles recently to understand have led to impasse and today I saw that this is me getting in your way over and over.
my incessant desire to understand (to 'see') is a barrier to you.
this week has been about giving and the next stage is not to be afraid to receive. I still do not trust enough. on the slippery slope I still hold back and cling to old ways and all of this holds me back.

I wrote somewhere recently that God is as impossible to live with as he is impossible to live without. but then today I read again 'For those things that are impossible with men, are possible with God.'

today started simply enough: waves of doubt, anxiety, despair, and confusion but no need to worry.
stay open and give and there was joy in that.
it's when the waves suddenly change direction and come from within that it becomes harder: the need for steady focus

tuesday psalms all about enemies but it's hard to remember who and where.

this afternoon: nostalgia. also an enemy.

this afternoon: improvisation surprisingly tumultuous.
but I think I know why

all too aware that today's thoughts will seem even more eccentric than my last entry. this worries me a little.
today I wrote in pen and ink rather than the blog and not only because the computer wasnt on at the time.

there is a sense of 'overflow'.
of things not fitting together in the way that they used to.
this might be important.
a great deal of confusion but today seemed significant:
the need to give without reserve.
the need to give more.
the need to try to give everything.

14 december: memorial of st john of the cross.
how much I owe this man!

and, so strange, . . . . merlin.
bbc fantasy programme, which has broken in upon me like a colossal wave
and I really am grappling with this because it makes such little sense.

just a couple of things I wrote earlier which may lead somewhere:
the search for significance.
the need to be a part of a picture;
part of a story which then imbues our own life with meaning.
this relates directly to merlin of course.
there is a link somewhere between 'meaning' and 'life'.

when we lose 'meaning' - the sense of being part of a whole -
we lose the will to live.
man as social animal.
sounds so prosaic put like this but it is something much more fundamental and much more far-reaching than that.
but - contradiction here -
in the attempt to find meaning where there is none,
we attempt to break into someone else's story:
a thief.

being excluded from the story is, for man, akin to the worst torture.
a fate worse than death.

in the attempt to break into someone else's story we lose the point of our own and yet, of course, people cannot have a story on their own.
we are all a part of each other's story.
but it might not be the major part:
more a rosencrantz perhaps.

isn't the quest for fame or fortune the attempt to break into other people's story: to become more important than them? ***
in domination, we usurp.
but it is also possible to usurp without dominating. people who have no place can usurp inwardly . . . . .
and yet this is all by the by and wasnt at all what I was trying to get at.

could it be true that one person might be better at 'being a person' than another? if it is not true, and only a fallacy, what is the consequence?
what does that mean for the story of mankind as a whole?

then I thought of that song (is it bernstein?)
'there's a place for us'.
unashamedly sentimentalised by the tune, but the words are essential
(and, come to think of it, very jewish).
I need to stop here and try to digest.

having digested I am painfully aware that I am doing what I always do:
turn life into a sort of puzzle.
this entry is much more about me personally than I want to admit.

the question I am really asking:
is there a place for me?

I sense that, unless I had become faintly aware that there was,
it's not a question I would dare to ask.
the question then becomes the answer.

so that is perhaps the significance of today.
I have a place.

good news!

*** I added this later but it suddenly became very personal.
I said 'breaking in, we seek to become more important than them', but what I didnt say was that the reason we seek to become more important is because we have no inkling of what 'equality' might actually be like. 'equality' seems impossible and therefore there are only two options: domination or slavery.
I know this is relevant. not sure how. . . . . . .
except of course, it is the sense of having 'broken in' which means that we do not trust that we have a place there at all. we are invaders. we must dominate or be thrown out.

in my mind, I was preparing a letter to my bishop.
this will probably never get written, but it did make me consider more objectively my feeling about the role of the roman church and my place in it:
its fundamental inadequacy to the task allotted to it and the ways in which it fails on a daily basis; the way in which God cannot be restricted by church etiquette and law; the way in which the spirit of God has exploded beyond the 'boundaries' of the church in ways that it can still scarcely bear to recognise; the way in which it's own attempts at integrity are gradually destroying it because it fails to grasp the one essential:
the need to let go (?)
having said all that I know that the roman church has an essential part to play and does act in good faith because of all those good people in it who give themselves to God on a daily basis and I will always be, myself, a member of this roman church because it is the closest that I can get to the 'original' one, although I also know that its own ever-lengthening history tends to carry it further and further away from that 'original' understanding of itself.
all around it churches spring up in attempts to mirror back at the roman church its own fatal flaws and sometimes it listens and mostly it doesnt.
the one essential gift of the roman church to the world, I believe, is its simplicity, which even centuries of encyclicals, theology and deeply flawed leaders have not erased: the mass. this is the great gift of the roman church to the world and it is one that has become my treasure.
to me, all the talk about the 'real presence' is irrelevant because I know what it means anyway. jeshua (I know this sounds eccentric, but it's somehow important*) said take and eat and that's what we do.

*it just seems more and more important for us in the west to recognise the jewishness of jesus.

is it real as simple as this?
my need to give and my ability to give
both gifts from you.
and yet giving is not so easy.
people don't necessarily want to be 'given to'.
walls, bars, gates, restrictions everywhere.
doubt, suspicion, refusal . . . .
which suggests that the ability to receive is as much a gift as the ability to give.
but not in you.
in you: freedom to give and freedom to receive.

in you, my useless paltry gift is redeemed.
in exchange for my anonymous unreal life
you give me a known and a real one.
you bless me with truth