lifeboats

I’ve grown weary of people merely existing to please themselves.
And what more have many of our lives ever been but that? For what other purpose do I keep hearing the term “college experience”? Can they mean anything different than fitting the most “fun” as is possible into four years of life? And this is when the nausea starts for me…
We love ourselves so much that even college exists only to please and entertain us. This is kind of thinking is a sickness with which we have all been infected.
It is starvation of the soul. It is life on the sunshiney surface. It is rootless, passionless. It is bottom-dwelling, yellow cowardice. The absence of wisdom, nobility, intelligence, history, anything that resembles love, art, beauty, hope.
It is all pretend. The ones who are real do not even exist here anymore. They died long ago.
Our lives are collections. It is no longer as trendy to collect things in order to keep up with the Jones’. Now in order to impress our friends we collect crazy stories, facebook albums, a checklist of countries we went to on free travel, a camera full of pictures of us beside every monument or work of art we could spend two minutes desecrating rather than appreciating, all so we could mark it off some list that supposedly makes you a somebody. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t pretend to appreciate it, because art is cool. We may not be contesting for the highest salary, but we sure are still competing for worldly success. And still we are keeping the spirit of hoarding the most stuff. But we have disguised our lust for more by storing up instead, the latest ideas, causes, movements, subcultures. Trying to seal the status we hold in our own minds as ultimately superior to others by making as many intellectually snobby comments as can possibly be made by one human being in a lifetime. Readers of Donald Miller’s Searching for God Knows What will recognize this as fighting to the death to “stay in the lifeboat.” Why else is there a hierarchical structure created during pledge week? Im sure it really is to make kids “appreciate” their club. No, I think it is just one more chance for one human-being, being so full of pride they can barely function, to exert superiority over another.
And what’s worse is that we bring God into it. As if he could even stand to be near such hypocrisy. Jesus called the Pharisees white-washed tombs, and I think that description fits us pretty well. We call the name of Jesus because it is convenient to us, because it is trendy to be spiritual at our university, while buried in our heart of hearts there is an altar built to the one and only god we truly worship…
ourselves.

"well if you see her, make sure you tell, tell her that i'm gone to find a land beyond where i'll be free"

Theory

This is a mixture of thoughts that I believe are somehow related. I'm not exactly sure how yet, but I am almost certain there is a connection here...I don't know if it makes sense outside my head or not.
I think people have become ignorant in such a way that they believe themselves to be ignorant. They have this idea of a "professional" in their heads, the idea that titles themselves bring authority, knowledge. They entrust "real" education to an establishment, a school, rather than teaching the Truth at home. Parents have become passive. They had rather pass off as much responsibility as possible because society has suggested to them thay they know nothing about the great big world of science and politics, dinosaurs, and social security and that they should simply leave these things to the "experts." After all, the real bulk, the really impoortant, success-making, value-giving information is taught in universtities, right? The wisdom of this world is what will bring children "success." Everything you need in order to succeed in life, to become a citizen of the world, to pass into the realm of functioning adults, that all is taught at universities, right? Thatt comes with a degree. And without consciously thinking it, they say to themselves. We don't know anything. We aren't capable of teaching you the really important things because we don't know them ourselves. So we will send you away to school to become wise and educated. They no longer take action to instill values, life lessons, passion, heritage, a sense identity, but rather pass off that job to the state. Which is horrifyingly reminiscent of that Brave New World we all fear in which all intimacy, sense of tradition, pide, culture, family, heritage is lost. And maybe our move toward this brave new culture is why so many of us American kids can't figure out who the heck we are...no one will tell us, especially not our families. They feel that somehow this would be limiting us, so instead they tell us we can be whatever we want. But that isn't who we are. Whether we admit it or not, we all have an identity, a God, a family, a bloodline, and we not only have one, we need it. Without it, we are lost in a great big universe, directionless, with a million different directions before us and no man is an island...we are all part of the human organism, a little bit of each of us comes from behind us in our parents and a little bit of us goes after us into our children. We all have our history living in our own bodies. It is a part of the core of our being. It's there, and it only hurts us to ignore it. And I think a lot of parents don't know themselves. They don't know the hope to which they have been called, and this is the reason they can't teach it to their children. But they are capable. Real wisdom and real knowledge are found in knowing the living God. Righteousness, holiness, redemption...these are wisdom, intelligence, scholarship. The wisdom of the world is foolishness. The weak things of this world will shame the wise. The one who knows love, who knows the power of grace, who searches out the mystery of Jesus Christ and teaches this to his children, he is the one who possesses true intelligence, true scholarship, and he can attain it without the recognition of an earthly establishment.

1 Corinthians 1:20 Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?

1 Corinthians 1:30 Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God--that is, our righteousness, holiness, and redemption.

poem

Witch Wife

by

Edna St. Vincent Millay

SHE is neither pink nor pale,

And she never will be all mine;

She learned her hands in a fairy-tale,

And her mouth on a valentine.


She has more hair than she needs;
5
In the sun ’tis a woe to me!

And her voice is a string of colored beads,

Or steps leading into the sea.


She loves me all that she can,

And her ways to my ways resign;
10
But she was not made for any man,

And she never will be all mine.

a work of genius by molly c. goyne.

Shuffle--

red light

power button

sing to me

fast forward to that gorgeous boy's voice

i wanna feel it

loud, strong, sure

sure i'll sing it back to you

volume up

hair on my neck is up

hushed&blaring

tranquilly pounding

stereo

The Creation of Man by Chagall

Bluebeard by Edna St. Vincent Millay

This door you might not open, and you did;
So enter now, and see for what slight thing
You are betrayed....Here is no treasure hid,
No cauldron, no clear crystal mirroring
The sought-for truth, no heads of women slain
For greed like yours, no writhings of distress,
But only what you see....Look yet again:
An empty room, cobwebbed and comfortless.
Yet this alone out of my life I kept
Unto myself, lest any know me quite;
And you did so profane me when you crept
Unto the threshold of theis room to-night
That I must never more behold your face.
This now is yours. I seek another place.