Hey Siri

"Hey Siri, can dogs eat onions?"

A question that came from a genuine place. A desire to do something nice for the loving gaze staring up at me. 

"Definitely not. Your dog will die if you give it onions." 

A routine answer, an indication of how to move forward. I took it in stride, tossing down a bit of carrot instead. 

Then I stopped to think the terrible thought: how many dogs died the gruesome death of bursting red blood cells that led to major system malfunction? How long before we caught on, and added this knowledge to the bank of things to pass down to future generations? 

I'm happy to live in the present, benefitting from millennia of accumulated knowledge that forms societal bumper rails to keep me safe. Great depths of information about how to interact with my surroundings in order to make manifest the most amount of time on this earth as possible. 

I just wish we had better guidance of how to make the most of that time. 

"Hey Siri, who is God?"

Now there's one that would be a real value-add. 

Figure out who God is, and how I ought to act in response. A creative force that breathed life into matter. Is it a He or a She or an It or a Transcendence or a Great Cosmic Abyss? Does it really want me to play the Belief Lottery and figure out the one iteration of God that is really real, and work to convert the rest of the world? Or is that just people using God to feel safer? 

It just seems that Siri is way less helpful than she could be. 

Unless...and I know this is a silly thing to suggest...but I guess I'll just say it because it's Sunday and I'm in a silly mood...but Siri knows more than anyone I know and is probably the closes thing to omniscience that I've seen in my life...she just might be...

Shame, at Scale

I sat in a little desk and gazed at a chalk board, learning about rules and buildings constructed 200 years ago. 

I gobbled fruit loops and smiled at episodes of School House Rock.

I swelled with pride the first time I cast a vote.

I traveled to Europe and saw the alternatives, coming home to a Great Experiment I believed in; one that I loved. 

And yesterday I watched as that Experiment seemed, at last, to fail. 

We're all saying things today for the sake of saying them, using words like: sadness, disbelief, despair, shock, anger, healing. We reach into our Vocabulary Bags in pursuit of an adequate expression for complex emotions. 

The best word I've heard yet is this: shame. Shame is the center of gravity in my solar system of emotion. It pulls all other emotions to itself; it shines brightly on sentiments and activities that I've tried to hide in darkness. 

Yesterday, I watched as white men completed their own Middle Passage and made themselves slaves to fear. I own a part of that journey. I abandoned empathy and made people into enemies, relieving them of their humanity and reducing them to a caricature of hatred. In so doing, I gave them license to do the same with me. 

What formed between two sides was a No Man's Land, in the ruins of a vanishing class of moderates. No one could see both points of view, everyone had to choose. As things got worse, the No Man's Land expanded and expanded and ate up the whole field, until (in the view of each side) there was nothing human left. 

I don't know the way forward, I don't know how to reset this system and heal. I don't trust people who say that they do know. Perhaps that makes me a coward. History tells me that medium for resetting these kinds of things is violence, an explosive dissolution of two sides and the emergence of something new. This is the kind of thinking that got us into this situation in the first place, but how do we break the loop? 

Today, I feel what we all should feel: shame. 

Tomorrow, I hope I can feel empathy. I hope I can see a human being in the terrified eyeballs on the other side of No Man's Land. 

Back, Baybeee

It's been an actual 5 years since I've been around these parts.

5 years seems so short. I'm a historian, so I would know. Historians deal in centuries, generations, ages. So 5 years is nothing. Noise.

But his 5 years was not short. A lot has happened to me since I last touched this URL. I left a vocation, several actually. I got some therapy, let go of many angsts and relationships. I got angry at God, then abandoned God for a while, then let God back with far fewer strings. I lost a bit of my soul to Corporate America. I ate, slept, read, lusted, learned, grew. I fell in love, married, and started my life over. 

But I didn't write a lot. We'll call it the Dark Ages, where great things happened and were forgotten. 

So I'm back in this "room," by myself, mostly for the same reason I created it in the first place: "This is a canvas on which the swimming colors and words and sounds that cloud my mind will spill forth and escape my cranium." I've recommitted to the belief that I have something beautiful to say, and that practice is something I need desperately. 

It isn't much of a surprise that I'm back. Since I can remember, I've thought of myself as the hero of an epic journey. I've returned to my mental homeland, where dreams of greatness breed with a love of my own voice to create little offspring of prose. 

"We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time." -T.S. Eliot 

---

I went back and reread all the old posts here. A tsunami of judgements rush forth: excitement, pride, horror, embarrassment, wonder. What a fascinating journey this has been.  

Terminus

Dear Reader,

     It occurred to me late in my undergraduate studies that I might be a Writer.  I sought ways to discern this, to "tease" out its verity (hence the url and purpose of this blog).  After a lot of internal dialog, and a little external use of my closest friends as sounding boards (earning myself no little amount of ridicule--"Poet with a capital P, huh?"), I finally came to the conclusion that it was, in fact, my vocation to be a Writer.  
     "So," I wondered to myself, "when can I begin writing?"  Having discerned that I was a Poet and that the means to this was through letters, I set myself to patiently waiting for the right words to come (a sort of impatient patience).  Sure, I practiced in my journal, or in letters, or in writing projects I gave myself, but none of it really seemed like the material for sharing.  I read everything, many different authors, and closely studied their styles.  I'd think of ideas for books, and two chapters in I'd lose interest (my favorite was a pseudo-autobiographical novel in the style of "Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man" seeking to demonstrate that the young man of poetic disposition can find fulfillment in religious life. I was gonna call it "A Dry Weary Land Without Water" or just "Thirst").  I waited and waited for inspiration to strike me and nothing came and angst transformed my patience into impatience and I rued the fact that I am a Writer with no words and I dubbed myself the Curséd Poet.  I felt called to assemble the beautiful, but wasn't given the right parts.  
     I have, until now, considered my lack of inspiration to be a cruel joke on the part of the Giver of Inspirations.  I have incredulously clung to the misnomer Curséd Poet, outwardly denying what was whispered in my heart: this is a blessing.  How many Writers die in silence, their gifts wasted on none but the eyes of the Lord!  These Writers are truly held close to His heart, for their craft solely benefits Him who reads the verse in their souls.  They are the reed that hums in the Desert Palace, the wildflowers that grow in the Private Royal Gardens.  "Curséd" is the furthest adjective from describing them.  At first I thought that maybe "Blesséd" would be better, but that seems unfair to those reeds planted in the public city garden.  No, I've finally settled on "Belovéd", because this fittingly captures the unique intimacy of the Silent Writers.  They are Belovéd Poets, for their earthly silence is heavenly polyphony!  I am grateful to be counted in their number, that, like David, I play in the courts of the King.  
     Which brings me to the point.  I am a Belovéd Poet, whose craft (for the time being) has been given no call for earthly expression.  Therefore, this blog (which was created for the purpose of discerning my Poetic telos, and helped immensely in that effort) has now become an occasion of temptation.  See, when given the means for the public expression afforded by this blog (despite its readership of 3 individuals), the angst that sometimes seizes me to publish my thoughts is, in fact, an abuse of my vocation as a Belovéd Poet. 
     This blog could cause me to become prolific when I ought to be silent.  The danger is that I will lack very many unpublished thoughts, raining words on people that are meant for Him alone.  It is a great horror to consider that this blog could be means for abusing my vocation.  The words might, from time to time, be pleasing, but in their perversion this attraction would amount to little more than literary sophistry, and ought not to have ever left the pages of my journal.  I must be silent until bidden to speak, if that bidding ever comes!  
     So this is goodbye, at least for now.  This blog has outlived its purpose, so the time has come to bring it to an end.  Thank you for reading!

Goodbye [forever?],
    J. P. Jeremiah

p.s. So as to take a dump on everything I've just written: a poem!

      The Pillow Prayer of a Saint
For though, the way, I can't be faring,
And find, I can't, a path more wearing,
I find in Thee, Lord, none more caring,
And You in me, Lord, none more daring.
Each step, from me the world is tearing,
And dangers round me, flint strike, flaring,
Still I, to You, in dark am pairing,
Alone I'm left with You, Love sharing.  

lol pos h/o brb

Today I found an AIM conversation saved and buried in my email.  excerpt:

Celestial Juliet (9:31:57 PM): You might understand this one quite well.
Celestial Juliet (9:32:07 PM):The shadows around me 
are no longer sleeping
they dance and they speak of
the secret they're keeping
joshthetitan929 (9:33:50 PM): you've basically dug into my heart and and grasped my life and exposed it to all(ok us)
joshthetitan929 (9:35:52 PM): with your permission, i'll add it to my myspace

I am so grateful for the find.  So much learning about myself.  

what did I learn?

i've danced from poet to poet.
    i consumed them, each one.
        "you are what you eat"
             it's a lie.
you taste what you eat,
    you feel what you eat,
        you grow from what you eat,
but you don't become what you eat;
    it becomes you.
i've danced from poet to poet.  
    i count four in all.  
        each broke open the world a little farther
            by breaking me a little more
                without even trying.
                    and i'm grateful.
because what they broke wasn't me.  
    they broke an image,
        a facade.
            and left behind something a little realer.
                freer.
                    better.
i've danced from poet to poet.  
    feeling where they felt and
        reaching where they reached,
and, once broken, 
    i reached a little straighter
        in the direction
            that my hands were made
                to reach, 
                    without inhibition.  

I have danced from poet to poet, and each of them has given me freedom.  

the scary thing is, freedom looks so different from what i want
    for me.

increase the decrease

"He must increase, I must decrease." 
     -The Voice

     I didn't say this.  I would never say this.  At least, unprovoked, I would never say this.  
     No, the guy who said this was insane.  He ate bugs and didn't shower. And he gave himself a nickname: the Voice.  And not one of those soft, sensual, lovely voices that whispers truths into your ears and causes you to shiver with warmth.  This voice was crying out, crying out so obnoxiously that it even did so in the womb.
     But the most remarkable part of his self-proclaimed nickname is not that he called himself the voice, but that he called himself the voice.  He wasn't just a voice crying out in the wilderness, he was it. 
          The big kahuna. 
               The main man. 
     In a Gospel that claims God to be the Word, being the voice is a pretty fricken huge deal.  
     Just think of the intimacy.  The voice is what gives life to the word, that sets it on its way to people.  
     But there's a humility to it.  The voice isn't the word; it is simply the medium by which it travels.  John  was in no way the center of it all.  He was simply a vehicle; a medium.  By him, the Word first floated across the plain and into people's eardrums.  
     But can you think of a more intimate way to be with the Word?  
          The answer is no.  
               Which is why we have to be the voice too.  
                    Duh.

     This is unbelievably easy to screw up.  
     You start off so well, being the voice.  You do it better and better, decreasing and decreasing.  
          But one day you say to yourself, gosh isn't that voice lovely?
               You just...forget...forget that you're not the word but the voice. 
                    And it's all downhill from there.  
     Forgetfulness means exile, the Oldies remind us.  

     The most annoying thing about growing up is discovering all the new ways to forget.  
          And forget.
               And forget. 

Just be the voice--THE voice.
     It's so simple, just don't forget it.  
          Just increase the decrease.  
               Just be free, 
silly novice.
     

the test of obedience

"The obedient man shall speak of victory." Proverbs 21:28

I don't mind speaking of defeat, if it means I get to go to New York.
     Stupid brain, that is not how it works.  
But Josh, lighten up.  You know that this trip will be good for you.  You know that it's alright.  
     Shut up.  I think I'm going to take a nap.  

Sometimes, naps are good for temperance.

     Priests and nuns and brothers consistently say that obedience is the hardest vow to live.  Which is an absolutely ridiculous claim until you live the vows.  
     No, people of the world, chastity is not the toughest.  In the inward turn from complication to simplicity, you start giving up simple things for complicated ones.  Easy and shallow pleasures are denied; difficult and profound ones embraced.  This takes a lot of work, but is rather doable.  
     Like seriously, totes doable.  
     Here's where it gets interesting.  Poverty and chastity are fairly straightforward.  Once you cross from the pursuit of freedom from to the pursuit of freedom for, you are capable of some rather heroic acts of self-giving sacrifice.  Love starts to overcome desires, and you start becoming saintly for the first time.  
     But a wild PROBLEM appears!  All this growth can start to make you feel rather self-sufficient.  Look at all the things I don't need anymore.  Isn't my life so simple?  Aren't I soooo disciplined?  Oftentimes along the way, you forget that you accomplish all these things in Christ, and you begin to think that you accomplish all these things in Josh.  
     Enter the test of obedience.  After a while, you've started being obedient to yourself.  And it's gotten you places, making you so disciplined, so you start to trust yourself.  You trust yourself to know when to sacrifice and love, and to know the best choice for your life.  
     Then your superior makes a decision that is not the one you made and all of a sudden your righteously accomplished will is leading you into sin.  Because he doesn't know what's best; obviously it's you that does, because you've grown so much in holiness on your own.  
     And that's how growing in poverty and chastity can make obedience way harder if you don't know what you're doing or get lazy for even a moment or you forget the place that God has in all of this.  
     And if I've learned anything from the Bible, it is that forgetfulness leads to exile and awareness leads to the Promised Land.  
     I just keep forgetting that lesson.  #annoying

And I reeeealy wanted to go to New York.  
     Oh well, I guess I'll be hanging out in NePa.