"What a curious life we have found here tonight there is music that sounds from the street."

"And so this is Christmas."

Last night was the long, lively chain of Christmas Eve services, the finale of which commenced at 11 o'clock in the evening, ending with a royal "Joy to the World" at approximately midnight, making it Christmas day.

The auditorium was packed. Sitting in the front, between my mother and the mother of my best friend, I stood just before the service started and gazed back across the tops of everybody's heads, picking out those that I knew and recognizing with tangible evidence just how God has blessed my life through the people he has placed in the path he has for me.

My spirit soared, gaining new heights of levity that it has not known for sometime. A meal for my soul? A buffet of joy and love, and I took my absolute fill. Biting into the softer meat of substance, I laughed and let the juices drip out the corners of my mouth and down my chin. It was so good to be alive - to know how much I love and am loved - the kicker of "It's a Wonderful Life" - You and you and you and YOU and you too!

Our world is so broken, so tragically broken in so many ways. We are in such need of saving, so incapable of self rescue. Advent and Christmas celebrate the duality of these ideas. The pining wait for a savior and the uninhibited joy celebrating the memory of his arrival.

In a way, the Christmas eve service and the weeks preceding it served as a miniature Advent and Christmas on a personal level. A few weeks filled with a sense of isolation; of occasional sensations of helplessness and fleeting moments of despair, followed by the sudden re-realization of happiness, love, and unity with all those around me.

The loud, musical reminder of my own need for a savior and the fact that I already have him.
What a fitting thing to relearn less than a week before a new year dawns.

If one were to remember how they are loved all the year round, they would truly be blessed indeed. Loved by God and man both -so utterly blessed.

"What a beautiful face I have found in this place that is circling all 'round the sun.
And when we meet on a cloud, I'll be laughing out loud-
I'll be laughing with everyone I see.
Can't believe,
How strange it is to be anything at all."

The Aura Unexplained

I once met a kid who said he could sense other people's auras -the color their soul (essence, personality, identity) gave off. By looking closely he could tell what the quality of your heart was -the ultimate, irrefutable personality test that smells strongly of the spiritual world.

I do not know how much you believe in Angels, Demons, or the roles they play in our lives, but what this guy picked up was closely akin to that. In some, he could sense evil or Godliness. He could feel the negative dark around those who had surrounded themselves with the bad. He told a few of the people we were with about themselves, and accurately.

I did not ask who he perceived me to be -which was odd looking back, considering my struggle to find identity at the time. I would have liked him to tell me who I was -so that I would have some sort of idea at all.

But daily I am figuring out who I am, and aptly.

Would you like to know?
Camus said "No man dares describe himself as he truly is."
Maybe I am as diluted as all that...

None the less,

I know in my core I was destined for something larger than nine to fiveing, paying my pension plan and retiring in Florida. But how many other believers can say the same?

Sometimes I feel strength in my hands that shocks me -the power to change much and many.
Other times I wallow in the mire of despondency, indulge my insecurities, let the moody blues drag me deep, fuel my anger's fire.


I just want to be extraordinary.

Numb-skulled

In those days, your young men will see visions and your old men will dream dreams...

What I wouldn't give for a dream that would find its roots stretching far and deep, rooted in reality. If only if in the deepest spot in the deepest crack between my dreams' deepest roots there was not dirt of sleeping thoughts but the smallest grain of the deep deep reality.

"For what dreams may come after we have shuffled off this mortal coil?"

If I did not believe in God, I would be as existential as your albino friend. But what to do when those close find themselves slipping their arms from the life vest, doubting if the surface is really where they want to be -asking themselves and others out loud if they can call themselves one of those who do not sink if they truly question the act of floating.

Do I sound drunk? Altered?
Every once in a while I find my sober thoughts are rather similar to drunk ones. Such is the nature of my mind.

I struggle.
It may be a secret.
A secret only kept because I keep to myself -the walls may have ears but I find them indifferent audiences. Mostly I'm afraid of how they talk after I've been hanging with them too long.

I need to get out more.

And now we grab the circus wheel...

My philosophy research paper was assigned 2 months ago.

I had only picked it up every now and then, only to set it down because it stressed me out up until last Friday. Work officially began yesterday at 5 p.m. I took a 4 hour brake at 8:30 to go to Evensong and get coffee with Nick and Kris afterward. Guy talk. I saw it as more important, and I maintain the ruling even now.

Work recommenced, went until 4:00, wherein I finished my works cited page and found myself oddly satisfied despite my C- paper. I was in bed by 4:30, and set my alarm clock to 7:00 in order to get up and do homework for my Com class. Needless to say, I rolled over a few times and it was 8:00. The intervening time was spent in a motley combination of Snooze hitting, mass disorientation and vivid dreams of Sunday School teachers getting into vehement debates over the props i had created for the week.

Some were intensely dissatisfied and demanded changes on the spot because they transgressed some crucial theological issue that their conservative seminary schooling had clearly stipulated against. "No, you don't understand! This is a serious infringement of this or that obscure tenet! We surely cannot say we endorse that theology..."

The other Sunday School teachers maintained that it was not all that serious of an issue, but they had never gone to seminary and were unsure of themselves in this argument.


I know, right?


I woke up, tossed some eggs on the stove, drank some weak tea, whipped through my homework in order to don the same clothes I wore yesterday, not take a shower, and sprint out the door.

Communications was canceled.

But now I have two hours to write, and stare out the widows at the rather pretty snow falling.

As I walked to class this morning, I was alone on the sidewalk. No other walkers or bike riding commuters. The cold has driven them in. When I went outside last night, just to stand out in the 4:00 Eastown morning, I was alone, save for somebody howl-singing a somewhere near and yet distant.

I am at peace.

Grand Rapids sleeps in under thick blankets.

Thought Block

If I were riding the metro rail, the recorded announcing voice would have just called out: "Leaving: Comfortable. Next Stop: The Wire."

Tense, high pitched violins tremble, indicating an imminent attack (under the water's surface/around the corner in the vacant, darkened house)

Sure they were assigned two months ago, but actually working on assignments are for sissies.

Three weeks:
One group project with an essay.
A research paper.

One week:
Hamlet
A Philosophy paper

Need to Do:
Late assignments
Work on my creative writing manuscript
Edit the poop out of a One-act I wrote in time to submit it to CC's semi-annual literary journal
The odd five-page aptitude test for my academic adviser
Apply to Cornerstone
Choose a major
Read my Bible
Pray
Apply myself to everything I do
Worship God
Stay the type of person I could like if I knew them
Occasionally call my friends and remind them how much they mean to me
Bathe.


But music helps.
And I've played so much Tetris in the last 48 hours I can see descending multi-colored blocks locking into place as I read my textbook, or write this.
Concentration is impossible.

My Cousin Dylan

Dylan and I were close growing up. Just a year and a half older than me, we wrestled on trampolines and in basements on Thanksgivings, Christmases and Easters for as long as I can remember.

He was always stronger, always faster, always beating my brother and I in backyard football. In hide-and-seek he was nowhere to be found. He ran cross-country and went to state his Sr. year of High School. Division One.

Funny? I thought he was hysterical. Homecoming King. Popular. Good looking. The girls adored him. He worked at either Abecrombie or American Eagle for what felt like a year in High School -I can't remember which. His graduation open house was more like a block party.

My freshmen year he was close friends with the girl I had a massive, heart-bleeding crush on. I sat in his room one afternoon, slumped in some teenage fit of moodiness, staring at the pictures on his wall of them on spring break together in some tropical location.

Last April I was at the surprise birthday of that same girl -we're friends now. A sister of one her friends went to high school with Dylan, and asked what he was "doing these days."

I told her he was in Fallujah with the Marine Corps -And he was.

This Saturday he came home, safe and sound. I did not know how much I loved him until he came out of his gate, and hugged each family member in turn.

Corporal Dylan Manion, just off a tour of duty with the Scout Snipers. Fresh from the sands of Iraq and freezing in this premature November snow.

We left the airport, my massive family choking the streets in entourage, and ate pizza on a long row of tables in a restaurant in East Kentwood.

Dylan was generous in answering the probings of his Aunts and Uncles, though as a whole somewhat tight lipped. As much can be expected. Between appetizers and the entree he held his baby niece for the first time.

Barring unforeseen circumstances, he will be in Afghanistan before his twenty third birthday come this September.

Though he is safe and out of harms way for the time being, I am worried about him. How he is inside. What wounds we cannot see, and how what he has seen will be processed in time.

While we sat around the tables, eating and laughing as an extended family, celebrating the return of a grandchild, a nephew, a cousin, a brother, and to one of us, and uncle, there was across town a funeral for another veteran of the same war who came home too, but didn't make it after all. I know this because my father was asked to do the funeral and had to say no.

I love my cousin Dylan. Now I pray for him every night.

A long day indeed.

Today a lady read from a book that she wrote. A man, the picture of collection, cried briefly, quietly, at my elbow. And the sun outside shown bright and warm.

I felt the bursting of life I have not felt in a while -my very seams shining light from within.

I heard that my own voice is more than just drops in a well, behind your parent's farm, where no children play anymore. I am grateful for this fact.

But then the bags beneath my eyes sagged a little more, darkening to bruised colors, the way they do. The edge of the wheel, once high above the earth, then in the mud, soon to carry on.

I find that I have recently become a twitcher -a shaker or bouncer of legs when sitting. Once, in an archaic dictionary, I found the obscure name for this action. The "devil's tattoo." Demons playing marching beats to your constant, rhythmic motions.
Big Dan once told me that he rocked his body back and forth because he had pneumonia for 8 months when he was a child, and his tall bodied father would return home from work and use the same rhythmic motions to soothe Dan to sleep. Why do I move the way I do now?

Today we voted. Some cry out in anguish, others in optimism. Some bury their faces, and others lift their eyes up to the light. We project our pictures of God and Satan on human beings so easily. We seem to forget who is in control. We seem to forget who can or cannot save us, body or soul.

For me: I see people fighting in the streets and forests of other countries. Will we be spared from such a fate, such cave dwelling? Here, on our own city blocks, in some future's distant mist?

I wait for my love, my future wife, the one whom will radically change my life.
But I also can see myself dying young, tomorrow, or the next, in a traffic accident, a stray bullet through my apartment's window, an air conditioning unit falling from a window stories above.

No matter the date of my demise, either near or far, before you lower me into the eath, have them carve on the lid of my pine board box:
"How great is the Creator? Who knows what shape I may take, or where I will go, or what I may see there?"
Bury my body beneath a tree that will grow large, so that in time it may lower its roots and cradle me in its loving arms. Me? I will be somewhere else entirely. For, "I have no soul. I am a soul. I merely have a body."