Godspeed

if you’ve dropped your keys,

hat or hash pipe

into the “rabbit hole”

of delusive fantasy,

whirling and writhing down

an eternal abyss of insanity,

further and further away

from the drain of objective reality.

Does Scripture—

the Rosetta Stone

of what sinners’ call “fire and brimstone”—

employ fear tactics of emotional control?

Give me Narnia or 

Give me the Wild Lands of the North. 

Give me Aslan or 

Give me the White Witch

and her black dwarfs.

God: “Truth is self-love that sets you free and enables you to see your sin as an opportunity to talk with Me about why you sin so we can have conversations like this one and walk further down life’s path together. This is My heart. This is discipleship.”

The sin particle,

an element

before the elements

of the Periodic Table.

An irritation

to the core

that makes it unstable

like uranium or plutonium,

an existential explosion

with the biblical force

of 100 Noachian floods

unlike the God particle

of infinite glory

that pre-existed the lies

that traumatize

the innocent child

at the beginning

of every story.

If words are a bubbling brook

above the geyser of our hearts,

they’re poised

to say something about

the nature of our spirituality—

a disjointed but shared reality—

seeking comfort

in the womb of bad religion.

Sometimes monsters

of our own making

show up relentlessly

until we look introspectively

at the mess we’ve made

when we’ve felt incarcerated

without the possibility of parole

as both our own judge and jury.

I felt like Icarus, whose hubris led him to fly too close to sun, which melted wax on his shoulders, causing feathers to unfasten, and thus his hope of freedom to come crashing down like one of Zeus’s lightning bolts.

True happiness is biblical, moral, pleasurable, historical, and necessary for Christian character.

The toll of communism