The Government Is Now The Woodstock Of Our Generation

There was a time, when the middle-aged were young and full of passion that we tried to throw off the government that was trying to become the master of the people.  It spied on its citizens, used its different arms to harass and squash those who would dare question it.  It divvied out favors to those who kept to the company line and would hold no quarter to those who disagreed.  It used the media to shore up its “self-rightness” and the military to cast fear on its own citizens. 

The government has learned a lot in the last 50 years.  It now mesmerizes the very ones who once were so opposed to its practices and invites to bed all those who will uphold its tyrannical oppressions of its own people.  The government is now the Woodstock of our generation and sex, drugs and rock and roll has been replaced with a more heinous drug, the drug of celebrity!

Joe Cocker at Woodstock.  We can now change his anthem "I'll Get By With A Little Help From My Friends"
to
I'll Get By With A Little Help From My Government

Can God Die Of Thirst?

I am studying the crucifixion account in the Gospel of John, the gambling for His clothes, the adoption of His mother, His fair weather friends asking for His body.  One of the most meaningful aspects of John’s account is Christ’s cry that He is thirsty.  I wonder if He hated that sensation, if it was the singular event that once again reminded Him of His imprisonment in the human form.  It is an all out effort to keep a human body satisfied, its physical needs alone can drain us, it is always in need, food, water, warmth, safety, cleanliness, cutting its nails, brushing its teeth, it is the most demanding of all my relationships.  But it is our spiritual needs that the body most desires, it drives us to all manner of actions, Holy and unholy, in order to satisfy its insatiable desire for The Real Spiritual.  In the greatest example of a Humans desire for Spiritual Reconciliation, Christ death and separation from His Father, it is stunning that the Battle of All Battles was interrupted by His physical thirst.  That human body will not give in, it will have its demands met or die trying.  He wasn’t dying of thirst but His Human Body kept nagging Him it was.

Carracci's, Samaritan Women At The Well

A Stage Marked "World"

My guy bombed on the world stage last night.  Everyone desires to be on the world’s stage but few would step there if the play was about pitting us against our strongest rival, if your greatest strength was competing against the strengths of your greatest enemy, if it was by chance that you would win or lose or even suffer a humiliating defeat.  We all have, for no reason we can understand, showed up with our C game in a battle of A’s and with that knowledge we should all consider or count the cost before we willingly step onto a stage marked “World”.

The gospels tell us of an awful story, of God playing on the world stage and suffering a terrible loss.  Some meditations on it reveal that no one seemed to know the whole world was an audience or that the play was the most important of all time.  The most amazing thing is that the Lead played His role flawlessly, a perfect recital, an Oscar winning performance, to an audience that didn’t even attend.  The stakes on the world’s stage are always high but never more high than that Play, The Divine Victory, that to almost all concerned, looked like a humiliating defeat.

Rubber Soul

Rubber Soul, the Beatles sixth album, was what my wife wanted for Christmas this year.  It is considered the Beatles first artistic offering.  This morning I awake in a suite in one of the grand hotels of the South  my Bible lays on a sterling silver tray.  Art, luxury, music, the sincerity of fine quality all rub gently on humans.  Lying on sable seems to be what we are meant for.  An animal will be content on hard pack but the greater the amenity the greater the meaning for humans.  As I drank fine Kona coffee this morning I am reminded that God has made us to live eternally in an indulgence never conceived in our minds.  We do not have a rubber soul bouncing from one luxury to the next but a divine soul waiting eagerly to lie eternally in the Lap of Devine Extravagance.    

The Veiled Rebecca, of which I have seen a copy at the High in Atlanta.
This is perhaps the greatest feat of carving, marble looking
like lace.

Time In A Bottle; NO

I have had two stark reminders of time, one sorrow filled, one joyous.  The death of a young person reminded me that time will inevitably stop.  Time seems eternal to the living but the evidence to the contrary lies in every coffin.  I have become, in time, one year older.  It is my day of celebration of my birth.  At conception I was granted one of the greatest gifts of all, I was placed inside time in order to exsist, exsist as a human being.  Time is the mystery of mysteries and will never be solved by humans because we all live in it and by it we all are.  But there will come a period when time ceases and either we do or there is a plan that does not involve time.  In that plan we will be so far removed from the form of our humanity that if we were to see ourselves with human eyes we would readily believe we beheld a stunning angel or heinous demon.  I believe that yesterday was born a stunning angel that strolls with God.  To Him are all the honor, majesty, glory and praise.