If Jesus Came back for the Day

I got up early that day, took a shower for far too long ‘til I smelled like Fabreeze and Gatorade.  My hair I fashioned backwards as if to erase the time between the last time He came here. I put on a suit at first but as I looked in the mirror I saw a Jesus in a tunic and coat and asked why I would try and improve upon this. Fashion is the myth of an era and Jesus, of every one, never seemed obsessed with looking the best. I didn’t shave but merely cleaned up the stray hairs which sought to grow in patches instead of a beard. Putting on a white V-neck and jeans ‘cause I couldn’t figure out why not, I sat down on the bed. Usually I would lay down again since it was nearly 2 hours before he was coming, but I knew enough of myself to know I would fall asleep. Like Peter and James at Gethsemane, I would miss my Jesus’ pain and agony for my own pleasure. I have done that enough and if God was to condescend to flesh again and spend a day with me, I would not miss it. In part because I have the faith of Thomas and in part because I want to learn, but mainly because I refuse to hear the words, “I never knew you” when I stand at His judgment seat.

Jesus came to the door. He didn’t need to knock but I let Him, immediately regretting how I made Him wait. He stood in the door of my house under the shade of the porch. He wore a white linen short-sleeve dress shirt and light khaki pants. His shirt was unbuttoned the first three buttons and it wrinkled around his tan chest. He had brown leather bracelets around his wrists and penny loafers on. I fell. There was nothing else good to do at that moment. All of my questions seemed to skyrocket out of my skull and into his being, as if he had consumed me. So much I wanted to say, gone in an instant; thankfully, or I would have never learned anything. I don’t remember a span of time after that but I recall there was an amount of walking and then we were sitting on a bench at Squirrel Lake Park. I’ve tried ever since He left to remember His voice, and while I feel Him as if He is still here, the sound of His voice seems quenched. We drove for a while and he made me drive. I guess it makes sense, he probably doesn’t have a license, but Jesus wouldn’t wreck. I made a stupid joke about Jesus take the Wheel and He smiled—actually I think he laughed; yes, it was a deep and hearty laugh like Eli in I made you special. All afternoon Jesus seemed to be working on my mind and soul. They were certainly His. I felt higher than a kite—drunk on peace and overflowing with love. For brief moments I was pierced with the insecurities brought by my sinfulness and a shameful feeling now having seen the Son, but at these moments He never failed to fill me again. All I knew was Love and everything of my past—my arguments, my sins—all was overcome with the flood of His love and Grace. I melted beneath the weight of His love. I melted silently—which is rare. Before I was aware He was saying goodbye—as if it were some surprise I threw my hand up like a toddler and mumbled goodbye. Yet I didn’t say I Love you. Maybe I was embarrassed maybe I forgot, but I would have done anything at that moment and anything now to share those words with Him. I missed Him as it turned out—still do.

I want to know the secret of your smile

I want to know the secret of your smile
to know what mystery belies your eyes
to see the eternity of your soul
I want to know what makes you cry

Your taste I know, or think I do
But I do not want to give it up
not for a moment do I want to lose
a second's wasted without loving you

I haven't met you yet, or maybe I have
Yet I am sure you linger
I do not know your face, but I feel you
And I know how you will touch
I know that brown, black, gold or white
your hair will surround me
I know that your smile will speak to mine
The corners of my lips following your lead
I know that I will give myself over
Probably far too soon
But what I know of my nature
Whether I have words or not
Not even forever can stop my loving you

On the benefits of Arranged Marriage

In order for one to understand why I, or anyone would advocate for the abandonment of such sweetisms as true love and “the one”— of anybody being any more special than another, in favor of the constrictive sound of marriage arrangement; it only takes that we find within ourselves the reason we feel the need to love, to be in love, to choose love.

This reason, I feel, is fear— fear of not being loved, of not loving. Fear of being alone—not just single, but truly alone— when you are, yourself, sitting in that dark and dank hotel room, suffocated by the weight of nothing, crumpled on a mattress unable to die for no one would notice, unable to live for no one cares—that state, where filled up and spilling out with loneliness, that this modern melodrama of relationships, hook-ups, and ceremony are born. It is in the heart of every man. It is in my own, but love was not introduced here.

No, love was introduced much before. When there were no opportunities for selective love and two individuals began to live and grow together out of necessity— out of efficiency— and from that learned, over the course of long lives, to love the other—in the manner eulogized by St. Augustine, as two trees, through every season, that at the end, you look down and realize that these two trees have become one. Here, love was not falling in love once, forever, but falling in love day in and day out to the same person, as throughout your life the person you married slowly revealed more and more—every part of their being and you found new, better, more complete reasons to love them. In fact this idea of falling in love once seems only to mean that you have already found out every reason to love that person and even if by some miracle 15, 20 years later you have maintained a marriage or commitment to that person, that flood of silence, and the desperate echo of radio that drowns out the car, thunders at dinner— after sex; it will not be some silent musical interlude that communicates without words, not the beauty of being in some inseparable union alone together, but the culmination of awkward boredom when all there was to say will have already been said. Sometimes kids come along, or sickness, or death, and it becomes easy to convince oneself that noise is there, and thus nothing is wrong when in fact love fled long ago. This love— this love that leaves both parties repeating to themselves how good things were, because good can no longer be easily witnessed nor will it be again; it is the type of love most prevalent in modern-day countries where love is self-selected. It is a love tied up in meaningless societal tradition, over-generalization, the under-representing of love with the three words, I love you. There is no justice in this for those words. All the original power is dwindled to dross, in the cold wind of this modernity as it stands stripped and exposed. In the words of Jonathan Safran Foer in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, “I love you also means I love you more than anyone loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else.” People are given too many chances to throw around this word. They mean it only in its basest form and maybe not even then. What if that is stripped away, the chance to fail, and instead by removing ourselves from the drivers’ seat of relationships we might experience all of Foer’s manifestations of “I love you”? As it stands, we flip a coin that can do one of three things, land in love, land in pain or fake love, or it could not come down at all, and in that interim of its flight our fears play a malady on our sensitive minds, and it is our very heart that is the coin thrown up. Is it a freedom to throw the coin, or a chain, a chain that binds you to one of these three outcomes? What if that “freedom” was removed and instead one is handed a blank coin and a blade, and given the freedom to make whatsoever they desired, with at least initial equality of opportunity? What if love and marriage is a process to a feeling not a feeling to a process, and everyone is allowed to take part in the process? What if it wasn’t just chance? Would not the knowledge of love being present, capable, alleviate the fear? Do we need to be in that ecstasy of love or is it not the presence of love that we seek. That somewhere out in the world someone wants you, and whether they are vile, whether or not you marry them, that love exists. Think of the whore. She waits like a lion in bars, in clubs, and at times on the street, braving the weather in little but her underwear for what? True love? No, she simply wants to be desired, to be sought after; she wants to know that love can be felt, that her presence means something.  It is no different with the modern teen who parades her faux anatomy in the face of every boy in order that they me be fulfilled in knowing that someone wants them—at least some part of them, and the boys who would strip themselves and the morals for a chance to know that they might be let in. Take it all away!

                Love by definition exists between only two parties, if it is a love with room for more; one wonders if it is love at all. How can one secure that he needs only one man or woman?

                It starts young, 15 or 16, wherein parents began to arrange for their son or daughter a spouse. Schools must as a result, streamline education, become much more efficient, taking out the busy work that engulfs years in this present school system, that at this late teen age, people began to match up with what will be their betrothed. In this age these adolescents have little to know experience with relationships, especially of such gravity, but it is perfectly okay that their relationships not begin in passion. The two individuals will start at whatever stage of relationship they feel comfortable with and move forward, with no option of escape, forced to overcome any obstacles thrown in their way. Two people will be pushed together with a destination, a pen, told to write a story and they shall, a great one that gets better and better as the pages turn, and uncovers to each more of the other.

                Would not the process of arrangement—of people being chosen, not encourage children to become what they want to be much faster— that they might get chosen by a number of parents and in a sense have their bit of a pick. There is no eliminating the want to be wanted, not even a taming of it, but by changing the process one can change how that desire manifests, and by virtue of who the young men and women are trying to impress, they will demonstrate themselves as honorable, loyal, and good. Clothing will finally stop its rapid convergence towards the waist. Adolescence will be stripped of the pressures of “love” and of fear, and freed that honor and decency will once again be honorable, even necessary. How many 15 year olds will be out having sex (and inevitably children and abortions) if in only a year they would be held accountable for their actions and subsequently forced to have that shotgun wedding; this time, without the chicken exit of the 2 year-in divorce?

                This sounds harsh; it sounds like an assault on freedom, but do we really want every freedom? Being free to do anything is anarchy. No, we want the freedom to live ourselves, in equality with others, able to go as far as we want in life without anyone interfering. We want the freedom to be the driver of our own destiny—the ‘Captain of our own and unconquerable souls’ as Henley put it. We want justice, as a part of our staking out our own fate; we expect that consequences ensue for those who have wronged us whether personally or by association, yet can we expect ourselves to not answer for those consequences? Do we define freedom as anarchy for me and justice for the masses? Often in our relationship, that is just the case, we want the freedom to fail inconsequentially because there is a chance to succeed, and we would trade anything to avoid losing that freedom. We want to live our love life out without negative consequences only good and necessary experiences. In the coin flip of love many flail their arms at the coin coming in contact with every side of the coin, the good and the bad. So it is that many know every groove of the coin but when it lands cannot be satisfied. They have seen too much to be content. Likewise, many lose the ability to hold on to the coin like Mohammad Ali who punched like a madman in his younger years and now can’t hold his cup. There is then, little that is positive about this process of dating and hooking-up. We learn what the coin is like; if we are lucky maybe even what we are like, but we have wasted half a life learning everything about everyone only to try and settle down to learn something about someone.

                Arranged marriages not only eliminates much of the failures of individual selection, but can also develop even greater a passion. Rather than nuclear bombing a single area or even two or three, marriage like this, slowly throughout its years plants little bombs across the globe until it is encompassed entirely in flame. So what of the questions about conjugal homogamy—those who feel that their sexuality might falter if it is not their decision? Of course it will. In the majority of arrangements the bride and groom will be a bit of a surprise, an awkward time of figuring the other person out, but you are given years back on your life to learn all of this. By starting young in an arranged set-up, you eliminate all the years of fear and scorn and depression, all of the woes of relationship hopping and take the average age of marriage, 27 and subtract the 16 or 17 years of before marriage and you have over 10 years to get to know that person— what they like and don’t like, what they smell like, what they taste like, what they sleep like, what they feel like, what they sound like, what they’re allergic to, what they think about, how they are in the morning, how they are at night, how their eyes mirror their emotions, how they love, how they want to be loved, and by age 27 you will know no one more than them, not even yourself. Nicole Krauss in Great House describes ‘our bodies like a great field where each day a circus is assembled and taken down again and the next day a new circus comes in, and it is never the same circus—what hope have we of learning about another if it is so hard to learn about one’s own self. Learning about one another is a far greater task, one that must start young and continue, on and on, over every storm of life, catching a glimpse of these circuses as they assemble and dismantle in the eyes and heart of your love. That is what I desire—to grow together. In the modern path we are walking around looking for someone to hold onto and hold on until we are unable to not let go. We are searching in hopes to throw ourselves into another and hold on to pretend that we are one, but in actuality all we need to do is stand beside one, holding a hand for years and years— decades, but by the end we really are one tree. Arranged marriage forces us to stand with another, and though at first it might be awkward, sweaty, or quiet, by the end when all of the rollercoaster of life has passed through and there comes again a sort of quiet, it will not  be that there are things that want to be said and can’t or things that need to be said that won’t be, but rather it is a contented quiet that comes when talking to yourself, that words are being spoken but there was no need for them to be made audible. Silence scares us to death. There is nothing more valuable to ne than knowing that as I age, it won’t be in to this unquenchable silence, but a respite of happiness and the tenderness of being alone together.

                Though the arrangement of marriage presents a sort of chain to what we perceive to be freedom, the freedom we perceive is not a freedom we need; if we knew the effects we wouldn’t even want it. It is a freedom to be consumed, whether by passion, or most often by fear. It is simply my freedom to throw up my heart and let it fall where it may. By taking out this process and fast-forwarding to the end—to the promise of a last page, where love in its truest form is really felt, I can be no longer bound by this system of fear, insecure hook-ups and failed relationships, and instead thrive within an institute a system by which love can foster—where love is a vessel with the promise of a journey, and though I am no longer in the drivers’ seat, I’m a passenger on one hell of an autopilot. I’m guaranteed a ride on this winged angel: love, and as it 360s and dive-bombs and twirls through the air I know I am safe. Though I wield no power, I get the opportunity to ride—for my whole life, without responsibility and stress and pressure. I get to ride where the wind goes, one with love and happily not in control as we soar through the sky where by myself I couldn’t go. Life is a fatal obstacle course, and it does me good to be on the back of the creature that knows its way around these obstacles. Sometimes life moves to fast and I run into things, but with love beneath me, those things don’t happen more and hurt a lot less.

Arranged marriage is all about trust. As a young adult right now, I still live under the fisted rule of my parents. It is not so much that I am much more constrained than others or even that the fist is squeezing hard, but as a teen and tending naturally, I think, toward rebellion I see this fist as a control I have not yet gotten free of—a power that I want for only myself. I am not so foolish to think that my parents would deliberately pick the homeliest and most religious girl of the bunch out of a lack of trust or some presence of vengeance for things I’ve done. The fact is that I have magnificent parents and though I often want power for myself, some things seem too weighty for me to bear alone, especially at this age where my hormones scream louder than my brain. I understand this relationship between child and adult does not exist in every home and that the benefit of my home may lend me unfairly toward the idea of arranged marriage, but it is a practice that I would love to be instituted on me because I’m sick of going at it alone when all I get are mysteries and games in return. I believe that as a man I am meant to hunt and seek out a woman, but this process is much longer than we think and shortening the race to simply landing a girl to date is aiming far too low. I want the girl it takes me a lifetime to figure out and I want to die still learning about her. We cheapen this journey of love to a few shallow puzzles at the beginning. But can those last? I guess it is unfair to call for a ban on non-arranged marriage, but it seems a blatant ignorance to stick our nose in the air at it every time it appears as if we are above it. I am a proud man, if I can even call myself one, and yet I need love and recognize that on my own I waste far too much time. As soon as arranged marriage gets a better reputation for the love it fosters (though admittedly I would do it sooner if I could) I will be the first one in line, because I believe that Happiness doesn’t always start with romance and that not even one lifetime is long enough to know a person and I am sick of wasting the years before I can start. Love answers no requests it hasn’t already and it’s not worth praying to. I’m tired of waiting and telling myself I am preparing for “her” as my heart turns inside me on this rough ride of life. I have begun lately to put myself in chains because I would run away otherwise. The world has run out of motivation for me to keep searching and keep myself. Where is “she”? Is she coming? I’m finished waiting for romance and not ready to dive into sex, and I’m sitting between where it seems many are. Why don’t we just sit with each other and begin to share. My heart done not living and I’m tired of waiting. Give me something to hold onto and I’ll hold it forever. Give me something to look up to. I know I’ll be better.

               

Life and Love: Spoken Word Poetry

The sledgehammer pounds on life's icicle spike

It’s driven inside me--inside of my heart.

It splinters my chest and it opens me up

And digs even deeper as if there is treasure in there somewhere

And he finds it

That part where Beloved, your home has its place

The only place in me I don't want to escape

The head of the spike its drawing closer to my skin and the hairs on my chest stand up with a shiver

Old sweat beads down around my heart into that crease of my chest but the blood pouring out

Of my heart's not new

The spike

It is melting

Like liquid sun glinting over the dried blood of my flesh washing me clean,

A river of faces of used to be knowns, people distorted sucked up by the past

Tomorrow will hold them no longer, and we all need some tomorrow

There

You

At last

I see

You

So beautiful

Beloved you warm me up

The insides of me bubble and shake with the you pumping through me

Pulsing through my blood

Your soul

A song

Our song

Too much?

You slow down and spread e'er so slightly

You U-turn around my ear so you can whisper my name and I'll know you're voice

You bear left down my jaw and tickle my cheek so I'll know what it feels like for you to kiss me goodnight

You pause at my mouth as you roll through the stop sign and redden these lips with your tongue

Beloved you drive out to the edge of my world, circling my feet you spin around like you're a ballerina and dance a tingle into my toes

And then you return

And I only wish to do the same for you

To complete you

To celebrate our conquering of life

Sprinting through every fiber of your skin

Letting myself in

Taking notes in your eye

Counting every drop of color that paints the collage of your iris

Studying the infinity of your pupils

Dancing on the follicle of an eyelash and falling

And landing

In that hollow before your cheek where I could call my home if but a moment

You and I

Beloved

After melting life

After melting the past

What lasts?

Wont to sing and overcome

Wont to dance

To hold hands

For who?

For us?

Love

Love is not magic or a sudden exchange

But the loving caress of a palm on my face

Your palm

Your fingers

“Hold me!”

“No!” I remiss

“I can hold myself”

“I can’t”

“You must” I rebut

Dance with me too

Love me so fully and fill up and pour out this vessel

Love me ‘til bruises cover me

Love me ‘til my teeth shatter with the weight of our kissing

Love me ‘til my nose can smell you like a shark smells blood from a mile away

Love me ‘til you can feel my love rushing through you

And I’ll love you ‘til bleeding makes you feel better and comfort is comfort only when we're together

I’ll love you ‘til our dreams become reality and we dream once again

I’ll love you further, then

I’ll love you ‘til our song fills the universe's silence and conducts it with a string

‘Til the universe taps its feet

I’ll love you ‘til my insides become you and you’re the half of my whole

I'll love you ‘til all those clichés ring true and yet we won't say them

No

Beloved we'll do nothing but sing

‘Til words aren't enough

And filling you up and life comes once again to the door of our body and once again we send it off in evaporated dew and you and I weld the pieces of our broken heart, bending our dreams and bringing hope to our souls ‘til the universe says "Fools and Lovers! just go ahead and go"

And it'll be just you and I and we'll be filled to the brim

With love

With the other

And then I'll love you again

A job began is a job half done

            To say that a job began is a job half done is quite a catchy phrase, with all of the truisms like “starting is the hardest part” and “the blank page is the artist’s worst enemy”— and it certainly helps that Horace was perhaps the first one to coin this type of phrase. But it leaves such a crucial element out—the middle. The middle of the road, middle age, the middle of two things, the middle of an argument, the middle of a word…

But ah, how I’ve waited to use this excellent study that hangs in my Bible classroom—a study from Cambridge that says that no matter what word it is as long, even if all of the letters in the middle are mixed up, as long as the first and letters are the same, the word can be read at the same speed as if all the letters were in proper order. So it is, that in our lives it matters only where we begin and where we finish. Some are born into wealth and greatness and power, but do not begin in taking up their life towards the finish and end up little removed from when they were born. Yet some, some begin in dregs and raise up greatness, and by starting, whether they have a goal or not they have begun a race that will take them somewhere. The gravity is of little matter, only the distance that they go. The middle means nothing if there is no beginning and if there is a beginning it takes but a step to bring an end.

I began a few months back writing a novel, not the first one I began. Its meaning is dually poignant. First, that beginning it is nothing like finishing it, or even getting into the middle, and second, its title: Where it takes me. I am writing with no goal in mind, I have no idea how it will end, if it will end in a way I hoped, how the characters will come together, how the plot will develop and resolve. But it is out of that curiosity that I continue—I must continue, you see, for the words now, know something I yet, do not. By beginning I have given myself a reason to end, I have allowed for an ending to take place.

A page, a paragraph, half a face, a line—that’s all it takes. We did exercises in art on just that, taking this or that squiggling or zagging line and turning it into something—not perhaps what the artist of the line intended, but something, something more than what was there, easier than with only imagination and a blank page.

Why do I tell you this? Do I need to verify Horace’s outstanding credibility or even the truth of such a commonly heard statement? No, but it was necessary that I might start, that, by getting words on a page, all that is left is finishing it. Having begun, I am now able to end. Having begun I conquered all the alabaster demons of the white page hushing them with words that I might end and like Horace said, finish the job by living each moment as the beginning and pressing onward until my time expires, that the stretch of my growth in life would be long because I started, and every step after that simply added to the glory of where I might end up. I began  and that has made all the difference.