communion (i think i might illustrate this)

And there was a man
clinging to a bit of wood
alone in the sea
for many days.
Many, many days.
So long he despaired of ever seeing land again.

He cried out to God
both day
and night,
"Please save me!"
Day after day
night after night
the same plea
"God, please save me!"

One day he heard something.
A voice,
not an answer
but an echo.
And there was another man
clinging to a bit of wood
alone in the sea,
crying out, "God, please save me!"

"My boat sunk!" said the man.
"Mine too!
"All i have is this chunk of wood."
"Me too."
"I've been here many, many days."
"As have i."
"I've despaired of life."
"Brother." said the man.

the famous final scene

A question texted to his eldest son hangs in the ether unanswered.

Hello?

HellooooOOOOOooo?  He tries to make it funny.

His youngest finishes eating.  "You want me to put this away?" he asks.  Pappy looks at the vegetables and fruits in their sealed containers.

"Sure."  The young man puts them back in the fridge.  He never says a word.  He finishes and he goes upstairs.

Loreena McKennitt begs on the radio, "Please remember me."  Pappy sits alone at the table.  He sips his ale.  "Please remember me."  He thinks, this is where the camera pans back, back, back out the window, the air conditioner noise fades and the night enters the screen from the sides and closes on the shrinking man sitting alone.  Somehow the music rises to the fore.  "Please remember me."  Fade to black.  Roll credits.

But this isn't a movie or an artsy fartsy television show with a healthy dab of sap in its closing scene.  We won't magically move to our protagonist waking up tomorrow.  There's no way to cut out the loneliness, futility, frustration of waiting to sleep.  Of waiting for a little blessed oblivion.  Cut to daylight.  Cut to another day in the life of a sad sack.

The ipod randomly, yeah right, shuffles Ray Charles crying about something or other next.  He looks at the clock.  Seven twenty-seven.  Shit.  It's going to be a long night.  He takes another sip.

Life

"Life," Seamus said to me once, "is riding a bus somewhere you don't want to go with wankers you don't even like."

Had to ask

"Have you ever been treated for depression, Seamus?"
"Life is depression.  Everyone's depressed, lad.  Weeborns come out screaming and crying.  Living, yer way of life, is nothing more or less than how you choose to treat it."

Why do i talk to this guy?

"Yikes, Sheila cut off all her hair!"
"Woman-hater's hair cut," Seamus stated matter of fact around a mouthful of spaghetti.  I knew when I was being baited.  He knew I would give in.  Eventually.  Damn him.
"Okay, why not a Man-hater's hair cut?"
"Now what about that looks Man-hating to ye?" He gestured to Sheila's bob with his fork.
"I don't follow you.  She had gorgeous long hair.  Men loved it.  She cut it all off.  Obviously she's sick of being eye candy for men."
"Certain men.  Some like that sort of thing, I'm told.  Anyhoo, what's the worst thing a woman can do to a man?"
"Cut off his --"
"Oh aside from that, ye unphilosophical simpleton!"  I shrugged.  "Become a man!  And how can you truly hate a man if you're working so hard to become one?  They cut their hair, they wear men's clothes, they try to be independent, they try to do men's jobs, they talk like men, cuss like men and destroy and distort everything feminine about themselves.  They don't hate men.  They want to be men!  It's themselves they hate."
"So smart guy, what does a man-hater look like?"
"All the rest o' em."
"Jeez!  What do you call this dark, bleak little world you live in?!"
Seamus stabbed a spherical meatball and held it up to inspection.  "Earth."

A mystery wrapped in an enigma all tied up with paradox

Only my God.  Only Yahweh the mysterious and all knowing could come up with this.  Only He would know that you can teach a dog like me to love by denying me all visible love.  Only He would know that you could make someone an encourager by placing them in a desert devoid of the encouragement they crave.  Only He would know that a drought of kind words, a mouthful of sand and not a drop of joy even in a mirage, could make one a fountain for others.  Only He would hatch such a plan.  Only He would spring it in a moment when at my lowest i was crying out to him and lamenting this dry, waterless waste that i stagger through.

Only He would know i would totally see Him behind it all.

i love Him! 

Good Friday

 

Good Friday. 

Right now you have been up all night, first praying but then dragged to and through a mock trial.  You have been beaten and spit on, derided.  In a few hours, they will drag you up to Pilate, a foreigner, a pagan for yet another farce of a trial.  You will then be dragged to Herod for more of an interrogation.  But there you will be beaten and mocked some more.  Then back to Pilate where he will condemn you upon a political expediency.  Better one man die than many in an uprising.  And he lose his job if not his life.  With great power comes great anxiety.  And so he washes his hands and signs your death bill.  But first, you are flogged, scourged, flagellated.  Your skin torn off.  A crown of thorns, carefully woven by some sadist, is mashed down onto your head.  The king of sin, the king of the fall then tries to carry his own cross but is unable.  A Libyan Jew is forced to carry it for you.  Or with you.  You walk the streets of Jerusalem, staggering from pain and the weight of the all the world’s sin.  You who has never sinned, now is forced to endure the punishment of it, the separation from the Father, communion is broken.  Love is broken.  Now there is only wrath.  The wrath of the Father pours out on you, the faithful and true and undeserving son.  The only flesh born ever that did not deserve the wrath of God from birth. 
 

By around nine o’clock they will have nailed you to the wood and hoisted you high into the sky.  They offer you a drugged wine and you refuse.  Though when you do cry out for drink, they offer you only sour wine.  Vinegar.  Even those in the same predicament as you mock you from their own crosses where they pay for their own sins.  Save one.  Who begs you to but remember him.  Who recognizes your innocence.  Three hours you hang there.  The sky goes dark.  You cry out to God the Father as but God.  You declare it all done.  All the work of all creation finally finished.  And you commit your spirit into your Father’s hands.  The earth quakes, the veil in the temple is torn in two.  There is now no separation between us and you, the profane and the holy, we have been made clean by your finished work. 

By tonight, before darkness falls and the Sabbath begins, they who adored you in secret will finally make public their declaration by coming and asking for your body and preparing it for burial and placing it in their own tomb.  Freshly cut.  Never used.  A stone is rolled over the entrance.  It is sealed with the governor’s seal.  Guards are set and the world wanders away, your followers to hide behind locked doors in confusion and despair, your detractors behind smug self satisfaction, your executioners behind their ignorance.  Darkness falls.
 

Hi there, I AM.

Passover.

Slaves under an oppressive regime, literally worked to death.  And when God comes and introduces himself to them by name, their cultural memory of him and his last communication with them being four hundred and thirty years prior, he tells them something amazing.

Their biggest problem isn't the one they can see.  Yes, they are slaves.  Yes, the government is evil and wicked.  Yes, Yahweh is going to rescue them from their geopolitical and economic reality but what He has really come to do is rescue them from their sins.  From a curse which if they knew it at all was merely a part of their creation myth.  He has come to rescue them from eternal death.  And he even hints at how He's going to do it. 

Somewhere around two thousand years later a man comes to the same people, now subjects under a foreign empire in their own land.  This man sits down to another Passover dinner, now not much more than a religious ceremony that establishes their cultural and racial heritage, and tells them something amazing.  Their biggest problem isn't occupation forces and pagan governors, it is still not geopolitical and socio-economic.

He tells them He is God, and he's what Passover was all about.

The thoughts of an old soldier

When i was young, i thought i would win the war.
As i aged, i became afraid i'd missed the war.
Now...
   now.
Now i just hope to win this one, little skirmish before i die.


(And in other news, this site, my oldest blog, my first presence on the Wild World of Web, has over ten thousand views now.  i wish that meant something but i suspect, most, if not nearly all, are just spam bots.  But hey, milestones are milestones no matter how you get to them, i suppose.)

Welcome

i hate locked doors.

By extension, i hate being ignored, passively or actively locked out of a conversation, a group, a place where i was hoping to enter, participate in or just listen to.  i don't need to be celebrated, i don't have to have the recognition and delight of every participant, i just want to be included, allowed, given a fair shake. 

Welcome. 

America is locking its doors.  Fear and jealousy is taking over.  Selfishness.  If we share with you, there won't be enough for us.  If we let you in, you might do something violent.  If we let a lot of you in, we may change.  We won't be in charge anymore.  There is danger in welcome.  Guests are not always pleasant.  Hospitality is costly.  Safety is tenuous.  Comfort is more comfortable.  Welcome is vulnerable.

Vulnerable is scary. 

You have to assume damage if you are going to love the damaged.  And everyone is damaged.  None are healthy, no, not one.  Everyone is hurting from something.  And where they've been hurt, they have learned mechanisms to defend themselves.  Where they've been denied, they've learned skills to get what they think they need.  Those mechanisms and skills are broken, they are almost always sinful and damaging, but they work in the short term and that's all that matters to the damaged and the needy.  If you let them in, you are going to be stolen from, you are going to be hurt, your stuff is going to get broken.  They may be ungrateful.  They may lie about you.  They may hurt you.  They might even beat you up. 

They might kill you. 

They might drag you through your own streets, nail you onto a beam and hang you up for public ridicule.  This is what happens if you cross us!  This is what happens when you welcome!  This is what happens when you love! 

People call Christians intolerant.  They accuse us of being exclusive.  Unwelcoming and i'm sure they've got some examples they could hold up.  We are all broken, we are all damaged and some have yet to understand the God they believe in.

But that's not what we are.  Christians are people pointing to a door.  Testifying about a door.  You don't enter a house through the wall.  Only thieves go into a temple through the window.  You enter a kingdom through a gate.  Through a door.  Jesus is the door.  He's literally the way in. 

And for now, he's not locked.

A Night in Nox

In the gray, failing light of the last day of the year, the foot-tired travelers turned there backs to the chilling airs hovering over face of the lake and made for home.  Back, back to the road.  Back to the hard, poured surface of pitch and stone.  The black scythe swathe cut which proved man ruled these woods and went where he willed and did just as he pleased.  If they listened, they could just hear the whispered echoes of the rolling fortresses upon it.  They were not far.  Not far indeed.  The path was clear and hard packed from many feet; the way would be easy.  They would make their own fortress before dusk.

Twisting and twining, coiling and writhing the path led down into a shadow gloom of crouching pines.  Stunted and malformed, an army of ancient children, angry at their maker, keeping counsel with none but themselves, they hid from the light and turned the silent ground below to a moist carpet of needles which gave beneath the travelers’ tread.  Not in soft delight did they place their feet but in eerie dread as if trod upon the very flesh of a sleeping giant.  As if the softness and the blanket might muffle the breaths and they would fall into the very mouth and be swallowed up in darkness. 

Neither had much will to ponder long the spongy earth however as their ears and eyes were hooked and pulled to the gnarled spider limbed branches hanging low over their fearful faces.  A shadow flitted before them.  First one, then two, then three, then fifteen, then fifty, then a countless cacophony of feathers and wing, chirp and screech!  A great squawking, Hitchcockery mob, long overdue in the southlands, hanging here in this wicked wood.  Robins, robbed of their warm reds, cold gray and dull drabs in the gloom, glimpsed only for a moment as their sharp beaks split to cry at the interlopers.  Fear!  Flight!  The impenetrable net above them that strained out sky and light was filled with the wind of beating wings, they could feel it on their faces, it thrummed in their ears, an arrhythmic beat, an erratic madness.  Fear!  Flight!  Flee!  But never far, never far, always one step ahead, one branch further, only to take flight again!  The world around them became a dark, thrumming mass of flashing wing and darting darkness.  Their steps quickened but the path twisted back, this way and that, never free of the copse of malevolent trees and terrified birds. 

Light often comes in strange forms when one feels most trapped by the darkness.  A spell.  The grizzled traveler knew a charm for such times.  He sang an old, throaty song, a song of light in darkness, of warmth in cold, of succor in abandonment.  A melancholy tune of being found when lost.  A song it was, imbued with ancient power, an enchantment stronger than fear, greater than darkness: Hope.  Soon the shadows parted.  The wings drew back, further and further to either side and then fell at last, fell behind.  Joy began to peek out and then…

They froze, the song cut off. 

A call.  A voice of Night.  A sentry’s query.  Ominous and portent.  Who?  Who goes there?  State your business.

A shadow, a silhouette on a dead branch, a horned watchman on his tower.  Who? Who goes there?  They did not answer.  The interlopers dared not speak.  The great watchman lifted up and on moccasin wing and silenced currents went to make his report.  Joy stillborn, hope forgotten, the interlopers pressed on no longer sure of the Road.  No longer sure of Home.  Eyes wide for what may come next. 

What came next were gnomes.  At first the travelers spirits lifted.  At first they laughed at the brightly colored comedians.  The cavorting fools.  The antics of the minuscule denizens of this enchanted wood.  So here, then must be the source of the tricks of light and noise.  Here then was the cause of their folly.  And favored guests they must be to see this village of the fair folk!

But no fair welcome was this.  All they received was course jest and rude name.  Insult and ignominy.  And warning.  The guard made it clear what the natives thought of their grossly oversized intruders.  The dead eyed scavengers gnawing on bones made it clear what the fate of those caught in these woods at night would be.  But fear not us, they mocked, no, no, fear not us!  We are the janitors, we are but the gardeners.  Fear the Parliament!  Aye, they laughed,

    The Parliament, the Parliament,
many wasted minutes spent,
    many fools’ last moments,
wondering what the wee folk meant
    by fear the Parliament!

When they know just what we mean
    split they are from spine to spleen
Too late they see what we’ve seen
    and we will pick their fool’s bones clean
And sing a jolly last lament
    to fools who should fear the Parliament.

And with many more rude noises and raucous laughter at our backs, we quit that place and none too quickly.  And before i and my companion had time to consider the song of the faerie folk, the sentry called again.  From far ahead, between us and the road came the challenge.  It was answered from West.  That challenge was answered from the East.  Then behind.  Again, and closer from before. 

Surrounded.  Hurried we did now.  The gnomes had achieved their fateful work.  It was dusk, we had lost the light.  No silhouette accompanied our warnings from above now.  The sentries hung over us unseen but not unheard.  Now before us.  Now to the side.  Faster and faster we went, as fast as we dared as root and rock sought to trip us in the gathering gloom.  Night fell and still we were fighting the path itself.  This way and that it turned.  Taking us tortuously close to the road, within sight of passing fortresses and then away and deeper into the rolling wood and hollering cataract.  A watery trench between us and the road.  An open maw.  And always the Parliament overhead!  Unseen talons in the dark.  Silent wings at our backs.  The values shifted.  Dark path became ribbon of light. Reflecting leaves became deep shadow.  Trees closed in around us, reached for us, cut us off from the Road and then…

We stumbled and nearly fell down the steep embankment cut by human hands, abrupt, unnatural and oh so welcome at last we came to the Road!  Fumbling for the key, encased in steel and glass, engine roars to life, lights stab the darkness and make it deeper still but outside, outside, blessedly outside.  Escape at pursued impala speeds, they breathed deeper the artificially heated air, they let the chill escape their feet, they tore into sugary chocolate to sweeten the fear from their mouths and set course for home.

The deep raking talon tears along their souls will heal and be forgotten in a week or two.  Or so i’m told.

Probably not an original thought

The Oath is forged in moment of peace

when witness shine upon the maker;

But in battle fierce and darkness deep

are the keeper divided from the breaker.

The Vow is not for when love's river

be swollen with the rains of Spring;

But when choking drought and love's stone well

naught but dust the lover bring.

None need promise what none doubt done

in joyful days when Satan slept;

The Promise is not judged on noble intent

but in the devil's hour when it is kept.

Of fog and crows...

For no one hopes in what they've seen.

Voice of the Apocalypse

It has become an uphill slog of gory hand to hand combat to write.  To force fleeting flickers of thoughts to coalesce into lamps of luminous prose.  And it's not a block.  A lump of wall between the world of words and i.  It is the i in i.

i just don't see the point.

Lately i think a lot about finishing.  A conversation with Jeff the Elder in which we lamented and he said something that my mind remembers as, "there is a dearth of men finishing well."  Ending their lives as firm and as solid and as noble as they began them.  There is a falling off which happens.  An inward curvature.  A parabolic arc that turns the man upon himself, inward, selfish, low.  As if we all, like Gollum, bury ourselves beneath the mountain, far from eyes, far from light, far from anyone and anything we need to care about.  Hobbies become obsessive.  My precious.

Depending on how you measure it, i am either in the last third of my life or the very middle.  i think of life in terms of twenties.  Scores.  The first Score: birth and childhood.  The second Score: marriage, family, raising my sons.  i am in the third Score now, what is it?  What's its purpose?  What is its mission?  Does it have one or can that only be determined in hindsight?  Mid-life crisis?  Would we have the stereotype if it weren't true?  To me this score is the last of my productive years.  Anything beyond sixty is bonus round.  But the life i've lived will most likely make it a wasteland of the physical.  My body won't be up for another twenty by then.  If i follow in the footsteps of some of my forebears, my mind won't either.  So i don't hold out much hope for a fourth movement (though who knows?  Moses did ALL of his work from eighty to one twenty).  This is it.  This is the time you have allotted to you.

How shall you spend it?  What shall you do?

i feel the deck heave beneath me.  The world at large and personal is a Titanic in her death throws.  Nothing holds together.  i can hear the screams of the metal as it tears away and it mixes with the fear of the dying.  What is yet worth doing?  Is there anyone listening?  Anyone i can give a life preserver to?  Should i just sit here and draw the bow along the cello until the deep closes over?  Would anyone draw strength from the music?  Would i?

Is it enough to be the last DJ on the overnight, graveyard broadcast, playing his songs as the stars fall?  Pappy Fricken here, your shepherd through the pilgrim's progress of the long, dark night of the soul.  The last watchman on the wall, talking to the crickets and the katydids.  "Watchman, what of the night?" they cry, "Watchman, what of the night?"  Morning comes and also the night, i would answer.  If you would inquire, inquire.  Come back again to WHUT, playing your musical score to accompany the end of the world.  Saying never forget, never forget, Salvation before Revelation, my friends, crickets and katydids.  The end is only a new beginning and you don't want to miss the next world.  It's going to be the one you thought this one should be.  One worth writing about.  Come Lord Jesus, come!

Excerpt of another conversation with Seamus

"Ye know what i hate?" Seamus asked me one cooling evening in our favorite publick house.
"Everything," i answered with the full weight of assurance.
"Now that's a lie you could'a-"
"Excepting Guinness."
"Oh well, then aye.  Pretty much," he admitted.  Small victories.  "So to be perfectly clear then, do ye know what's particularly chafing this week?"
"No, but i'm sure it's epic."
"Completely overused descriptor, lad, it's this generation's 'awesome."
"Paramount then."
"Better," he took a swig of his beer, "it's this whole business of being holier-than-thou."
"Run into that a lot do we?"
"More'n ye c'n know nor likely guess."
"Try me."
"Never ye mind, it's moot."
"How so?  Cuz it's not true?"
"Ach no!  It's dead nuts!"
"So your annoyed that your better than everyone or that they notice it?"
"Not better, ho-li-er," he drew out the key word.
"Ah well, we can't all be saints as righteous as you."
He slammed his hand down on the bar, startling me and not a few others.  "A fookin' cannibal pimp with blood on his fookin' lips could be as righteous as I fookin' am!"
"Right.  Yet it's accurate to label you holier-than-thou?"
"Aye."
"And that annoys you."
"Fook no," he took another sip, as if i didn't know it was for dramatic pause and effect.  "It annoys me that ..," he swept the entire pub and by extension, society at large in a roll of his eyes, "they..think the problem lies with me!"

An awkward introduction

"Seamus!  You wazzock!  You never told me you were married?  This beguiling woman is your wife?"
"Wife?"  Seamus looked intently at the woman for a moment, "no.  'at's not quite it.  Is there a word for, 'stranger I 'appen to sleep naked in the same bed with?'"
"I hate you," she said to him.
"Nemesis!  That's the word.  Thank you darling."

about cows

No, your confederate flag does not make you a racist...

But your dogmatic adherence to it does make you unloving...

"Therefore, let us no longer pass judgment on one another, but rather decide this: not to place a cause for stumbling or a temptation before a brother. I know and am convinced in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean of itself, except to the one who considers something to be unclean; to that person it is unclean. For if because of food, your brother is grieved, you are no longer living according to love. Do not destroy by your food that person for whom Christ died. Therefore do not let your good be slandered. For the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. For the one who serves Christ in this way is well-pleasing to God and approved by people.

So then, let us pursue what promotes peace and what edifies one another. Do not destroy the work of God on account of food. All things are clean, but it is wrong for the person who eats and stumbles in the process. It is good not to eat meat or to drink wine or to do anything by which your brother stumbles or is offended or is weakened. The faith that you have, have with respect to yourself before God. Blessed is the one who does not pass judgment on himself by what he approves. But the one who doubts is condemned if he eats, because he does not do so from faith, and everything that is not from faith is sin."  Romans 14

"But this knowledge is not in everyone. But some, being accustomed until now to the idol, eat this food as food sacrificed to idols, and their conscience, because it is weak, is defiled. But food does not bring us close to God. For neither if we eat do we have more, nor if we do not eat do we lack. But watch out lest somehow this right of yours becomes a cause for stumbling to the weak. For if someone should see you who has knowledge reclining for a meal in an idol’s temple, will not his conscience, because it is weak, be strengthened so that he eats the food sacrificed to idols? For the one who is weak—the brother for whom Christ died—is destroyed by your knowledge. Now if you sin in this way against the brothers and wound their conscience, which is weak, you sin against Christ. Therefore, if food causes my brother to sin, I will never eat meat forever, in order that I may not cause my brother to sin." 1 Cor 8

Cows should be made meals, not sacred.

A contractor's thoughts on churches, chiefs and the confederacy.

It stands to reason, really.  There were only two kinds of people who hopped or were thrown on a boat back in the day and survived the trip to these bountiful shores:
  Those who couldn't live by the rules of their homeland.
  And those who wouldn't. 
With demographics like those, how could we not, as a people, prize and value independent spirits?  It's our legacy.  It's our common denominator.  It's our defining characteristic.  America has always danced to the beat of a different drum.  Its own.  We're the lone hippie at a hip-hop house party.  We stand in the concert of the world with headphones on listening to our own playlist.  We revel in our rebel image.  So much so that we still pride ourselves on a time when, having not been able to even stand our own rules, we thought it more expedient to slaughter six hundred and twenty thousand of our own people over the matter. 

Pride rules.  Any kind of pride.  We pride ourselves in the majority.  We pride ourselves in the minority.  We pride ourselves on our success, we revel in our outcastness.  We say we value team work and community but we turn the cameras upon and throw money at the bad boy, the salacious, the inflammatory, the rebel. 

It didn't take me long in the construction trades to realize that all of the owner operators have one thing in common, one over arching personality trait that binds them all together...
They cannot abide another person's rules.
They universally have a problem with authority.  It's why they stopped working for other men and started their own business.  'My way or the highway,' will be expressed in any number of phrases, but it's always credal. 

It took me a little longer to see this motto lurking behind churches.

Maybe it's a relatively new thing?  The church plant movement.  The independent church movement.  These have seemingly swelled in recent years.  But i doubt it.  We don't have denominations for nothing.  Even our denominations have denominations.  i suppose this is a good thing when the parent church has become heretical and needs reformation.  But that doesn't always seem to be the case, does it?  When we started using phrases like "relevant" and "rockstar pastor" i think we left reformation for holy purposes in the dust.  Part of me likes the phrase, "i wanted to create the kind of church i would want to go to."  Part of me sees Jesus in, "i looked around and i didn't see a church reaching out to people like me."  Jesus came for outcasts: lepers, prostitutes, tax collectors, lame, blind, demon possessed, fisherman, the real dregs of society.  My denomination tends to look more like the successful and well adjusted members of society.  So there's a disconnect happening somewhere.  Possibly, it's in that little word, "look," but there's no denying that for all our efforts and well meaning, we have tended to create clubs for the "like me."

None of this is revolutionary.  None of this hasn't been said before by smarter people than me.  Most of whom probably had solutions and suggestions to suggest and solute.  i don't.  i just have a concern over the tribalism i see forming around every self-proclaimed chieftan, the clannishness of our people, the desire to follow any dynamic, charismatic rebel that walks in off the street with a tattoo and a stratocaster ready to rock you to heaven and rewrite the Bible in their own image. 

i just have two pleas.  Pray and Read.

Pray to see your own sin.  And don't stop at the surface.  Don't stop at the verbs, the lying, the yelling, the lusting, the partying.  Get down through the adjective layer, the selfish, the angry, the fearful and into the septic cistern of our souls.  The Pride.  The thing in you that makes you want to not just be a chief, but god.  See your sin so clearly that it breaks you, that it humbles you, that it makes you so distrustful of your own desires that you no longer are confident to tell another person much less yourself what to do or think or believe...
Except for what you have read and seen and come to know as the Truth in the Word that God himself revealed to us so we would know not what to believe or do or follow but Whom. 

stupid song

They saw us together
They saw a resemblance
They asked if we were brothers
And i had to tell them, “Once.”

Once,
once we had trust
we each spoke freely
once i knew him
and he, he knew me
and we loved each other anyway
another time, back in the day
Once

You went away
you changed your name
you tried to change everything
but you’re still the same

Once,
once we had fun
we were a family
i didn’t choose you
you didn’t choose me
but we loved each other anyway
Another time, back in the day
Once.

No one really changes
We’re all what we were at the first
the only real difference
is we keep getting worse

We still live together
sleep in the same bed
still wear the rings
but now you wish i was dead

Once,
once we were one
in spirit and body
once i knew you
and you, you knew me
and we loved each other anyway
Another time, back in the day
Once.

No one really changes
We’re all what we were at the first
The only real difference
is we keep getting worse.

Once
once we forgave
cuz we needed forgiving
once we knew dying
was the secret to living
Once we were blind,
poor, wretched, astray
But God loved us anyway
one dark morning, one good day
Once.

A conversation from the Pub.

"I fancy he thought that was a prayer," Seamus sneered.

I don't know why but I offered the following weak defense, "I s'pose with some men, God takes what he can get."

Seamus just snorted.  "A garbage disposal takes what it can get, lad.  A King takes what He damn well wants!"