deep inside where vitriolic spill

sloshes against epidermis walls

as i find protection

within my hypodermis sanctuary.

But that is simply apart of life. And while i find De Melo’s prose somewhat inspiring as well as enlightening, it is clear that he has never been in love; truly in love, where he allowed himself to be naked in front of his lover with the sincerest and most profound trust for this person’s ability to see past the mud and mire to his core and meet it not with measured expectations, but with grace. Yet maybe what De Melo is suggesting is that since we are so enraptured with the hope of this preternatural notion of love that only in the removal of expectations can one truly experience love in the form of grace.

I have always been a sucker for the intersection of theory and praxis, although in looking at my life, one could easily surmise that i find more comfort in the theoretical.

There is so much romance tied up in the potentiality of grace, for instance, that its expression may never actually look anything like what theoreticians have proposed. And yet it exists; it moves; it becomes others experiences; and others experiences become grace.

I so long for grace. To see it; revel in its stories; meet it; own it; and pass it on as my own.

However, if i am to reconcile what i once understood of this grand notion called grace, i must first unpack what it once meant in my life and reform it to my current context.

i have the sinking suspicion, that is, that it starts with me reconciling me with me, and not with any other fucking individual i may come in contact with.

Today, i came to this very intersection, slide my right boot out of its stirrup and swung it up and over the hind quarters of a colt that had neither been broken or wild and in one motion glided to the ground. Unfortunately the intersection was quite nondescript like the northern hinterlands that form the landscape of a McCarthy novel. As I surveyed the ground and options that i ostensibly lay before me, some things were clear: the carrion littered road i once traversed was not an option.

however, today i received one of those ‘you are not a good fit for this company’ type emails.

here it is:

Hi Joel,
Thank you for your application for the Portland site coordinator position. Unfortunately, we are not able to offer you an interview at this time as you are not a good fit for the current needs of Sports4Kids at this time. We encourage you to continue to gain experience working with groups of youth and reapply in the future. Good luck.
Sincerely,
The Team at Sports4Kids

And so i decided to respond in kind (i’ve wanted to do this for oh so long and i applied here like two months ago):

Hi Jonathan,

and while I thank you for your timely reply, I can honestly state that you can’t possibly ascertain my qualifications from an online application and some ostensibly appropriate questions regarding how one might deal with youth. However, if you were to interview me, or even better yet, speak with the past leaders I’ve lead or the dozens of youth who I now consider my friends, you’d most likely think otherwise. But discerning from the fact that this post is still up, your hiring practices have yet to properly evaluate potential candidates.

Best,

Joel Brady

Yes, it felt great!

I want to quote Berry here, ‘[...] the love of nature that limits itself to the love of places that are ‘scenic’ is implicitly dangerous. It is dangerous because it tends to exclude unscenic places from nature and from the respect that we sometimes accord to nature’ (28).

This is highway 84 in southern Idaho. It is arid and profitless lanf.  And yet, this barren stretch where seldom is seen a valley dwelling deer or low lying hawk, hoping for prey to fall victim along this asphalt wonderland, is quite captivating. But despite this captivation, and according to our modern understanding of our general use of the word, scenic it is not.

& now the spoof

trust me, they’re both worth it.

The physics of relativity confirms that absolute and final objectivity is a mere dream by showing how each particular observation is strictly linked to the location of the observer and cannot be abstracted from this particular situation; it also rejects the notion of an absolute observer. We can no longer flatter ourselves with the idea that, in science, the exercise of a pure and unsituated intellect can allow us to gain access to an object free of all human traces, just as God would see it.

He goes on, however, to suggest that this doesn’t weaken the veracity of science or even the need for scientific research as much as curtail the dogmatism associated with the notion that only science can obtain ‘absolute and complete knowledge.’

i stumbled upon these guys while borrowing a friends car the other day…nada surf is one of those bands that i’d heard of but never truly listened to; aside from an older hit, ‘popular’. anyway, i am really digging their albums Lucky (from which this song is from) and Let Go.

_________

it’s weird to be in this position: jobless, depressed all the time, walking around kind of listless. Since i’ve been here i’ve submitted over 60 resumes to only receive one interview (last friday). i mean, that’s a lot and not very many, right? as this continues i have become more apparent of my status with others. it’s not that i don’t think people care, but they stop asking. people don’t like to be around negative reminders. it’s weird, but over the last month phone calls and emails have come to a near standstill…

i guess i kind of get it. maybe not.

this is not to discount those who have cared, it just highlights those who have not — fuck, this is hard and people kind of bum me out.

i’m not sure if this is cathartic, but it’s a new post.

In looking at the above photo, are we to gather that the beliefs of the two individuals in the foreground are the same, or at least similar? For how long? The guy to the left, holding the stick, could’ve had a bad day with his parents; recently found out that his student loans had been denied; or that his boyfriend just broke up with him and therefore decided to go on a rampage — low-and-behold, there happened to be this very convenient paradigmatic riot happening right outside his flat. oh how fortuitous!! let’s go bust up that VW.

Now the point I’m trying to make here, in a not so lucid fashion, is how difficult the journey of belief really is. To merely suggest the internal wiring of someone based on collective involvement means shit. And in fact, ones involvement in anything is most likely based on something akin to a contact high (yes, of the drug induced variety). On some level, we yearn to be apart of something, so once we witness a certain happening that fits into this ‘ideal’ situation we have a tendency to mirror the other participants. It’s interesting, because we seem to do this quite often. Instead of looking like the odd man out so to speak, we subsequently become engendered with feelings, affectations, and linguistic assimilation’s that would suggest that we have a greater knowledge of this belief than we actually have. But here’s the kicker, once we’ve ascribed to ourselves a certain belief system complete with affectation, we then seek to understand it and make it our own. It’s like some kid who watched North Shore for the first time in the ’80′s and thus begins to identify with the attributes associated with surf culture only to follow it up with learning how to surf.

But what happens if after investing so much of our time in ‘creating’ our identity, we come to realize that the outward image is far more difficult to believe in after we truly delve into what ever substantive quality lies beneath?

it was during our familial preparations for church this past sunday morning that rekindled the often heard trope that the hour before church might possibly be the most stressful moment of the week.

hi.

hi.

bryan and i beltched as we dropped our kids off at the registration heavy children’s ministry area. i’m not sure any of the men at the door could have prevailed against a gun toting crazy person, but eliot never mentioned fearing for his life…

lot’s of people mingling around the entrance to an impressive auditorium space that left me longing for my high school theatre days. and yet, i was never in theater (so spell it correctly) in high school, and really only wished i was years later…anecdotal as well as descriptively speaking, of course. imago had greeters that weren’t all that greetery. and throw a curve-ball at my postmegachurch mind, but the greeters didn’t actually handout anything but merely stood menacingly by a stack of bibles. i didn’t take one.

however, as i found a perfect sit with which to familiarize myself with this relatively young community, a woman kindly walked over and offered me a program. i took one of these because left in the wake of our mornings carnage getting ready was my back-pocket perfect, orange Rhodia notebook. i needed something to write on.

once seated the obligatory worship music began. it was fine. it might have been atypical in the fact that it was not ten years behind the times, although more like five or six (and there was this one song whose music had great potential to only find its doomed fate in horribly written and dare i say wordy lyrics). but i didn’t have to shake anyones hand. two points for imago (there will be no more points given or tallied for the rest of this post).

as the worship leader finished up his prayer i felt a bit of excitement welling up inside as i watched Rick Mckinley make his way to the stage. now i know very little of this man, the church’s history, or how he has time for four kids; but i have listened to quite a few podcasts during my biking to work days and his ability to preach is indisputable: he is extremely intelligible, especially with some complex theology, he is unafraid to point out that the mission of the church is to help the less fortunate (this church is service project rich), and in the end, is quite funny (a plus for anyone who longs to preach). but unfortunately, attending imago is as Kate suggested, Inland Hills 2.0.

now, is this a bad thing? to be honest, i’m not sure. it’s just that i haven’t been apart of a more corporate style church in nearly ten years. i’m not entirely sure i have it in me to be a small fish in a big pond. sure you could say that has more to do with me than imago, and that’s most certainly true — it does illuminate certain issues that i have. but i think at the heart of what i’m suggesting is that as the message ran on, i remembered why i started to have a hard time with this style to begin with — someone i didn’t know was trying to teach me something as if it was the gospel. he was looking at me and everyone in there as if what he was saying was indeed the breath of God; and i’m not sue it wasn’t, but was it?

there is more here i need to flesh out. i think i’ll post more, especially regarding the message and the great conversations that i had with my friend bryan afterward, but for right now i need to let this ruminate.