Grace

Jun62018 by Jamie DedesNo Comments

The Hanged Man

The Hanged Man card, Rider-Waite tarot deck One iced night mom took his hand and led the boy to a no man’s land And in the darkness of that night, he came to know himself as blight Born upside-down and on a tether, no turned up way to make him clever Both heart and memory came away with jilted mom on that crazed day Excess baggage he seemed to be, surviving much-grudged care you see Imagined poems filled his dreams, soulful skimming of raw life’s cream On winds of change other blows, but joys embedded he has known And in the end life’s still worthwhile Life was precious to man and child Upside-down fuels such rare view, and capsized life is a lonely pew But when time came to make a close, only sweetness from a thornless rose I was intr

Apr192018 by jrcowlesNo Comments

Toward Becoming “Un-Lapsed”

Abrahamic Traditions, autonomy, awareness, Buddhism, C. S. Lewis, Challenge, Change, Christianity/Catholicism, Church, critical judgment, culture, efficient cause, Epiphany, Evangelicalism, Fascism, Fundamentalism, God, Grace, Holy Mystery, Ideology, instrumental cause, mindfulness, monotheism, Mystery, Myth, Numinous, Religion, Religious War, Scripture, The Divine, Theology, Uncategorized

For the past … I dunno … dozen-plus years, I have been what polite people would call a “lapsed Catholic”. I say this even though I met the Catholic Church at a time of spiritual shipwreck / accedie – what some call the “noonday demon” -- and that the Church gave me a vision of humans in community with the Divine that I never found, either as a fundamentalist, or as a non-fundamentalist but still conservative-evangelical, Christian. It may be that the Catholic Church saved my life. To this day, the issues I have are not only or even primarily with the Catholic Church – I mean, who among us with a non-flat-line EEG does not have issues with the Church? – but primarily with that Church’s God. (Or as I usually express it these days, “Gawd”.) But that latter is another rant for another time

Apr62017 by jrcowlesNo Comments

Wholly Missing the Whole of the Holy

Abrahamic Traditions, Anchorite, Archetypes, awareness, Buddhism, C. S. Lewis, Change, Christianity, Comfort, contemplation, Creation, Ecumenism, Epiphany, epistemology, faith, Four Quartets, God, Grace, Holy Mystery, inner peace, inspiration, Intention, Jesus, Julian of Norwich, Literature, Liturgy, Longing, meditation, meditation with music, mindfulness, monotheism, music, Mystery, Numinous, Present Moment, Religion, Renewal, spiritual growth, spiritual practice, T. S. Eliot, Taoism, The Divine, Theology, Uncategorized, Universe

This will probably sound strange coming from me. But … here goes … I miss God. Well … even that is not quite accurate. If by the term “God” you understand the traditional, orthodox conception of God as basically “a really, really, really big Person writ large,” then … no … I do not miss that God, the kind of God Samuel Taylor Coleridge, somewhere or other, referred to when he said that the average Englishman’s conception of God is as “of an immense Clergyman”; the kind of God Whose eye is on the sparrow; the kind of God Who numbers the very hairs of my head (in my case, a task easy even for human beings, let alone God); the God Who browbeat poor, innocent Job. In other words, I do not miss the kind of God who Sees Things And Runs Things, the Great Cosmic National Security Agency,