Peace Labyrinth
The 2008 Side Door Christmas Journey Peace Labyrinth is running in Latimer Square, Christchurch, this weekend, 24/7 until Monday morning. If you have Windows Media, apparently you can see a live webcam feed.
Poem: Happy Hour
Happy Hour
Evenin', sir. Been out on the town tonight, have we?
Just a routine checkpoint, sir. If you'd kindly whistle into this bag.
We need to establish your blood happiness levels, sir.
Yes, just a whistle is perfectly sufficient.
Or a yodel, yes.
A rousing chorus of 'God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen' would indeed do the trick, sir. If you truly feel it.
No sir, this is not an evidentiary happiness test. That is to say, it has no actual what you would call legal standing in court. But a failure would indicate sufficient cause for us to request you to accompany us to the local store for the full Seasonal Fitness examination and certificate.
His orders, sir. Our mutual friend. Him with the beard.
No, I'm sure neither of us wants that, sir. If you'd just whistle? Or hum if you prefer. It's the mirth that is the significant factor.
Involves candy canes and intubation, I believe. I've not witnessed the procedure myself. It's only my first night on the shift. Your lips go here. It may help to pucker.
There's no call for that sort of language, sir. This is for your own safety and protection during this extremely tolerant season. Once again I have to request that you perform the procedure and display visible jollity.
Sir, I'm afraid that is a fail result and I'm going to have to ask you to accompany me to the store. You are not at this point under obligation to exchange gifts, but a card will be required, and possibly one phone call. Should a gift become mandatory, you have the right of access to a gift-wrap of your choice; if you do not have gift-wrap, a tasteful bag with store branding will be provided...
Poem: Absents
Christmas is a wonderful time. It's when you're powerfully reminded how many things exist that you don't need, and how many things you need that don't exist.
Absents
I looked everywhere
to find you a present
The only thing they didn't have in stock
was me
So I bought it for you
but then I remembered
The only thing I don't have
is you
Poem: Collision
Christmas is a northern hemisphere holiday. There should be a law against celebrating it in summer. Fake frost on your windows in 30 degree heat: no excuses, BOOM.
Collision
Christmas is a collision
white knuckle deadlines
multiple party damage
the smoke of burning bridges
one final accounting
of the year's sins and omissions
told, carried, spindled, posted
racked with the cards and wine
white crosses
on the new year's grave
resolutions
to live forever
Poem: Forgetting How To Fly
A poem for Christmas.
Forgetting How To Fly
Christmas and the smell of
haybales on the plains
and looking up at a sky
black and full of dust
through a tin-shed window
and bright in that star river
the Cross, a kite
for hanging dreams on.
It's been some years, now,
under white fluorescents
and I'm missing something
I've forgotten how to name
that space inside, to fly:
I need a holiday from me.
Dreamlog: Gothic Trilogy
Three sequences from a night's dreaming. At the time the connections aren't apparent to me. I am not sure what the wider significance is.
1. I am visiting an upscale shopping mall with friends. It has been built around an old school or church complex, like the Arts Centre of Christchurch. All the shops are Gothic stonework or Shakespearean style houses, or built to look like it. The shops are things like expensive hunting and fishing or house decoration. I look at one which has a bubbling artificial spring filled with live game fish. I feel sad at how cheap and flimsy this whole 'experience' is. Why does a mall need to be so pretentious, and so exclusive?
2. I am reading a horror novel. It is not a novel I particularly want to be reading because it's so scary. Or perhaps it's a videogame. I'm not sure. It is media of some kind. The prologue chapter is set in an old school or church complex with Gothic buildings. There is some possibility that it's the same shopping mall at a later date. A monster, a creature of dark magic and rags and bones, is stalking the hero/heroine. It has a sharp, haughty intelligence of its own. The intensity just in this first chapter, of walking through this desolate complex and being hunted, is overwhelming. There is a confrontation, the hero/heroine escapes the monster but not without scars, and it suffers a setback but is not destroyed. There is a sense that a larger evil has been unleashed; that something else becomes the monster at this point, perhaps one of the protagonists. The story proper opens years later, when someone returns to the site...
I stop reading at this point. It's too scary.
3. I am driving around the inner city of Christchurch in a taxi or bus. I notice that there is a lot of rebuilding going on. All the wonderful Gothic Revival buildings are being repaired and resurfaced in their full glory. I notice that the Cathedral, the Press building, the Town Hall and an old department store all originally had Gothic frontages. I did not know that. They all connect up to each other behind the frontages with skyways.
Dreamlog: Stand-up Wedding
A particularly odd little dream tonight.
I am a member of some kind of tight-knit community; I have a feeling I'm either in a cult, or some kind of prince; either way my life is very managed and I have a wide extended family. One morning I find that my parents have not only arranged a marriage for me without letting me know, but that the wedding itself is today, and I wasn't told. Everyone else seems to be dressing up in their finest. I have no clothes but my everyday work ones, which seems kind of underdressed. I'm greatly annoyed. Also, I barely know the girl, and though she's nice enough I'm not sure this is the right way to start a lifetime together.
Everyone is already en route in cars. I decide that for the first time in my life I'm going to make my own decisions. I tell my parents that the wedding is off and pick up my cellphone and contact the other key people. It takes a while as they're driving.
Suddenly a second carload of people pulls into the driveway and I look out incredulously to see that there's a second bride! This wedding really has been the most poorly organised in history. I just about crack up laughing as the scene outside devolves into chaos (a car goes into a swimming pool at one point) and I address the crowd with a bullhorn.
I feel delicious schedenfreude. My overbearing parents/handlers are going to be so embarrassed and this is totally worth it.
Fragments of another scene, completely unrelated:
I am walking through a museum. The exhibit hall I'm in is empty right now, presumably being prepared for a new one. I know I've been here before - there's a 'museum / amusement park' dreamspace which has been around a while, and it has something like a train and a hall of vehicles in it, but it's been years since I've been there and it's changed a little.
A Dilemma
The more I read about spirituality, after-life communication, and see glimpses of how all the things we believe as part of organised religion could actually make sense as descriptions of a wider universe in which our temporary physical world is embedded, the more I come up against this problem:
1. Christianity teaches that God is love; that we are all children of God, created by the Father's love; that what is not love is not God; that the Father delights to fulfil our prayers and knows what we want before we ask, so that even to desire something is to receive it; and that it is perfectly safe to ask anything because the Father will never give us anything that is against His wider purpose for our lives.
2. Christianity teaches that Jesus is the only Son of God, the only mediator between God and man; that believing this is the chief, perhaps only means of salvation; that 'no man comes to God except through Him'; that we must be exceedingly careful how and where we pray because there are many false Christs and false spirits who could lead astray 'even the very elect'; that opening our hearts and minds to the spiritual dimension through any methods except those sanctioned by the Church is very dangerous because the Father refuses to communicate with anybody except 'in the name of Christ'; that 'broad is the way that leads to destruction, but narrow is the way that leads to life, and few there be that find it', so we must be on guard the most fiercely against teachings which are the most similar to Christianity, because even if they teach in large measure what Jesus taught, if they do not speak His name then these could be wedges to drive us away from the Light.
The dilemma can be summed up as: Can a universal Christ, and a unique Christ, coexist in the one faith?
(I think the answer is yes, but I think there are many Christians who would disagree.)
Edit: Perhaps a clearer way of putting the dilemma is this: 1) God is love, so all we need to do to approach Him is to wish to do so in our heart; 2) Christ is the only way to God, so we cannot approach God without getting Jesus' permission first.
If I had to choose based on what I actually believe, I'd pick (1) and reject (2), but I'm not entirely sure how to justify that from the Bible.
Peace Labyrinth
This is what I'm doing this Christmas.
Glueing googly eyes onto driftwood sticks is surprisingly therapeutic.
Advent
I seem to be constantly running at the moment somehow, with little time to catch my breath. It is December; the rough beast of Southern Hemisphere Christmas shambles toward Bethlehem, with stress, gift-buying and end of year panic in its wake. I ended up going to three separate churches this Sunday: Anglican, Baptist alt-worship, and Catholic (ecumenical). It's 1am and I still haven't quite managed to finish the day.
The Urban Seed Advent in Art calendar inspires me. I'm still not used to the whole Advent thing; it's not something we used to do formally in the churches I've known previously. But it does provide a slightly more peaceful counterpoint to the rush and hassle of the season.
It frustrates me that I think in pictures yet I don't draw. An image has been haunting me for a while now: manga space Christmas. Whenever I see a 'stable and manger' painting I think not of animals but a grimy space garage, full of hulking machines. Mary wears a blue NASA jumpsuit. Joseph has a wrench for an arm. The Wise Men are aliens, their gifts a mystery of tangled wires.
In the baptism scene Jesus rises from a hydroponic pond, a ventilation duct fan turning slowly behind. John is startled by the arc of neon plasma in a light fitting overhead.
Good Friday is an explosion ripped through deck plating, a white hiss of oxygen dispersing into space. He lies broken on a gunship's prow. Yet it is the cyborg centurion who has flipped back his own helmet plate and kneels in surrender.
In the garden pod, a wrecked sleep capsule holds no body inside. Mary II turns, attention captured by the figure entering frame lower right with a living branch for a staff, whose face we cannot see.
