I've been studying archetypal images for an upcoming novel and that got mixed up with thinking about stained glass windows (how they were used to teach Bible stories to the illiterate), which all wound up pitching a tent in my belief that the natural world was designed to be a mirror for the essential qualities of God.

Just to warn you, I'm probably going to use the word "threefold" a bit gratuitously. It's been a lot of struggle, but I've settled on belief in the threefold salvation. That is to say, salvation requires three things (okay, evangelicals, have your cringe and keep reading). First up, we have Knowledge (Rom. 10:14), followed by Belief (not Faith, there is a difference), which is then followed by Works (I know, I know, but I've read James through over and over and I just don't see any way out of that one). All of these together are Faith and they make a New Man. Knowledge represents the skin, the boundaries of this New Man; Belief is all the internal stuff, the substance; and then Works represents all of those oh-so-needful bodily fluids. Voila! Faith body. (Without bodily fluids, you're dead; faith without works, also dead. Dead faith getting you into Heaven? After all that talk of new life and being dead in sin, I just don't see it.)

Here's the Sunday School illustration: Knowing says "A chair is something you sit in." Belief says "There is a chair in the corner." Works doesn't say anything and goes to sit in the chair. If you're sitting in the chair, you have Faith.

Something else occurred to me through this. The vogue of late has been a return to the personal God, the God we have a relationship with. Which is not a doctrine so much as an emphasis. We've always believed God was personal, intelligent, emotive, but the Generation Y mindset isn't looking for a King, we're much more interested in a brother. So, what if interpersonal relationships can give us a much clearer picture of the Trinity?

When you are getting to know someone, you work in three spheres: knowledge, action and communication. Knowledge, on the basic level is stuff like name, age, physical description; eventually it becomes the ability to predict responses. Action is the context in which you get to know each other, what you do together as well as encompassing behavior on both sides; especially the unique behaviors you have in each other's company. Communication is what you say verbally, how you say it, as well as body language and all those other things we learned about in 'Hitch' (which I only just now realized was a pun on the marriage thing).

These things are all quite distinct in their functions, but just try to separate them when you're hanging out with friends or meeting someone new. Basic knowledge is easy to come by just by seeing someone, but their clothes and even their posture communicate at varying levels of subtlety. The way they shake your hand is a behavior that communicates what will become knowledge. If you're watching a movie and your friend bursts out laughing at the screen, you've just learned about how expressive they are, not to mention how much they liked that joke, plus all of this in relation to yourself, and a picture of their preferences just became a little clearer.

So, while the elements of relationship are very distinct and easy to define, in practical experience, they are extremely difficult to separate. You almost can't ever get only one at a time and they almost always hit you all at once. Now, if Knowledge represents God the Father, Action is a picture of Jesus, and Communication symbolizes the Holy Spirit, then that whole three-is-one thing becomes just a bit easier to grasp. At least, I think it does.

Watching her hands to keep us in time
We wait for her rhythm to awaken our love
Hoping our souls will be saved by her rhymes

Entering, filed in our sleep-walking lines,
Coffee cups and NIVs, we feel pious enough
Watching her hands to keep us in time

Standing, in pockets of unison, at her sign
We lift our eyes to the noteless words above
Hoping our souls will be saved by her rhymes

Singing someone else's love song to the divine
Our effortless eloquence remains something rough
Watching her hands to keep us in time

Alone in our silence, we pass the false wine
Listening for what our body and blood are barren of
Hoping our souls will be saved by her rhymes

We are an audience rehearsed and refined
With choreographed gratitude and well-scripted love
Watching her hands to keep us in time
Hoping our souls will be saved by her rhymes

The faces of saints appear in the curling wax of my great aunt's prayer candle as she weeps pyrrhic tears for her grandson.
She whispers to the mahogany beads of a rosary that remembers the Civil War that my cousin will be the wounded animal that the wilderness preacher pulls from a rusted trap and seals his wounds still clotting.
As a pious girl with a boy's haircut walks past, another candle ignites in hope that lost Johnny can find love running across the parapets of Lyon and Orleans with pyre singed sleeves raising the splintered left side of a door frame, a fleur-de-lis tacked to its most solid knots, in desperate victory.
I asked to be the one to answer her prayers, but the lost boy has heard the love and the prophets through a preacher deafly.
And I move so slow, six more terraces to ascend, with this stone on my back.

The scariest part of loneliness is the knowledge is that it will never go away. You will feel lonely again, no matter what. You will be empty and no amount of food will fill you. You will be cold no matter how many blankets you wrap up in. And one day, your skin will ache for human contact so badly that you will, almost involuntarily, collide with someone at the mall, office, skybridge. One of my devotionals from this summer said "To be human is to be lonely." It also pointed out that certain people, especially artists, "are probably, to some degree, lonely all the time."

It really doesn't ever go away, there is always some barrier. Pain is a great one for getting in the way, but sometimes they are good things. The day you realize that you are not your best friend's best friend is always a cold one. Honestly, if you ever meet someone who will always choose you over every other person, every time, you haven't made a friend, you've made a stalker. Stalkers wouldn't be so bad, except that they only take, there is no input from them, even if you're having dinner. Eventually, you will have nothing to give and the loneliness returns. Marriage isn't the solution, for sure.

And God forbid you should tell anyone at church about this problem. Let's be honest, if you ever feel lonely, you clearly don't have a strong enough relationship with the Lord. I mean, if an omnipresent yet invisible being who regards taking on physical form as a kind of humiliation doesn't fill your days with company and good times, nothing will. And don't even try to defend your loneliness with the Gospel because every good Baptist knows that when Jesus said "Father, why have you forsaken me?" it was a rhetorical point about God's holiness, not the desperate cry of a profoundly lonely man. Now, go read 'The Purpose Driven Life', say three "Prayer of Jabez"s and sin no more.

Imagine what you would say if a friend called you and said "Can we hang out? I'm just feeling really lonely right now." Now, try to say it yourself. Make yourself say that sentence out loud. Realize just how vulnerable you are when you cry out for another human being. Because, eventually, you're going to have to. Cynicism aside, God never meant for our relationship with him to be all-satisfying. Remember the part where he created Eve? Remember how that happened before sin entered the world? And if you feel like I'm attacking you, just know that I used to think loneliness was a sign of spiritual weakness, a symptom of the sin nature. I also tried to commit suicide three times before my nineteenth birthday.

Loneliness and I are old acquaintances. The strange thing is, it seems like the more my heart longs for the Lord's and my feet for his path, the closer loneliness is to me, the more frequently he visits. The more I recognize my gifts, the more fervently I chase the purposes to which they guide me, the more I seek the person God designed me to be; the more often I find myself feeling desperately lonely. Loneliness which gives way to depression, which really just makes you want to hide from everyone.

I wish this was written in ink, so you could count how many tears this note has cost me. Also know that my roommate is not tagged because all this is still too hard to say to someone I live with.

So, what's the point of all this? Vulnerability. What part of himself did our savior keep from us? Don't worry about how much you keep from him, not now. Ask how much of yourself you keep from other believers. How much of you do you protect? If you can break as completely as our Lord did, if you can keep nothing from the fellowship of believers, you will have nothing held back from the Lord, either. "Whatsoever you do to the least of these, you have done to me also." Once you're vulnerable, once you're broken, before God and man then to that same degree will you be available to serve God and men.

Seeds are wonderful things, unless they never open. A seed that won't open is useless.

I'm new at this. I took my vows from a Brother who doesn't even live in this country. There are days that I kind of forget who I am now. Because that's what I did, by taking vows I altered who I am. Ask any physicist, potential is just as much a defining characteristic of something what it is actually doing. I cut out a big chunk of potential when I became a monk. More than that, this isn't a well-established order where I can just go sit in a monastery and run a garden while becoming fluent in Latin; I'm part of the New Monasticism. We're trying to alter the definition of 'Monk' here. And, I'm the youngest member of the order! By almost a decade! Nevermind that I'm the only practitioner of the order on the West Coast. In many ways, I'm making this up as I go, with the truth of scripture and the testimony of the Celtic Saints as my point of reference. Technically, because I'm not involved in the main community's infrastructure (because I don't live in Scotland), I'm a splinter group of Community. And by 'I', I mean 'me'; all by my lonesome am a splinter of an obscure monastic order. That, my friends, is talent!

So, this is me (...on the raggedy edge), fresh out of college, unemployed, dedicating my life to a doctrine in which I have no mentor, maintaining focus on my goals in the face of impracticality... My life has no shape, right now. Monasticism, traditionally, brought a fairly rigid shape to your life; but I'm striking out on my own with this. But, then again, the word 'Monk' actually means 'alone'. They don't tell you about this stage, not in the Bible, not in the histories. They never mention that time when Paul went "What the smeg am I doing?" or when St. Patrick thought "Hold on... this is stupid." Nope, we hear about dedication and resolve and having reached the goal. Why not? Why wasn't I warned? Because it doesn't matter.

All the doubt, the uncertainty, the stumbling around in the dark; none of this matters. Dedication matters, faith matters, resolve matters. Everybody doubts and falters and wonders if they made the right decision. What's special, what's extraordinary is believing. It's when we stand on the picnic bench with our back to our friends and fall backwards, straight as a pencil, that we've done something special. The Bible doesn't have a book about doubt and how it's normal. We have whole books about faithand why it's weird. Because weird is the point! If it isn't weird, abnormal, extraordinary, it doesn't count. Because those things happen completely by accident; there's no work involved in doubt, there's no effort in second guessing.

This, I think, is the heart of monasticism: to dedicate yourself to conscious effort. The plowman and the farmer are not plants. Where the missionary breaks ground and the pastor cultivates, the monk is the plant who grows the way that all the plants are supposed to grow, only taller. The visionary, the teacher, the paradigm. It's a higher standard, to be set up as the example; not the shepherd, but the leader of the herd, dedicating yourself to discipling others. And Heaven only knows why I got called to it.

Written by Gypsie...


He walks in a world of legend
With the confidence of a destination
And the course of a blind man,
Who, for all his stumbling,
Hears and senses things we will never see.

We have laughed at the blind man,
When he believed in the invisible,
Spoke to empty spaces,
And didn’t catch the exchanged looks,
The silently mouthed words.

Despite his confidence, we will never follow him.
For his confidence, he will never follow us.
When we turn back from the height of the mountain,
The blind man will continue to climb,
Believing that the very next step
Might be the one to bring him to the summit.

The maiden pouring out wine called me her brother
Then led me to the man she called her son
And told me, tomorrow, she'd be my mother

When I brought the blood to cover
The footsteps from where I'd come
The maiden pouring out wine called me her brother

And when I brought the wounds I'd given another
Though I had beat him guilt for what I had done
She told me, tomorrow, she'd be my mother

When the woman of webs asked if I'd be her lover
And I told her that such things were over and done
The maiden pouring out wine called me her brother

The virgin asked why I'd spurned the web-woman's bed covers
I said I wouldn't do in shadow what I would do in sun
She told me, tomorrow, she'd be my mother

When she showed me a path I hadn't discovered
And after a century had only begun,
The maiden pouring out wine called me her brother
And told me, tomorrow, she'd be my mother

The Jericho Institute's debut short film (dubbed "The Gypsie Slushy") has been entered in Apple's Insomnia Film Festival. Our initial edit, which was just shy of everything in the script, came out to about a minute and a half over the 3-minute limit. So, after some tortured Darling-Killing, we got a final product clocking in at 2:59, with credits. Our story focused on the Muse of Inspiration and the Spirit of Distraction fighting over a poet's attention. It's not exactly what we set out to make, but we couldn't do everything we wanted in 3 minutes. Our story happened but didn't develop quite as deeply as hoped and some of our best jokes got cut, but we turned in the best 3-min we could and some of those cuts were painful, which is a good thing. Although, by the time we finished shooting and editing, none of the jokes made us laugh anymore. We knew they were good, but we're too tired (and tired of them) to care. More to come.

Having not slept in well over 24-hours, at this point, we've wrapped shooting and are now embarking on the editing process. The shoot was slightly lower energy than I would have liked, partially because of too much down-time, due to not enough organization, and some other stuff that could have been avoided with better planning. But, hey, that's what makes this 24-hour thing such a challenge. That and the sheer amount of work involved. Jason and I are fatigued, but surviving and all-in-all none the worse for wear. The girls did great in shooting; Kachina being a real trooper about washing her hair in her room. Alissa surprised me with some of her suggestions for blocking, didn't know she really had that in her. Thus, editing begins and the goal is truly in sight!

SO IT BEGINS!

The Jericho Institute takes its first voyage as we begin "The Insomnia Project". Hosted by Apple, the Insomniac film festival gives participants 24-hours to make a 3-minute movie, beginning at 6am (Pac time), Oct. 13. The writing team is currently (2am) prepping for power naps in my apartment. We begin shooting at Willamette University in, roughly, six hours. Our idea is simple, an artist (Za'chary Westbrook) struggles between the Muse of Inspiration (Alissa Taylor) and the Spirit of Distraction (Kachina Kudroff). Eventually, they go get slushies. Despite a few logistical difficulties, we're all speed go! Which isn't actually a recognized phrase, but you get the idea.

More to come!