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Showing posts from January, 2018

The Great I Am

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We're in time and there's enough space. A short poem, "The great I Am" on the rhythm of love. The last line is from a song played whilst I was on a meditation retreat last weekend. The great I Am Your love is real. Your love is you. Everything you are is expressed in everything you do. As we love one another we are alive within each other, members one of another. If I love you then you live in me, part of your life is in me and part of my life is in you. And as you go and love, your love is in and moving and active in everyone you know and touch. And we were formed, both genetically and psychologically, from all that came before. Who we are is formed from all those around us who have loved us, and they in turn were formed from those who loved them. As we love, the love we were given is passed on and grows and changes as we and everything else grow and change. So love lives on. The stars whisper, you never die. " I dream of the armies of

Leaving the Jesus Fellowship Church

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Gloom. In the half light, where people forget themselves, you get to see who they really are. I was part of the Jesus Fellowship for more than twenty years. I arrived as a broken man on the tale end of more than a year of homelessness and psychosis. Being at New Creation Farm and part of the Jesus Fellowship saved my life. Part of the message of the church was love, commitment, the kingdom of heaven and sharing lives and possessions. Those values resonated in me as the things that I valued most in life and how I wanted to be. Over those twenty years I've been on my own journey, as everyone is. I've arrived in a very different place, with very different beliefs (although many fundamentally the same depending on how you express it) than the beliefs I took on. I've struggled with my involvement in the church for a long time. In practise a lot of it seemed so unloving and judgemental. The decision was finally made for me a few weeks ago when a preacher at the Jesus

Fundamentally Speaking

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I don't think you die if your heart breaks, I think you die if you don't let it break. I've been thinking a bit about fundamentalist Islam, coming from the context of having grown up within a culture part of which identified as fundamentalist Christian. This had both good and bad meanings. Being totally sold out to what you believe in is not itself a problem. It strikes me that fundamentalist Islam and fundamentalist Christianity, certainly in the bad elements, are basically the same religion just with some of the names and details swapped around a bit. The same conviction that they are right and others are wrong, and that because you're right anything you do in the pursuit  of that right must be right. These religions, like any belief system, are a world view as well as a set of beliefs. Mostly people think they're good and not evil (except in their darkest imaginings of course, which we all have). So we rationalise our behaviour by forming a worldview in

My Second Best Story from 2017, and other tales

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The shadow self is still just you. My Second Best Story from 2017 One of the things I learned from my failed experiments in adulting at university was the value of story telling. I don't mean in any mythological sense, nor folklore nor even small tribe oral tradition (those stories your mates tell which you've heard a hundred times but are still worth listening to). All of which I value. I just mean how much fun it is to have an appropriate story for a situation when you're with people. I learned from the best, a good friend who always had a good story to hand. I was inevitably torn between enjoying the story and being jealous of how much more fun it must be to be the one telling the story. Better even than good story telling is story making. If you want to have good tales to tell you'll have to go out and make some stories. That's my one great consolation when really bad things happen, at least I'll probably get a story out of it. I think my best story