A Slow Bloom and the Young Search for Value
Christopher looked every where. He looked beneath his bed, under his desk, and behind his dresser; nothing. He even moved the clothes pile on the floor of his closet. Still, he couldn’t find what he was looking for.
“Ah,” he thought confidently to himself, “There’s one place I didn’t look! Surely it must be there!” He darted off towards his Disney branded Mickey Mouse T.V. and its matching red stand to give them a quick look behind too. Nothing. Nada. Absolute zero.
Christopher let out a long and frustrated sigh as he plopped himself into his little red desk chair in obvious defeat. Read More »
Social Hitchhikers’ Theater Act 2
The cell chimed a while before I could audibly zone in on its catchy Pearl Jam ringtone and track it to an innocent looking pile of jeans and socks hurriedly tossed onto the living room sofa. I could faintly hear a polyphonic version of “Yellow Ledbetter” struggling to escape an avalanche of fresh denim and cotton. I dug through my laundry and managed to rescue the call before it was demoted to voicemail. I simultaneously looked down and thumb-flipped open my cell; I immediately recognized the caller. Read More »
A Tale of Two Meals
Setting: Jesus’ Table Meals vs. Religious Broker’s Table Meals. These meals clashed at Simon the Pharisee’s House (See: Luke 7). In this story we find a 1st century religious elitist named Simon extending a shared meal invitation to Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus accepts, and journey to Simon’s house.
I can easily imagine Jesus facing his inner-circle of friends and trying to explain why he can’t join them at the evening meal, as originally planned. Read More »
A Tired, Worn, and Travel-wearied Leather Rita Botta
Filip loved his religion. He was the kind of man who needed tangible boundaries, real rules to live by.
His was a life lifted directly from the pages of his daily planner. His was no ordinary daily planner! It was a Small Italian Genuine Leather Rita Botta, and it was bursting at the seams as it valiantly attempted to envelop all the oddities Filip had shoved into it during his daily travels between home and office. The Rita Botta could have handled all of the expected norms: a notepad, calendar insert, contact page, and the occasional business and/or credit card flap. Its most formidable challenges, however, came in the form of an oversized black comb, TI 30XA, zip-disk, 7′ wooden crucifix, and 10 - 15 paper-clipped pages torn from “The Screwtape Letters.” Read More »
Considering Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange is so much more than an entertaining novel; it is a philosophical and theological fable built upon a conceptual struggle between good, evil, and our God-given and human ability to choose one over the other freely. It is a satirical treatise railing against the dangers of overextended government and its vain penchant for social solutions predicated on the contextual removal of individual free choice in moral decisions. It’s a nightmarish tale of sex and violence set in a dystopian world no sharp person would ever volunteer to live in, never mind confessions of actual and real-time occupancy. Yet, we all do go on living in that very world in spite of our best intentions, and everyday too! Read More »
The Faust Myth according to Christopher Marlowe
Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe does incredible justice to the Faust myth in his own Dr. Faustus. Dr. Faustus is a poem (blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter) about a learned, intellectual, German scholar who sells his soul to the devil in effort to gain ultimate wisdom and the ultimate power accompanying it. This ultimate wisdom and power purchased by Faustus is delivered to him in the form of twenty-four years of service from a devil commissioned by Lucifer called Mephastophilis. The knowledge and power gained through deep exposure to academic disciplines such as philosophy, law, medicine, physics, mathematics, and divinity (theology) are not enough for Faustus. His Ph.D. expertise is not enough. He desires something greater. He has already mastered - to the point of self-conceit and waxen wings (illusion to the myth of Icarus) - all that these academic disciplines have to offer. He wants so much more! He desires to master the universe! He wants to be a god. So, Faustus tragically turns to the magic arts and necromancy. The resultant story is laden with vivid images of Mephastophilis (a devil), Lucifer, good and evil angels, the Seven deadly Sins, a tormented Pope, and the Spirit of Alexander the Great. Read More »
Translucence Follows the Morning
An era is ending; clouds are spent and parting. Bright blues and yellows are claiming atmosphere. Translucence follows the morning.
Social Hitchhikers Theater: Act 1
“What are you waiting for? If not now, then when?”
I wasn’t really sure what to say to Dave, in response to his inquiry. He had a forceful way about him that seemed honestly persuasive, initially, but quickly became demanding, even domineering. He meant well, and that was the source of my problem. How do you tell someone to shut the hell up when you know they are right? Read More »
The God-Shaped Hole
We are all born naked. We rush youth trying to become old. Then we beat time into delusion in our vain attempts to stay young. We refuse to die with grace and dignity. We prefer crowds to mirrors. We frame discussion in the past or future, forever avoiding the present. We are more ‘other’ than we are ‘ourselves’. We insist on defining ourselves by things we do, rather than who we really are when we are completely alone with the self in the dark. Read More »
Love Falls Down
There once lived a woman, in an age not too far removed from our own, who had not seen her children for sixteen years. The choice to leave them was her own. Her twenty year marriage to her husband was not a particularly healthy one. Jealousy, bitterness, rage, and a nagging feeling of nonacceptance gnawed at her fragile soul until it could no longer participate in such union. Her husband’s early drinking and philandering didn’t help matters either; he was a dog, in every sense of the word. Read More »
