When Nicholas goes on to explain how baptism and communion make this unity possible I know how that’s true, and when he quotes Paul over and over again, such as when he says’ “in Him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28) to support the reality of life in Christ and Christ’s life in us, his words are as reliable the sun. And yet I don’t have to try so hard to feel my family genes in me, and me in my neighborhood or me in my country. I can think what it means to be in Christ but I can’t feel it.

Christ really threw us a curve ball when He came back from his trip to Hades and took the form of a different person. His disciples spoke to him for a while before they even realized that it was Jesus they were speaking to because he looked like someone else. Why did He do that? Was it a trick?

Actually you and I probably know Jesus better than we know anyone else, even our closest relatives because His personality is described so specifically and so consistently in the Bible. Maybe Jesus in me is all that is good, all that is compassionate, all that loves to commune with God the Father.  Maybe I can feel Jesus in me loud and clear, even though I don’t recognize Him when I am producing the fruit of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace patience, kindness, goodness, longsuffering, mildness, fidelity, modesty, continence, and chastity. Next time I see a fruit blossom and grow from me, I’ll say hello to Jesus. Maybe He’ll smile and say hello back. 

I wonder which fruit I will need to make when I am in Him on the Cross. 

It is when I need forgiveness the most, that of course I deserve it the least. Being haunted by my own weakness, as I approached the cleansing purifying Chalice on Sunday, I wondered if I could forgive myself. Weakness is the wrong word. It tries to erase blame. There was no weakness, it was a voluntary and intentional performance staged to express the tumult I felt, like a pinball being jettisoned not just by flippers but in a sea of currents screaming to bust through the wall of conflict, when I should have been a meek and faithful lamb. It doesn’t help at all that I am reading Mark Twain’s Recollections of Joan of Arc. Worse yet, I am at the part in the book that describes her at her trial. Here stands young Joan firm and strong before the most evil opposition. The contrast is humiliating. Please reader of mine, read Twain’s book for the most inspiring tale of a true immortal.

I look ahead at this week with renewed commitment to find my way into the very heart of Christ so I can consciously join Him at the moment when He reunites humanity to God to make the new Eden possible, even here and now. To listen to the echoes of my failure is to deny the power of the Blood. This is a new day in a new week and I have only to experience what is true and real and before me now. I mustn’t look back, but rather set my hand to the plow.

During this Lent in my writing, I am intentionally not on another journey likes the ones you have joined me on so many times before, such as when we walked the Exodus together, or rode in the bubble during Creation (that was fun!). Nope, no journey this time. I know that most aspiring immortals call Lent a journey, but not me, not this year. I don’t want to go from here to there; instead in stillness I want to become aware of being in Christ and He in me. Awareness is no journey, it is an awakening. It is truth revealed in the midst of powerful lies, distortions are like wavy mirrors at the carnival that tickle us with our false reflections. Awareness of truth is the first speck of sunrise over the ocean illuminating what had sat in darkness.

Of course I need help to become aware of being in Christ, the help one can only get from a friendly immortal or an aspiring immortal. I started Lent with one such man, Nicholas Cabasilas, but then needed to put him down for book club assignments and the occasional treat, Joan of Arc. I am almost finished with my book club assignment, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a beautiful book about how the true Christianity of both Negroes and Caucasians helped to overcome and ultimately to extinguish evil slavery. After the meeting tomorrow, I hope to shed the scales from my eyes and tell you what I see. Till then, adieu.

As should be expected during Lent or any other time of a special push toward holiness, the Divider has appeared to challenge me. You know him, the Diabolo, the spirit-guy who assigned himself, or was assigned, to mislead and trip those on the path to the land of immortality, lest riffraff be allowed into Kingdom Come.

As my beloved mom would say, “you know it’s not always happy-happy.” Well it sure ain’t happy now. I have been pushed away by someone I want most to be united with because I unintentionally offended her. I have been caste into outer darkness. I am dumbfounded because what I saw as small, she sees as huge. What I would laugh off, she is using as a hot twirling sword to cut me off. So now I am in hell during Lent.

If the Orthodox theologians have it right, there are no parties in hell. All the faithless people who like to imagine physical death to be either an eternal dreamless sleep or a big party in a hot place, all those people should make some room in their equations for the saintly prophesized probability that a non-stop severe loneliness is behind the curtain they have chosen. Hell is being cut off from others, especially those we love, and now I get to feel what that is like. Sometimes I want to weep and sometimes gnash my teeth but mostly I weep!

One thing I should know is to stop eating what el Diabolo is feeding me for dinner. This is Lent; I am supposed to be fasting, so why do I gorge myself on thoughts of the pain of separation. Worse yet, why do I chew and chew, taking these thoughts to fantastic hellish conclusions or relating them to past tumultuous nightmares like a kid picks at an old scab until it starts bleeding again, a fresh new wound to inflict upon myself as if the enemy wasn’t bad enough. With fervor, I join el Diabolo to pierce the heart of Evangeline and watch her slowly bleed to death.

Silly child, it is time to stop wolfing down the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of evil and cling to God for life.

The film Forrest Gump was rich in symbolism. My favorite scene was when legless Lieutenant Dan shimmied up the pole in Forrest’s shrimp boat and was yelling at God in the storm. He clung to that pole for dear life. Poor Dan had confused life with death and death with life, clinging to a dead pole yelling at Life to be damned. It’s a normal mistake.

Life is union with God because he is the Creator of Life! In or out of this fleshiness, death is nothing more than separation from God. Love is union with others made in His image and likeness which is why most everyone wants love so much and why we pursue it in any old form. Life = love = union. God unites, the devil separates.

Ah math and philosophy help me feel better!

The pain of rejection is a dinner of death and as if I was starving I am eating it.

The only way to fight the divider, el Diabolo and fight I must, wimp that I am, is to cling to God like Lt. Dan clung to the pole in the storm.

The only way to cling to God is to think and behave like Him. Go the second mile, love my enemies, unite whenever possible rather than divide further.

Oh geez, I am having such a craving for an ice cream cone right now. That was a bad joke. It means to fast from food, especially during this volatile period of the Great and Holy Lent, is effective if it can make me strong enough to fast from death in all of its familiar diabolical forms.

It is not in my power to bring my beloved back. I can’t control her heart. There must be something about this separation that comforts her. So instead I should reject that death sandwich and focus on loving God, then perhaps He will grant my wish and bring my beloved back to me, because He can control her heart. This is a difficult challenge but our God won’t have wimps in Kingdom Come.

So far the family reunion is everything I hoped for. The first couple of days were spent getting ready. My brother Lar and I were determined to obey our strict but loving Mother by not eating anything, not even a crumb of bread. We had never done that before, but you know, it wasn’t so hard. In fact it made me think about how Jesus didn’t eat for forty days and then he was hungry. Yes, I felt weak but I was supposed to. She said that the hunger would make me more aware of my dependence on God. If only I could always be aware of my dependence on God more than on my dependence on food, I would probably be thinner and less cocky.

Then, on the third day my dream came true. I still didn’t eat anything and I was amazed that I hadn’t so I started to feel hungry. That was like when Peter tried to walk on the water. When he became aware of how crazy that was he started to sink. Afraid of angering Jesus too, I stopped thinking about being hungry. In the evening Lar and I went to visit Mother and the family at a place called Saint George. We read psalms and prayers with lots of brothers and sisters and we broke the fast with the Body and Blood of Christ. He tasted so good and felt so warm and smooth as He traveled into my heart. Then, like the family we are, we all went into a big room full of tables and ate bean soup together. I gave Lar two bowls because he is so big and there was enough left over. He ate them faster than you can spit.

The best part was, and I’m so glad to have this to tell you, that the most important brother in the whole wide world came to be with us and talk to us about God. When he was born his mom named him Timothy and his father ended it with Ware, but now his names have more syllables than most. Met-ro-pol-i-tan-Kal-li-stos. Try to say that fast three times! This man turned a giant light on for the English speaking world by translating so many saintly writings and by writing about the Mother [Church], her background and her ways, things that Greeks and Russians took for granted but had been all darkness to English speakers until God sent Timothy on his mission. I could cry when I think about how different my world would be if little Timothy didn’t love God so much.

I can’t tell you everything he said to us but I will tell you what struck me like little bolts of lightning and made me smile. He came to tell us about how our God is a trinity and even though that concept is a mystery, some of the multitudinous mysterious aspects of it can be described, first by contrast with the one monolithic God of the Jews and Moslems. A monolithic idea of God isn’t very sociable. But a triune Godhead is very sociable because it loves each of its Selves and in the same way God loves each and every one of us humans. So, when Kallistos says God, he thinks all three-Father, Son, and Holy Spirit together. Then, he got all intellectual and quoted Lossky to tell us that he said “The doctrine of the Trinity is the cross for human thought.” I suppose he said that so we wouldn’t get too comfortable by thinking that everything else he would say was really so simple. I wonder if Lossky’s powerful quote means that we have to completely surrender to the whole intricate concept of a triune God like Christ surrendered to death.

What really hit me was that the Trinity doesn’t have free will like we humans do who go this way and that and who change like butterflies. Each Person, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit conform to one will, called the will of God. It is probably better to think of it as the Will of the Father. We are so hot about having free will like it is everything, but when I think that Jesus and the Holy Spirit don’t have free will, well, I have to tell you, I am glad. That’s why we can trust God so much. Because He isn’t going to change His mind tomorrow about what He wants to do with us. Maybe free will isn’t so great; maybe not as great as joining God in His will. Wait a second; that reminds me! “Thy Will be done.” Maybe the best of us don’t want free will either; those who give their free wills back to God.

Because God is social, to be social is Godlike. Hell is self cut off from others. Kallistos went on and on about how wrong it is to be alone or to love yourself, which I suppose is an oxymoron since love must involve another person.

Kallistos said there is only one choice and that is to either join the Trinity or hell. Then he really opened it up by adding that all forms of community, schools, governments, businesses, families, churches should all be forms of the Trinity where mutual love and respect are free from oppression, and coercion.

When he prays, Kallistos is aware that it is not a dialogue between him and God, but rather he is taken up into their exchange of love. Sometimes he sees flashes of the Trinity inside of him conversing with each other. I suppose that happens when you and I pray too but we aren’t looking out for it, not until now at least.

I asked him how God could love everyone since so many people were so self absorbed or mean. He gave me a good answer, something I can think about for a long time. It was a gift.

He said that God made each person to be very unique. That sure is true! Well, so God loves each person uniquely. He expects different things from each person. Not us, we expect the same thing from everyone which is why we get so angry with them. What a better way God has!

This wonderful family gathering gave me two Lenten homework assignments, 1) to love people as God does by remembering the uniqueness of each person, and 2) when I pray, to listen for God talking to Himselves. 

Goodbye world, I have to go to Lent now. Well, I admit I don’t have to go but I want to, I really want to go. It’s not that I don’t love you; perhaps I love you too much, the way you sit right smack in front of my face day and night so I can barely see God or sometimes even our Mother [the Church]. I have gotten used to that. I don’t like it, but I must say you have grown on me, like a tree that grows wrapped around a rock.

I won’t miss your brashness though. I must say good bye and I want you to respect that. I may have to fight you to get you out of my line of sight, so that’s why I want to have this talk right here and now; why I want to say good bye and I want you to leave me be.

My Mother needs me so I can’t play with you. It is our family holiday. All of Her children come together and we focus, we really focus on our Father and our own family. We will visit with our invisible brothers and sisters; we will sit at the feet of the sages and listen to their words of wisdom. It’s so wonderful! Maybe if we are lucky, really lucky God’s light will shine on us and in us. Some of my brothers and sisters light up like flood lights, it’s so cool to see! Our Father makes us feel so warm and loved. He plants us in His garden and waters us and shines on us and watches us grow up high towards Him. We become like a field of tulips, but we are still people, His very own people, His children and no one else’s.

No! You can’t come with me. That would wreck the whole thing! Don’t you see? It’s you that we need to separate from. You have no idea whatsoever of what I am really talking about. You are blind and ignorant and mean and busy and arrogant and stupid and selfish and shortsighted and I am really and truly sick of you. I can’t tell you in strong enough words how happy I am that my family goes on this vacation together every year…away from you!

I suppose being angry is not a good way to start this trip. I am sorry. I know you can’t help being what you are.

Okay, I’ll try again. Goodbye world. I must leave, but whether I like it or not, I will return and you can have me back. Before I go I want to thank you for all that you have done for me. Thank you for money because it has taught me so much and helped me to mature when I had none of it and when I had enough for anything I wanted to buy from you. It has helped me to be generous and if it wasn’t for you I couldn’t have used money to love people with.  I also want to thank you for the entertainment, books, movies, music, natural catastrophes, politics -- all those things you do so well to mesmerize us. You have very successfully enticed me, as I said before, probably too much. Oh, the food and drink, anything I want whenever I want it! Good job. The flavors and textures and the intoxication—all terrific. I can’t hate you for that—just for sucking me in so much with them. Not your fault, my fault.

That’s why I need to leave and I am so glad for the family reunion.

Listen body, I know you probably don’t want to go because you and world are so tight, but just cooperate for fifty short days and I’ll send you back. I need you to help me to get to the reunion. You are so much like money you should be considered twins of the world the way you help and hurt with equal enthusiasm, and how equally you can help me reach either the heights or the depths of life on this planet.  But it’s only with your cooperation that we can find our way to the reunion. You can be a real hero! Please don’t put up a fight, say good bye and let’s go.

Oh, two last things I want to say to the world before I leave. First, I want to tell you how cool it is that you are celebrating Valentine’s Day today, this day before I start my trip away from you. It shows me that you can see a glimpse of where my family and I are going and what we will do there. How sweet. I wish you could celebrate Love more often. But I gotta tell you, it’s much more than chocolate, roses, and body stuff. And lastly, I need to say, you will see me during Lent but please DON’T EVEN SAY HELLO.

Good bye!

Cars careening

Hilltops higher than houses hosting skiers

Rushing rivers relocating rocks

Intelligent intruders investigating

Seventy seven cents sitting on a dresser

Testifiers telling truths

God on high watching amused

Spits an inch on planet frenzy.

O humble inch, not ambitious, not assuming, still

Not moving

Inglorious inch

Swells not with pride

Nor insults do shrink

Never greedy

Never sick

Cares not for first downs

Nor pants too short or tight

Never twinges at colliding car scratches

Nor delights in peekaboo stunning sun rises

Oh inch, oh standard of measure so humble

How you demonstrate Divine Economia.

Oh models, oh marks, Christ and inch alike

We violate you at our peril.

Oh humble Father’s Son

Perfect reflection of The Good One

Model healer, feeder, teacher

Gold, and hatred-power dissipater

Like the inch eschewing both good and evil

Uncovers the mystical void

Through which the earth was formed

And the teensy weensy gate to heaven is exposed.

Two teachers twirling crystals make rainbows bloom

Silly Willy swings his legs sitting on a star

Isaiah laughs at loony lions licking lambs

Resting Richard raises roses by the river

Hilarious hillbillies hop over hedgehogs

Circles and bubbles draw holy wholes

Itching inch calling for attention cries good night gone

My work is done.

I love Him but I can’t see Him. I know He is there because He proves it to me when He plays with time right in front of my eyes. Last week I thought I should try again to look for an agent for my book, The Immortal Life, and the very next day Beth told me that she spoke to her old friend from Bedford after thirty five years and it turns out that Sally is an agent and is willing to see my book. How did He do that?

A week later I went to my new book club to talk about Frankenstein with the Catholic ladies. When I arrived, there was only the leader there and no one else. She mentioned that there was a Mass going on in the chapel so I said, “Let’s go!” There was a small company of about five people in the Mass. It was being said for their new project. When we walked in the lay reader was reading the Book of Samuel, and was at the point when young Samuel was trying to sleep. He kept hearing his master call him. Several times Samuel got up and went to find out what he wanted only to hear the master say that he did not call him. Finally the master realized that God was calling young Samuel and had something to say so he told the boy that the next time he heard the call he should reply “Here I am Lord.” Everyone in the small congregation silently said, “Here I am Lord.” And then we said it together out loud a few times in the responsive prayer. After Mass my new friend and I went back into the sitting room to talk about Frankenstein. A couple of men joined us because we offered wine and camaraderie. When the small company emerged from the chapel I asked them what their project was, and the one man replied that they were going to syndicate content to Christians. I asked if they needed content and gave them my card. Once again my invisible but powerful Lord was encouraging me.

It doesn’t matter if nothing comes of these two incidents; God was showing me for the millionth time that He can orchestrate my life (and yours) any way He wants. I like that. I don’t have to try too hard or be too ambitious. I only have to try hard to listen and write what He wants me to write. As I’ve said, ‘I am the visible ghost-writer of the invisible author.’ That alone is not an easy job. Someone else has to do the marketing of all this writing. I’m glad to be reminded that it is the Author who markets for me.

I suppose that it isn’t really the Father God Himself who is orchestrating all these marvels, but it is His angel that He has assigned to me.  I hope that my angel is very good and perfectly serves our Lord. I would hate to have a flawed or tricky angel.

Every time, well almost every time, God plays with time to show me He is near I get so excited about it that I write it down in my hard copy Journal. I feel so sorry for the people who don’t believe that the invisible God is Someone to love and obey and that one day will become very visible and that forever and ever and ever in a sunny place.

I trust Him with my life because He can play with time and I wonder over and over again how He does that because I can’t, at least not yet.

Johnnie ran to his old home to find nothing more than a mound of rubble where picture covered walls once contained his beautiful brown eyed mommie and jovial papa, where sun poured through windows to wake him every morning. He knew his parents and his sister Sally who was exactly half his age this year were deep in the lifeless mound because they were home when he left for school. He could not see them though; all he could see was rubble. Johnnie was gazing at that mound of sorrow and sobbing when Sister Josefina took his hand to whisk him away to her convent.

The nun said he was lucky to have lived. He wondered how that could be true. If his mommie and papa and especially little Sally were with God, and he was in this rubble, hurting and thirsty and dirty and hungry how could he be the lucky one? He asked Sister Josefina who replied, “Suddenly the Judge shall come and the deeds of each shall be revealed but with fear we cry out in the middle of the night, ‘Holy, holy, holy art Thou oh God, have mercy on us.’ Then Sister Josefina went on to explain, “Johnnie, we the living are the lucky ones my child because we who have beheld this disaster with our own eyes, have seen with our souls how suddenly each person meets his Maker. We are reminded to prepare. Glorify God, my child who rains on the good and the evil alike, the rain that gives birth to seedlings in the spring, and who allows evil to test and to strengthen men’s souls. Today our eyes have beheld a grand gift of mercy. Johnnie, let’s you and I gather the stars out of this rubble.”

Meanwhile papa was not seeing God. When the ceiling collapsed on him and his beloved wife and Sally he was indeed knocked out but regained consciousness only to find himself in an air pocket. He could see his wife’s lifeless hand, that hand he kissed tenderly so often to show her how grateful he was for her labors. He reached for her beloved fingers and wept. Then papa remembered Johnnie and knew that he couldn’t succumb to death to be with her. “Oh, Lord,” he began “send your angels to rescue me that I may see my son grow into a God-fearing man, then I can rest in peace. As for my beloved wife and girl-child, receive them into your loving arms. Have mercy on them in your judgment for no man lives and sins not, only You are without sin my Lord and King.” Papa prayed like that as he tried to tunnel his way through to fresh air. When he couldn’t think he just recited psalms or repeated the name Jesus. 

Freda had flown in from Florida. She was trained for situations like this. Her instincts were more valuable to her work than her strength. She trained daily to keep her strength up and her spirit keen. Freda could sense the life-filled prayers of papa inside that calamitous mound when she walked by. “Come on, she called to whoever would listen, help me!” Then she started picking up pieces of wall and furniture. “Mighty God who hears the suffering of these people, rescue the quake victims and even the community of saviors, from true death which is drifting away from You, the creator and giver of Life. Reveal yourself in miracles to the doubting; reveal your love to the angry. Touch the bitter with the sweet wood of resurrection. Lord, use this darkness to make your light apparent.” Praying like that while she worked was Freda’s secret to success.

And when she stopped praying to lift a particularly heavy piece, or just because she wanted to listen, Freda could hear a choir of angels and watchful souls chanting together, “Holy, Holy, Holy is our God, and Halleluiah.” Freda was joy filled in her labor for she knew that the time for renewal had come to Haiti.



I don’t know what is more thrilling, the weeks before Christmas or the weeks before Lent. Funny I should compare them because on the surface they seem to be opposites. Christmas is jammed packed with sights and sounds and Lent is relatively empty.

But I am almost as excited about Lent coming as I was about Christmas coming. Maybe Lent is the other Christmas, the secret Christmas of the soul. Instead of preparing with almost everyone else in town, I am preparing for Jesus’ re-birth inside of me all by myself. No songs, no gifts, no sparkling trees inside or out.

Phase one is just watching myself live and think and notice the things that I am doing now that I won’t be doing during Lent. I know I could just stop doing them now, but that would be like opening my presents early. Nope, I’ll just wait. If I am fully in this time and place now, then the contrast will be better and perhaps it will be easier to hear God then, like suddenly turning off the radio.

Meanwhile I can start packing. Pick out books I want to read, decide what to cut out and what to add in its place. And wait, just pure waiting, like for my turn at the doctor’s office or for the airplane to board. Waiting is a whole other space in time that, like pockets, can come in handy.

I hope I will get lots of terrific presents from God this Lent. How about you? What are you wishing for?   

Let us be vigilant to keep in mind that Christianity is more about entering the next life where we will live forever than it is about ensuring our comfort in this fleeting phase of life. It is to become a sheep rather than a goat, to keep oil in our lamps, to avoid being one of those who throughout their lives said, Lord, Lord” and yet He never knew them. It is to be able to hear the voice of Christ so we can recognize it when He calls us to Him on the last day. It is to become brave enough, by practice, to flee the flames and fly up to meet Him in the air.

In light of the real eternal life of our destination so much that would cause our demise is unimportant. 

Whether we are rich or poor doesn’t matter because we can’t buy God’s favor. We can’t buy character.

Hatred, lies, thievery or other painful darts aimed as us from our neighbors, relatives or on a political level from other countries and from terrorists do not matter because we are ultimately only responsible for our own attitudes not theirs. Let us protect ourselves, but never hate the enemy. Hatred is wasteful. Fear is also wasteful.  Since neither my love nor my pity can elevate the enemy, certainly my resentment or judgment won’t heal the enemy or myself.

To live the immortal life here on this planet and now is to pick up magical binoculars that focus on what is important, and blind us to what is not important.

My mission is to serve as those magical binoculars for my fellow Aspiring Immortals, with God’s guidance and help. I wonder if Christ will return in 2010?