"Gahtay Gahtay Para Gahtay Para Sahm Gahtay Bodhi Soha"
Canon G7x Mark II
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Excerpted from the novel "The Monk Downstairs" which contains a letter from former monk Michael Christopher to Brother James still in the monastery.
Michael feels me: Dear Brother James, Thank you for your letter, which I took as an attempt to cheer me up. But I am beyond being cheered by reassurances that I am "a good person at heart" and that "God will provide." That kind of stuff just makes me suspect that you aren't really paying attention. I am a futility. The life of prayer begins with that. And God is not a comfort, to be offered like Kleenex. God is a poisoned sea, with broken syringes washing up on the beach. God is shopping malls stretching to the horizon and warplanes in the sky. God is a flat tire in a rainstorm and beer cans in the ditch, a bottle shattered on a highway overpass and the taste of gunmetal in your mouth. God is dying children. Have you forgotten, cultivating your pleasantness? Or have you really never known that terrible enormity? You talk of faith as if we were not desperate men; you prescribe it like an antacid. But real faith is a failure and a defeat, vomiting blood; real faith is a morphine drip; it is plastic bags whirled by the wind in an empty parking lot and a cigarette butt in dirty sand. It is possums squashed by trucks, and the slaughter on the evening news. You consider me a project, clearly -- community outreach or something, a target for your well-meaning nonsense about God. You walk around passing out hope like theological Monopoly Money. But your colorful bills are no good here, Brother James. I am traveling in the desert, as you are; I'm off the game board. If we go on together, let's go on like men who are lost, crying for love as men cry for water. Let's not pretend we're doing anything else. Yours in Christ, Mike. |