Dwelling Places

Judgment day was set for the day after the great election. But before the final moment would arrive, the Almighty sent a pollster to do some exit polling. The Almighty had been plugging for citizens to appeal to their sense of right and wrong before exercising their choices. The Almighty’s penchant for recalling the past, to His chagrin, always led him to that fateful first election in paradise when there were only two voters. He had done the first exit poll of the first two voters. With judgment day on the horizon, this time around, it was clear that the Almighty would have to send a pollster. So the following is a discussion that took place between a pollster from the Almighty and an unsuspecting voter. Pollster: So tell me who did you vote for? Candidate Y or Candidate X? Voter: I voted for Candidate Y: Pollster: Why? Voter: Y is a representative of choice; of liberty; and that there is nothing that should get in the way of freedom to make the decisions without interference

We are in awe of magnificent sunrises. We cherish crisp spring mornings, fragrant purple jonquils swaying in breezes, effervescent dew trickling, tickling velvet-like petals. We sense vibrance in buzzing bees and fluttering humming birds – indescribably magnificent things. But equally glorious are sunsets that are looked upon with a certain hope of a coming tomorrow. However, sunsets, though beautiful, remind us of the “end of things.” Dusk reminds us of the inevitability of our lives’ own sunsets. Our repetitive circular-like existence finally ends. No more sunrises. We live “from the rising of the sun to its setting” (Psalm 113:3) in a solar system of predictability, of rotations and revolutions, of the law of entropy. The death of things is a calculation of the second law of thermodynamics. Civilizations have called this wheel of time the circle of life. But, what if life is not really a closed circle, but rather more like an open spiral? What if life is really a dynamic up

The punch to his face must have hurt. In the darkness of night shortly after hitchhiking from Arizona, a spirit of darkness came upon him. Violent knuckles cracking against flesh is an inimitable sound words cannot describe. It is a violent thud-sound as a soul violates another soul out of greed against someone who has only one possession which he guards with his life. At first, I had not noticed the purple around his eye as his skin color was burnt like ebony or palo fierro , darkened woods from the hot Sonoran Desert sun. He had an indigenous almost Yaqui character to his face though he said his family came to this country from Zacatecas by way of Matamoros. The eye was swollen and in the light I could see the injury was not as subtle. But his body swelled not as something visible but rather with an odor, an unmistakable perfume the poor often use to cover up the dense odor of pain, alienation and rejection in their lives. Norberto, a dark skinned Mexican American, a cit

  This political season clearly demonstrates that people are angry. It is a kind of “free floating anger” that hovers out there like a dark cloud upon the future. I have been watching the debates on both sides of the political spectrum and see that the cloud is the evaporative stuff distilled from the economy, and a kind of anxiety concerning our struggles among the world’s community of nations, the future of our nation’s security, the hemorrhaging of our borders and a variety of other issues that have made us into a nation of nervous ninnies waiting for the dark cloud to begin raining havoc on our spoiled society.   All of this is an external manifestation of the internal nervousness in America based upon a true lack of trust in governmental authority. That lack of trust is rooted in the fact that governmental authority is based upon human propensities to be, in the end, self-serving. The illusive concept of the “separation of church and state” has bullied and cut the roots