Tim asked us all to blog more frequently, even if only short chatty items. It doesn’t have to be “War and Peace,” he says, probably referring to my often very long posts. Ever eager to find favor with Tim and my British cousins, I send you this. It is brief. What it lacks in chattiness, I hope it makes up for in blogginess.

Father said when you go to the spirit world you will find that art is very important. He said a person who cannot write poems of love is a failure. Tired of being a failure, I wrote a love poem on Christmas Eve 2002, the night before my wife’s birthday. I can’t begin to express how enjoyable it was to put these thoughts down on paper.

warm regards,
Larry

——————————
Oh how your heart does sing to me

Oh how your heart does sing to me
and how my own does answer back to you.
The sound of your touch and impassioned eyes
tell me, though my heart’s for you alone,
still I love with half the power
of the higher truth I see in you.

I cannot keep my feet beneath me
yet never have I wanted more to slip away
into the moist, enfolding seclusion of you
to lay forever, I would choose.

The meaning of myself is found in us
tracing the pathways of our union
over stepping stones of sighs and laughter
together breathing in catches and starts
that mimic the silky staccato ascent
of notes on quarter tone trumpets.

When I find myself too inward dwelling
on dull cares of the present day
I recall the memories we have made
and treasures you and I have laid away.
I look again, and in the time it takes a star
to shoot between the treetops and the roof
you embrace me so completely
the moment becomes an icon for all we are.

Curled on the couch, through coffee steam,
you squeeze my stocking feet and tell me
“I will invite Santa Claus into my bed.”
It’s way more than can be explained
in a barely rhyming love song
twenty-three years, seven months,
fourteen days in the making.

March 25, 2010

Spring began March 20, 2010 at 1:32 PM Eastern Daylight. Science’s pathetic explanation is that the Earth’s axis tilts to where the sun is directly above the equator. As the axis keeps tilting, the sun will continue its northward march until June 21 when it will be directly overhead just a few miles north of Havana, where it will stop dead in its tracks, turn around and head south again.

Rubbish.

Last December 21 with heroic effort, me and some friends stopped the sun’s disappearance using time-honored methods. If we hadn’t, permanent darkness would have destroyed crops and all life on earth. It’s like this every year. We cut a deal with the universe and the sun starts to come back. Don’t let anyone ever tell you animal sacrifices don’t work.

On March 20, the daylight became long enough to equal the night. Coinciding with that was a string of days of perfect temperature and sunshine. It took a month for the piles of dirty snow to disappear. It will take longer for our blood to thin. A comforting sun hit our little patch of earth last week and it made us realize we hadn’t been breathing for a while. We sighed and exhaled, climbed down off the ledge and into the light, the warmth and the grass. We almost took off our shoes.

Some say God is fully half masculine and fully half feminine, updating the deity from the bearded patriarch of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. This idea is supported by observing that God appears to have divided his/her nature, putting the masculine expression into some and the feminine into others. Boys and girls, boy animals, girl animals, boy plants, girl plants. It seems to have happened across the board, all the way down to protons and electrons (not exactly boys and girls, but you get the idea).

The result is that in order to see what God really looks like, and for things to resemble what God is like, looking at just a male or female alone won’t do it. You have to put them back together in order to understand what God is like. I don’t think I need to convince anyone that the most intense form of “together” for males and females, is mating. And everything from people to hamsters to magnetic north and south are trying to do that. Goldfish and katydids do it without drama. But people, omigod, fill the air with sweet and stupid love songs, with valentines and rhyming moon with June.

And it happens in the spring like no other time. You can pinpoint the start of the madness to the first warm, sunny days after the snow goes away. It’s as though jumper cables had been attached to every living thing and someone cranks the juice up all the way. There is nothing subtle about it. The wrecked car parked on Lake Champlain falls through the ice and someone wins the betting pool for guessing the date and hour. And everybody gets a little crazy. The angel of responsibility sits on one shoulder and the angel of spring on the other, whispering twenty reasons to skip school or work. All of them good. Not just good. FABULOUS.

Life that we thought had been killed off by the months of freezing cold, was only hibernating, biding its time. Spring is its bacchanalia, a glorious Fat Tuesday for which there is no tomorrow, and in which nothing is held in reserve. Mother Nature is the extravagant life of the party. She is three sheets to the wind and will do anything and everything to ensure that the male and female of every hop-toad and slime creature find each other and share spit. Everything is over-the-top excessive. Where a few thousand minnows will do, nature needs millions just so their own parents can eat most of them. Some species of mayfly have an adult lifespan of only 30 minutes. A queen ant can live for 30 years. There don’t seem to be any rules.

The rush is headlong and pre-wired, without conscious thought. As a young boy in Oklahoma, I saw a Hereford bull destroy a sturdy oak and wire fence, hitting it again and again with a half-ton of momentum, until he broke through, bleeding and grinning, to the heifers on the other side. It inspires and humbles a person to see that.

We know of our own blind passion for love and war. The history of nations is the story of young men rallying around slogans and charging up hills behind colored rags, into heavily-defended positions, for reasons ranging from the most foolish to the most noble.

However, it’s the male praying mantis who wins the Charge of the Light Brigade Award for dedication. After a male mantis mounts the female to copulate, she turns around and severs his head with her reciprocating saw jaws. Now headless, he continues to mate for the next several hours, until he falls over or she eats the rest of him.

There are a couple of ways to look at this, aside from understanding that men don’t require brains for sex. You can either choose to see it as a testimony to the cruelty of nature or you can see it as a supreme sacrifice for the future of the species. He mates her and then his body feeds and sustains her for the gestation and laying of hundreds of eggs. I choose to see it as sacred. If your lover can also be your protein source, that’s a lot more efficient than the way some other species sort these things out.

So much of burgeoning springtime happens below our feet. The reason most of the planet is dirt instead of one big rock is because the bacteria, protozoa, and fishing worms have been burrowing through it and eating it, along with plant matter and egg shells from the compost heap. We call it “rotting,” but fungi, amoebae, mites and arthropods call it “the good life.”

A single spade of dirt from my little victory garden has some 200 species of insects and other life forms, most of them too small to see. Fungus spores, cicadas, several varieties of beetles, wasp larvae, caterpillars and others are there too, each hosting an impressive variety of parasitic insects, who in turn carry their own parasites.

There are two hundred million insects for every person on earth. Of beetles alone there are up to 8 million different species, with new ones being discovered all the time. One out of every four animals on earth is a beetle. And you thought there was only John, Paul, George and Ringo.

Ants are in the spade of dirt, spilling over the edges, each one trying to save suddenly exposed eggs. Amazon ants from Brazil, now found also in the American southwest, are one of a few species of “slave-raiding” ants who steal the pupae of other ants, raise them and put them to work raising the young. Amazon ants are incapable of caring for their brood because of their long piercing dagger-like jaws. Think about it. Would you want Edward Scissorhands changing your kid’s diaper?

Ants of course are eaters. Last week the cafe car on Amtrack, fully stocked for the run from Richmond to Boston, ran out of sandwiches and sodas 150 miles later, just north of Washington. The server shrugged, “A hundred teenagers got on at Lynchburg.” The Amazon ants could learn from them.

“April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land…” wrote T.S. Eliot. April rudely awakens a comfortably dormant land, and shoves it through messy changes. How affronted must a fetus feel to find its dark and warm, watery womb suddenly drained and the walls squeezing in. In birth there is vicious pushing, a flood of light, a rush of cold air and such noises and smells. The newborn is accosted by giants, backslapping one another and handing out cigars. Only a day before everything was so beautifully tranquil and undisturbed. So yes, April is cruel, and its motto is “Get a life!”

Sometime, while watching dragonflies mate, or two garden slugs entwined, suspended from a branch by a string of slime. Or watching sparrows mate for the third time in one season. Or while contemplating the touch of your one true love, take time to ponder why the magnetism between male and female was created, and made to be so intense. And further, why it is that only this bonding, and nothing else, creates new life from one end of time to the other. Why is the creation divided into male and female just so they can rush back together into pairs that resemble, in the physical world, what God looks like when sitting around the house alone?

To me the answer is obvious. I can think of no other reason except that God wants to be involved. The ultimate parent wants to love and be loved. God wants to be smack in the middle of all that we create, especially when we create new life. If we are bug-eyed and joyfully unhinged when spring fever hits, we are created in the image of God. We don’t have to ask who wrote the book of love. We know exactly who put the bomp in the bomp bah bomp bah bomp and the ram in the rama lama ding dong, that made your baby fall in love with you.

Larry Moffitt
March 25, 2010

There are six different ways to kill a man with a lemon wedge. And I know all of them.

The plush Atrium Lounge of the Makati Shangri-La, in the heart of the top of the food chain in Manila, is enormous. On Sunday afternoons, a string orchestra made entirely of gorgeous young women play classical and popular music while people sip tea and hors d’oeuvres in the quietude of elegance. The wall behind the orchestra is solid glass rising three stories, overlooking a perfectly manicured garden beyond.

I was the only one sitting near the indoor fountain. It had been a tough week and the sound of falling water was relaxing. A couple of no-nonsense Godfather extras suddenly stood in front of me, interrupted my reverie. One of them asked if I wouldn’t mind relocating to another part of the room so they could have that area for a “private conference.”

They were muscled, trying to smile, but it wasn’t really working for them. They looked only barely this side of nasty, wearing the embroidered barong shirts that are the business attire of the Philippines. Their shoes were scuffed and dirty. One of them was big, a human truck. The other, who did the talking, was a dark, thin stiletto. Definitely not Atrium Lounge material. I imagined them on leashes, sniffing luggage at the airport. Behind them by the bar a group of nicely dressed gentlemen stood talking, studiously not noticing the meeting arrangements being negotiated for them. That’s why henchmen were invented, to do the heavy lifting in community relations.

“If you don’t mind,” the smaller of the two, the asp, said impatiently.

I eyed the lemon wedges on the plate beside the teacup, then thought, nah.

“I don’t mind at all,” I smiled. And I didn’t. I stood as a waitress and a very relieved maître d’ rushed in to scoop up my tea and hors d’oeuvres  and whisk me over to a table with a good view on the other side of the room. I felt good because now the Atrium Lounge owed me one.

“Would you like to try the crispy Thai chicken?” the maitre d’ asked, “It’s our specialty,” adding, “on the house.”

Would you like the first violinist to soothe your fevered brow?

The scruffy guards were the darkest pillars of soot, chatting on the edge of the commandeered sitting area a discrete distance from the meeting. They created an unspoken no-fly zone for that part of the room. The cascading water would make it impossible for a hidden microphone to pick up what was said, and I wondered if that had anything to do with why they had chosen to sit there. The three gents were soon joined by two equally well turned out elders with distinguished gray at the temples. They shook hands and all sat down to plot their high crimes and misdemeanors.

I tried to allow for the possibility of having misjudged them. But sadly, I knew I hadn’t. You can cover thugishness in a silk shirt but the stains of predation and vulgar nonchalance will still bleed through until that’s all you can see. Occam’s razor: the simplest solution is usually the correct one. They were not meeting about how to bring fresh water to the slums.

I watched the gentlemen. The first three were subordinate to the two elders. The body language and attempt at lame humor from one of the three, said this was their first time to meet. I imagined all of them as they would appear twenty-five years from now, alone and bereft of love, unless they were lucky. Maybe they would never get their priorities figured out. Two and a half decades from now their bodies will  be deteriorated long past anything assisted living could do for them. They will be discarded and diapered, warehoused in a nursing home while the remaining money is steadily sucked from their accounts. Liver-spots and scattered wisps of hair, trembling palsied hands, useless dead penises, as they stare up at the skylight in the dayroom, waiting for the Great Leveler to show up. But right now, still so far away from that time, and puffed up with ignorance, they had full shocks of expensively cut hair, and powerful urges that would be met by the world they had built. They were the bottomless Mariana Trench of need.

Consider this: All that separates me from Tiger Woods on the golf course is distance and accuracy. Just two things, only it’s a matter of scale. What separates a wealthy man who only takes, from a wealthy man who gives it all back, may be a much smaller scale, I think. It’s a short walk from the dark side, into the light, maybe it’s as simple a thing as how a person comes by his brownie points. Does his first taste of respect come from someone who admires him or from someone who fears him? The choices that lead a person down one road or the other could be as fleeting as praise given or withheld when one is young. It’s subtle, like the difference between a hamster and a gerbil. (A gerbil has more dark meat.) I wondered what would it take for the wheeler dealers by the water fountain to make the shift, to awaken to the sacred and change everything about themselves for the better?

Jeremiah, the prophet not the bullfrog, said, “For from the least of them even to the greatest of them, everyone is greedy for gain, And from the prophet even to the priest Everyone deals falsely.” No wonder they threw him in prison. But his point is well taken. The “least of them” sitting in front of me, greedy for gain, looked like lifers. Really, what would it take?

Figure another ten or fifteen years before immortality starts to become an illusion for them, like it already has for me and most of my friends. They’re all savvy guys at the top of their game. You’d think they would try to investigate what comes next after the big roulette wheel they’re on begins to slow. Do they really think it spins forever? At some point a person thinks, hey, I have enough money and clout. Don’t they? Don’t your priorities shift at some point? How do gangsters relax anyway? Do they take time to stop and kill the roses?

The question is, if I had possession of the Ring of Power, would I throw it into the Fires of Mordor to save the world when the time came? Pretty much all of existing literature says no. History agrees, but then history doesn’t know squat. I challenge the assumption of greed, and I am not special, trust me. On the Hitler-to-Gandhi spectrum of sainthood, I am Joe Sixpack, somewhere in the middle. I am probably one of those lukewarm people who disgust God. “I will spit you out,” I believe God warns us. But I will still toss the damn ring into the flaming pit without a second thought. I kid you not. You just watch.

“If I were the king of the world, tell you what I’d do. I’d throw away the cars and the bars and the war, and make sweet love to you.” Book of Jeremiah. The bullfrog Jeremiah.

At some point in my musings I made eye contact with the two nose tackles. We smiled, nodded. Each of us had gotten what we wanted. Over in my part of the Atrium, the Thai chicken lived up to its billing. They brought more tea and, sipping with pinkie extended, I listened to the All Pretty Girl Orchestra. I never saw the check.

February 16, 2010

I keep thinking about last Sunday’s sermon. InJin Nim began by going over the story in the Book of Matthew about the disciples in a storm on the Sea of Galilee. (It’s a lake actually, but ancient Aramaic didn’t have a word for “lake.”) On a lake large enough, wind can whip up waves that could easily swamp a small boat, and that’s what was happening here.

Several disciples were in the boat, along with Jesus, who was snoozing in the stern. To InJin Nim the boat being tossed around on the waves was metaphorical for the troubles besetting the young Christian church at that time: expulsion from the synagogue and clerical persecution. Matthew may also have been referring to the first pains of multiculturalism as Gentiles began to follow Jesus. Unificationists know all about this one. We drown in multiculturalism. The two camps in embryonic Jewish Christianity were circumcised and uncircumcised. Nobody had to ask whose side someone was on. You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.

Metaphor or not, the disciples were in danger of being capsized, so they woke Jesus from his power nap. He said, “Oh you of little faith,” and he stood up in the boat and rebuked the waves and the wind, calming everything.

InJin Nim segued from this into a story from her youth about a time when Father was determined to go tuna fishing in the open sea off Gloucester, Mass during a storm with 20-foot swells. Of course everyone mentioned the weather to Father before they left the dock, in case he hadn’t noticed. But you know Father. InJin Nim did a lot of fishing with him in those days because she wasn’t prone to seasickness, so she was on the boat as well.

At the fishing grounds, far from the shelter of land, they found themselves caught in the center of a volleyball game from hell. From deep in a trough, surrounded by waves twice the height of the boat, they were suddenly spiked upward on tall fingers and slammed across the net. Over and over again. Dishes flew out of the cupboards. Breakfast flew out of the people.

InJin Nim said she couldn’t tell the difference between the ocean and the sky. Still not yet a teen, she was now aware of her mortality. She was more than queasy. “Father,” she said. “I’m scared.”

Father looked at her calmly and said, “I am here.”

The boat had the characteristics of a cork in a blender. A few minutes later, “Father, I’m scared.”

Again, calmly, “I am here.”

After a particularly nasty lurch, tipping the boat nearly sideways, InJin Nim could not keep the panic out of her voice. “Father, I’m really frightened!”

Father said, “InJin, I am here.”

This is a powerful story, not just because it parallels the story from Matthew and not just because that day Father caught the second largest bluefin tuna ever taken from that fishing ground. It’s powerful because it’s about a father and his child, and about trust and faith at the risk of your life. It’s a true story only InJin Nim can tell.

Regarding Lovin’ Life’s televised church, my jury is in and I’m liking most of it. I’m seeing it as a guest-friendly, human-enriching event, and InJin Nim’s sermons send me digging for my notebook. It’s not all things to all people but I can see if we have a visitor or two who respond well, which we had last week, then we’ll get another, and then another. And so on. Even the mighty Amazon River starts with single drops of water that begin on the backs of leaves overhanging a trickle on a hillside.

The technology is different from when I joined. But attitudes are cyclical and therefore the more things change, the more they remain the same. As it was in 1974, people are still desperately seeking to know the meaning of being alive. They still search for love, and are just as mystified as ever as to why it seems unable to last. Loneliness is the great leveler, then and now. The basic spiritual hungers have not changed a whit since I joined, and people are tired of being up to their wazoos in evil.

Matthew’s storm on Galilee is appropriate for the Unification Church at the dawn of the 21st century. Amid the chaos of the multiple transitions our movement is currently undergoing, the tempest-tossed waters and people flailing their arms and barfing over the rails, the answer is still “I am here.”

rgds,
Larry

On 8 July 1822, less than a month before his 30th birthday, Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in a sudden storm while sailing off the northwest coast of Italy in his schooner. Shelley, who could be morose even on a good day, may even have wanted it that way. His body washed up on the shore with much of the skin eaten away, his clothing nearly gone and a boot missing.

That’s all that was left of the Percy Shelley who wrote “Ozymandias.” Shelley, the philosopher-poet and husband of the author of Frankenstein. What was left of Shelley is what’s left of all of us.

Shelly, who had a beautiful mind but whose poems are sometimes long, long run-on sentences, can make you pass out while reading aloud, trying to find a place to breathe. His writing style conveys the sense he was one very intense lad. Not someone whose order you would want to get wrong at the Lamb and Flag.

There tends to be a lot of tomb, and sepulture and mouldering leaves kind of language in his poetry that can leave you in a brown study. After reading Shelley, I need a hug.

The sculptor Edward Ford created a memorial statue of Shelley. It wasn’t a rendering of the poet in a coffee house with goose quill in hand or sitting at the hearth being urbane with Lord Byron and Keats. Instead, Ford sculpted a likeness of Shelley’s soggy, lifeless, naked body, a cleaned up version of the way he looked laying on the beach where they cremated him.

Shelley was kicked out of Oxford 200 years ago for being an outspoken atheist. But after Oxford itself became atheist, they built a special nook for Shelley’s drowned rat statue with inset mood lights capturing snippets of his poetry on the surrounding walls. It’s there today, sitting on a pedestal composed of the requisite bare-bosomed lass and a couple of winged creatures from someone’s nightmare.

The statue is highly acclaimed as a work of art, but this is the best-known memorial of Shelley and I wonder what the poet himself thinks as he haunts Oxford’s University College. It seems unfair, but isn’t history mostly unfair?

Isadora Duncan, the great American dancer who died in 1927, is remembered with more dignity than Shelley, although her exit from life was more interesting. While standing in the passenger seat of a convertible, she ostentatiously threw the long flowing scarf for which she was famous, around her neck as she shouted a flamboyant “Je vais à l’amour” (“I’m off to love.”) to her friends. The scarf hung outside the roadster, where it was picked up by the back tire and wrapped as the car sped away. Ms. Duncan was unceremoniously yanked out of the car, her neck snapped.

But don’t look for that in a statue. Paintings and renderings of her, including statuary, rightly depict the woman for the poised and dynamic barrier-breaker she was in life.

There are lessons galore in death’s circumstances. Nelson Rockefeller died of a heart attack, tongues wag, while atop the lovely Megan. History remembers, even if only with a mention. Whenever I receive an invitation to an orgy, I always think what if I choke on a chicken bone while I’m there? What would my statue at Oxford look like? The imagination boils.

But in truth my final minutes are not as worrisome for me as my final two or three decades. That will be where the big summing up comes for me and most others as well. Sometimes one’s stains can be big enough to erase every other act of good that person accomplished in their entire life. A stain big enough and public enough, like say, that acquired by someone in a Judas role, lives on in footnote after footnote after footnote.

Conversely, one can redeem oneself so spectacularly in the final years of an otherwise misspent life, as to eradicate the years of debauchery and selfishness that went before. Although it’s rare, and often requires death in the doing of it, it is even possible for a person to reverse their destiny in one extraordinarily sacrificial moment. And history will never forget.

Nobody gets out of here without regrets. And truthfully, without stains either. Shelley wrote, “Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, stains the white radiance of Eternity.” What is eternity? “Eternity is really long,” Woody Allen said, “especially near the end.”

Shoveling the sidewalk and driveway today. It was snowing like a busted pillow and I went out to shovel, thinking I could keep up with it. I finished one pass and turned around to see the pavement was quickly being covered again. “Hey!” I shouted to heaven, “I just finished this and you’re covering it up again.”

The only sound was “the sweep of easy wind and downy flake,” as Robert Frost wrote. That’s okay, I wasn’t looking for an answer. I think sometimes God just enjoys keeping company.

It‘s good to spend time meditating. There are countless ways to do it and all of them work. You sit in silence in a church. In a zendo, wearing comfortable, loose-fitting clothing. Outside in the garden with the sun on your back and insect sounds. On a treadmill in a gym. Chopping wood. Lolling in a hammock. Washing dishes. God transmits on all those frequencies and, if it has been important to you, you have put some work into tuning your soul’s instrument to receive that voice clearly on your unique frequency. Maybe you’re like Kyle Toffey who prays while driving. I like to have a notebook when God shows up, but that’s me. I have never gotten anything done in unison prayer, with everyone screaming and lifting the roof off. Others have meaningful experiences with it.

Orwell said, at age 50 every man has the face he deserves. This is somewhat true in that you have become a vessel made up of your laugh lines and your tears. Both your deadly lies and your secret integrities unknown to others are in there as well. All your deeds, nuances and brutalities, gross motor and fine motor. Your money and how you came by it. These become your face and the frequency that connects you to heaven’s inspirations.

A violin held just right in the wind, will hum. You resonate perfectly, so that when you hear God’s voice, it is unmistakable to your heart, and only you can hear it. The gal next to you hears God’s voice on a different frequency, based on the unique molecules of her existence. You gradually develop a way to hear the unmistakable signature of God’s voiceprint on the particular frequency that you have arrived at in life.

All these years I have been talking to God in my prayers. But I should have done more listening instead. A lot more.

Ironically, receiving inspiration is unrelated to happiness or comfort. Some of the most gifted and accomplished artists and the most authentic saints endured lives of constant physical pain and unspeakable heartbreak. Worse is that it’s not even about being righteous because some who have done everything right are miserably poor, and there are others in big houses who have children with straight teeth, but who’s hearts are blacker than the inside of a goat. This part I’ve never figured out.

The only thing that can save me is perspective. Perspective is everything. You can either feel you are sitting in a dark room passively watching a television preacher preach and feeling detached, dissatisfied, even angry, or you can be inspired to the mountaintops  and find realworld revelations you can use in your life. You can either feel you are bowing to heaven before an offering table laden with your material wealth, or you can feel you are bowing to fruit. It’s your call.

Prayer-slash-meditation can result in instructing you to build an ark or go there and do that. But the best prayer changes your perspective A change in perspective alters your paradigm, puts more colors on your palette, enlarges your catcher’s mitt, so then you can feel confident to take your own initiative to build an ark or go there and do that.

I want to be a violin in the wind. Each person who is one in heart and mind with heaven, is also one in heart and mind with every other person in the world who is one in heart and mind with heaven. And heaven is meant to be here and now.

For the past month the weather has been bitter cold, sometimes snowing, or dropping chunks of ice, or doing it all at once with frozen wind diving down the backs of our collars like a screaming mother. Then suddenly today, still very January mind you, a big cartoon sun came out for a few hours and it did something to me. Temperatures hit the high 60s and it got my juices all boogered up in a good way. It was more than just a break in the weather or my mood. It changed the worn, cracked fan belt on my spirit. What’s more, the new weather helped me be aware of other favorable trends.

For example, for a week or so I have been sensing a cooling of tempers on some fronts. Simply being mindful of the delicate fragility of the Abel and Cain relationships in our lives is a good first step. Resisting one’s terrible urge to escort the other into the woods and whack him with the jawbone of an ass is an important second step. It’s a two-steps-forward-one-step-back kind of dance but I am sensing progress in me, in others. More sensing than seeing, and maybe the sun coming out today helped me peek around the corner. But it’s there, I tell you.

And speaking of the jawbone of an ass, I was talking with myself this morning. Another trend I am noticing is people getting in touch with their spiritual roots in a way they haven’t in quite a while. The opening lines of Divine Principle, “How is joy produced?” beckons to you and me. People want to rediscover what it was that made them drop everything and come running those many years ago. We want to reconnect with what makes us, us.

In the summer of ’74 I felt loved in Austin, Texas, and I was given an opportunity to give love back. Essential to this, God was involved, speaking and acting through others and through me. This is soooo not rocket science. It was deeply spiritual and deeply loving. It was all about the great news. In the afternoon we went to the park to find dinner guests. Members and leaders went together, arm-in-arm. We fed our guests a nice dinner, and for dessert, informed them that Christ had returned in their lifetime. This was reminiscent of brothers and sisters singing, dancing, praying, inspiring one another all night long in a too-small church in the Chungpa Dong neighborhood of Seoul in the mid-50s. It’s just down the street from the big church, that has also now become too small.

And so now we are moving into a newer bigger church in Seoul. If we speak boldly and truly believe what we tell others, and if there is love, this building also will quickly become too small. May all our churches be too small the very day the ribbon is cut.

It is human nature that the more complex things become, the more urgently we feel the need to weed the garden, yank out the brambles and grab hold of the roots of things that really matter. And so it is with our faith. When you are drowning, you realize how much extraneous crap in your life has no importance at all. On this last point, I ran into a friend I hadn’t seen in a long time. He has a strong spiritual orientation and he  had the hand tremors of Parkinson’s Disease and I asked him about it. He said, “Parkinson’s gave me my life back.” I didn’t have to ask what he meant.

Larry Moffitt
25 January, 2010

My favorite old man does combat with trees, or at least he used to. Tree smasher, embracer, bully fighter, eel biter, feeder of starving people.

The requirements of Providence are kitchen table conversation to him in a way they haven’t been since nineteenth century America. My favorite old man is a wizard. He owns the hallways of time, has the Prophet, peace be upon him, on speeddial.

He has lived long enough to get word that his siblings have died. Sunrises have been born, lived, snuffed and born again. As have heartbeats, longings and promises received. Each kindness, betrayal and repentance (sometimes from the same person in the course of one day) is scrubbed and filed, tucked away in rows of cabinets, each one labeled my best final plan. His wrinkles are honestly come by.

Only a beast more fearsome than the Beast of Time can unite a people incapable of unity. My favorite old man is the more gnarly beast who goes out of his way to kick over a cigar-chomper’s colored lawn jockey or tell a casino pit boss mine’s bigger than yours. Forever the tree smasher.

Even he cannot outlast the relentless piling up of years upon years, but he will beat the Beast of Time just the same by experiencing his final heartbeat hating no one.

He was not an ordinary man who became like this; he was always this way. What he did become that he wasn’t before, is a person who makes things so by declaring they are so.

Larry Moffitt
23 January, 2010

Father is right, all this stuff about sibling rivalry or son against father, is beside the point. It all begins and ends with God. Just as it always has. Providence belongs to God; the Will of God is God’s. It’s God’s universe and vision. God created man so we could grow to be his sons and daughters, his adult children. Eventually to be indistinguishable from God. It’s a glorious, loving plan, so sharing, so inclusive and it has never changed.

After you know this, the path becomes blindingly clear. God appoints his representative leader, that leader appoints someone, and he/she appoints someone and so on. That’s the path.

The rest is distraction that, unfortunately, ends up consuming most of our time. The rebel son, the errant disciple, the ministries of the other children. Ourselves, our denial, our innermost hearts. All these things are judged by the spiritual truth of that crystal clear path God has given us. In the end, spiritual truth is the only truth. In the face of spiritual truth, the time for talking is over. In the realms of the social and political, there is no truth. At least nothing absolute. There are only positions. That’s why rumor rules those spheres.

So we have to stay on the path. The crystal clear path given to us by God, judges us all. Actually it doesn’t even judge. It just sits there. We judge ourselves. Could it get anymore fair than that?

What should we think about the rebel son and errant disciples? We can love them, and we should. Have to in fact, because real families don’t excommunicate. But we can’t leave the path ourselves. We think of God as being absolute, and he is about most things. But also God allows for forgiveness, and that’s a safety net God thought up, but which doesn’t really have to exist in order for the universe to function. And yet it does. This is God’s love weighing in to mitigate God’s truth. The mother advising the father on the logic of nurturing, softens his stance.

A man steals $10,000 and squanders it on the usual stuff. After sinking to the depths of human degradation and growing weary of his job tuning pianos in whorehouses, he returns to the father, to the path, with a remorseful heart and hands back the nine dollars and eighty-one cents left over. The father takes the money, embraces the son, and pulls him back onto the path. That’s not exactly absolute. It’s something different. But it’s a very, very good thing, and it’s the only reason some of us have any bacon left.

But still, I should count on the path, rather than forgiveness. It will save wear and tear on everyone if I remember the path. Everything I do, every single breath I take, is for this path God gave me.

Larry Moffitt
23 January, 2010

All our babies caught occasional head colds and had stuffed shnozzes when they were little infantitos. But at that age, Taeko the Mom deemed them too young to use the squeeze bulb thingy to clear their nostrils. What Taeko did was hold his/her mouth closed, put her own mouth over the little guy’s nose and suck everything out. That’s when I knew she had sainthood in her.

Taeko and I have been together 30 years now (she hates it when I introduce her as “my first wife”). We are both becoming a sagging bag of bones, gray hair and “old people smell.” But she looks more beautiful to me now than she did when she was a head-turning cutie pie. Only God could have thought up a system like that.

Larry Moffitt (SanViejo)