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