Into Your hands I commit my spirit
Because I won’t endure this lie
This prison system cannot be True
Built on the illusion that we must die
Death’s nothing more or less than a doorway
Or when a movie changes scenes
Different characters embody roles
But there’s just One Dreamer of these dreams
Yet somehow we’ve conceived to deny this
Even though it makes no sense
In the beginning there was always One
And there only has been ever since.
I struggle everyday to express this
To live wholly in Your call
Knowing that I’m denying One
If I can’t see You in All
This is the fruit of religious life
Bonding body and mind to soul
Forsaking the separate self that never was
And abandoning false control
This is when the journey ends
We’ve found the only thing worth finding
And teaching each other is no longer done
We simply trust in Your reminding
This is what I live this Life for
Every other way must be undone
My spirit in the hands of the All in All
Completes what never had begun
There is a path that all flesh must take
We’ve always known this from the start
It’s the very awareness of this fact
That reveals the nature of our heart
For the spirit of immortality
Wrestles with the ways of form
Tempting us with corporeality
As if it were the norm
There are hearts that surrender to this way
As long as we are here
While other hearts struggle with time itself
Certain that eternity is near
The struggling heart will not surrender
It crams eternity into space
Living life with all it has
And in its wake leaves waves of grace
It knows the way that flesh must go
But it and flesh are not the same
And on that day when the two must part
It receives that which is its to gain
The poem above was written by request for the Rev. Bruce MacKenzie Pastor Emeritus of the church I serve in Boulder, CO. “The way of all flesh” was a saying Bruce loved to say when referring to anything that is temporary in this world. At one visit I had with him before his passing he said to me, “Soon I will be going the way of all flesh, but you and I know that is nothing to be concerned with. So no tears.” I said to him, “Well we teach that Jesus wept when Lazarus died and he was just about to resurrect him, so I cry when you leave.” He laughed at that and changed the subject. Bruce’s body might have gone the way of all flesh. But though the outer man is beyond our seeing, the inner man remains eternally abiding.
There’s a world we all are living in
But not everyone can see
A World of eternal spaciousness
Where everyone is free
Inside that world is another world
Where people choose to live a lie
“Special people”claim to know the Truth
And teach the “forgetting” we can die
Some of those people know the Truth
And twist it tight for so called gain
Telling us that we can’t get along
And that the Other causes pain
Their clarion call is “SAVE YOURSELF”
So that’s what many of us try to do
We can’t see it’s just a cattle call
And all they want to hear is “MOOOO”
They have no purpose if we’re not scared
“Can’t you see that there’s a threat?”
They know that we will sell our souls
Only as long as we’re fearing death
They tell you they’re here to protect us
That’s the job for which they’re paid
In exchange you can focus on other things
But you lose consciousness in the trade
The world of lies that we think is real
Does not objectively exist
Like a picture of a sumptuous meal
On which no one can subsist
Meanwhile in the eternal world
One is the Truth that always reigns “divided houses” do not exist
And there is no loss or gain
No one’s seeking for the joy in life
For Joy is the Cause of Life itself
And value isn’t used as we use it here
Since everything springs from eternal wealth
There also is never a use for Welcome
Because there’s never a time that we aren’t here
We can tell ourselves that we’ve gone away
But to Truth we’ve never disappeared
Like children with their hands on eyes
Who think they’re unseen when they can’t see
Here we can choose to chain ourselves
But that doesn’t make us less than free
We’re only bound by the limits that we project
Our own judgments become our jail
But our sentence is never for our entire life
Because the Truth always prevails
They told him “put your hands up.”
He did and that day he died.
Innocence put to death.
His crime was he complied
The authorities are the ones who killed him.
He must have “fit the right description”
They called him a troublemaker.
Never mind it was a fiction
It wasn’t just the way he looked
It was also the way he saw
He loved outside the rules
To them it violated law
He was out with his friends
No one knows what he did wrong
But they came for him with their weapons
They already had them drawn
Though unarmed and non-threatening,
They started drawing near
To me it’s quite ironic
That they were filled with so much fear
What were they afraid of–
The stories they were told?
“You better watch out with a guy like him.”
“He’s been known to lose control.”
“Have you seen the crowd he hangs with?”
“Let’s look at all the facts.”
“A gang leader if there was ever one.”
“He should have never crossed the tracks.”
“He dines with people known as criminals.”
“He’s friends with women of the night.”
“Believe me he’s not innocent’.”
“Something is just not right.”
That’s the kind of messaging
That makes those like him such a threat
No one ever gets him And we still haven’t seen him yet
That’s why still today we kill him
In the bodies we see as least
And yet many of us say we follow him
I thought he was called “The Prince of Peace”
He died so we could stop this
But still we choose to pay the price
Because whenever we kill the innocent
We are always killing Christ.
No matter what one thinks about Christ, we know what innocence is and what it isn’t in the depths of our being. When we deny that knowledge, we deny all that can be right in this world.