They say you never forget how to ride a bike…

Still, it’s been a thousand years since I worked on a blog. I can’t even remember the right verbs for it.

Everybody worth reading is using Substack these days, but at two in the morning (or three, or whatever time it was when I decided to go for this), I didn’t have the energy to read through a new user agreement.  I’m sure it’s fine. But, my paranoia is highest at o-dark-thirty, and I’ve read Doctor Faustus too many times, I suppose. Fearing a font size four commandeering of my creative soul and eternal state to Mephistopheles, I clicked on the same platform I used way back in the dark ages, bought another URL, and signed up for a monthly plan.

Monthly because I’m not committing. But today, I need to blog like an optimist from Timeline 2000.

Mostly, I want to keep up with friends. Real friends.

I’m tired of such sacred connections being dependent upon platforms that offer free community until they cost us everything—our sanity, our souls, our nation.

The disadvantage to blogging is proclamation instead of conversation. I dug around the web looking for old-school forums. AOL chat rooms? Passenger pigeons? What dry bones might we resurrect to touch fingertips across the miles?

The loneliness is a deeper pain than the fear of terrors to come.

In 2020, I had a dream that I was falling down a deep well. The sides were overgrown with ominous plants, snarls of ivy and all manner of serpentine vegetation. As I fell, I began to see faces emerge from the rock behind the leaves. Faces of people I knew, but these were distorted, twisted, horrifying.

You know that sensation, likely. I knew him. I knew her.

I thought I did.

A few nights ago, I couldn’t sleep, thinking about the rise of “religion” in America. I was choking on the irony of a“Truth Project” crowd parading objective truth (in watered down, pseudo-academic form) utterly abandoning objective truth.

Sure, I saw gaps in those systems long before they crumbled.

Still, I believed that underneath all the Temu academia, integrity would prevail. I thought mistakes were innocent but hearts were good.

Realizing I was mistaken about this has been the greatest destabilizing force of my past decade. Here was a quest for power that paraded as allegiance to truth.

I still can’t deconstruct properly, though. The worst of this disappointment still rings true to what I was taught about humans by humans who ended up fulfilling their own claims.

It all fits.

Besides, I can’t deny Jesus. I know Him in a way that is similar to the way I know icy air on a cold morning or the pulse of the ocean. He is integrated into my blood experientially as well as cognitively. I’ve tried running away. I’ve tried shutting down.

I’ve given up, despaired, defied, crumbled, spewed, railed, wailed, broken every rule I could reach. And yet, no matter how dark my own soul gets, I’ve found that attempting to remove the lens of His indwelling would strip away my ability to perceive anything at all.

He’s in all the science.

Hear me, I don’t mean the proof-driven science that serves cultural power instead of curiosity. Not those maddening university debates and whatnot.

I mean the private work of investigation, touching, inhaling, learning, discovering. The plowshare science not the sword science. God is all up in the plowshares.

Every time I’ve studied biology, I’ve felt worship in my heart. I’ve found indication that God is poetically, symphonically involved in the mechanics of our world, and in this I’ve found a richer grace and tenderness—and also greater mystery and severity—than I have ever found in the binary of strict theological or strict humanistic insight.

I hear religion is growing, and I feel no joy about it. I know what the claim means. It is referring to a mystical disconnectedness from reality. The gnostic divide. The “faith” that can be so easily commandeered by evil men for evil purposes.

That has nothing to do with the the hymnal of the discoverable world.

It’s strange that Saturn does it for me.

Poetically, mythically, historically, I should be a Venus gal. (Venus Coelestis vs. Venus vulgaris/naturalis seems like it should be the tension in my heart.)

Or it should be warring Mars with all his passion and recklessness.

Or it should be Jupiter in all its swirling glory. The supreme—I want to say Platonic, even—ender of all sentences. The giant IS.

But it’s Saturn.

I’ve never loved Saturn. But there he hangs, close in the sky, like a Modigliani sculpture. Those subtle, nascent rings.

I saw them again a few days ago. They bring me to my knees.

I’ve always trusted the scientists were right about Saturn. But to look through a lens and confirm what I had hoped for without knowing it, there’s something about the eternal state in this. I see this Saturn via the tools of science—and instinctively worship. No gap. No effort. I see and feel the fingers of God spinning the dust round that massive globe and know God is and that God is a wonder.

My soul can be satisfied with nothing else. I’ve tried the rest.

I feel rage at the charlatans.

We have the tools to decipher the hymnal that spreads deep into the cellular level and wide into the heavens, to run our fingers over the embroidery stitches of the Creator, but power is all we think about.

A battle between two sports teams, the mystics and the humanists. No thanks.

I’m lonely. I’m homesick. There’s more than all this. That’s not an attempt to proselytize. It’s just what’s on my mind.

This post is haphazard. I’m not going to clean it up.

Love to all.