Reply to Michael Bales post

like these Quaker querys. Some of them require more questions I think. Here are some of my Daydreams and hopes but the short answer is I don't know:
1.)Q:What is holding you back from surrendering all?

A: is it not self will run riot? I am selfish, self-centered. I'm all I ever think about! Perhaps surrendering this is impossible!! Perhaps that's as i should accept it as a place to begin. It certainly is current experience!! Program I follow in Alcoholics Anonymous encourages us to work with others and to reach out to the alcoholic who still suffers. I've seen this create a community. The problem we have in common is loneliness... And discouragement. another thing we have in common is hitting bottom. When one has literally faced down death one has a cusp of understanding to bridge the gap between person and person I think. It gives one's testimony the weight of empathy. We are encouraged in the program that this reaching out is what keeps us sober and Serene. One must, of course, experience this for oneself to know it has any effect whatsoever to relieve the intense craving and insanity which being addicted to a poisonous substance is all about.

2.)
Q:What keeps you clinging to the false promises of empire?

A: I am not sure where to begin!! I never knew anything else but these promises, and the propaganda that they are true, I have swallowed since childhood. First I think I've got to unlearn a lot of this crap!! I am only beginning to understand the depth of deception coming down in these days of Revelation. The short answer to this question why I cling  is  I fear the loss  of  a sense of security and privilege of  the upper hand of dominance yes. Right, which comes down to having power to assumed privilege, to keep things in the status quo. Once that power is challenged one is in a world of hurt MHO. One has to move through the changes that come in accepting grief and loss. The first stage and this grief and loss process is denial. The second stage is anger. The next stage is bargaining. One would do anything to stay out of the next excruciatingly painful stage I think , depression: one's experienced companions along the road warn of full Mourning one has never known. This is what they tell me is included in the journey to accepting one's powerlessness over alcohol but also in all one's affairs. Is this what Jesus came to liberate us from...?

 3.)
Q:What are the people, places, things, and ideas that you still haven’t surrendered to God?

A: I take a look around me and see that all I possess or think I possess are gifts I have stolen. There is a paradox too deep here for me to comprehend with the little brainspace that I have been gifted with. That must have been intentional!! To be the fool and the fooled at the same time!! I am asked to surrender all and yet cannot surrender any of it!! So I go on... So it be... I assume more will be revealed... It's supposed to go on for as long as it does... You know... from Glory / to Glory... In the program I follow they suggest that when you don't know what to do don't do anything... It's not a cop out... I hope!!

4.)
Q:When will you finally enter through the narrow gate, becoming a brother or sister of Jesus?

A: I'll answer this with a question... What is your answer? When and how will you, Micah Bales, do such if you're not "there" already? In other words when you get there what does there look like? I could use a clue!!


We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Little giddens
~T. S. Eliot

💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔
Little Gidding

www.columbia.edu/itc/history/winter/w3206/edit/tseliotlittlegidding.html

no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year.

Between melting and freezing
The soul's sap quivers.

This is the spring time
But not in time's covenant.

Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable Zero summer?

If you came at night like a broken king,

If you came by day not knowing what you came for,

It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone.

And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion

You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.

And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living

Never and always

Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.

The death of hope and despair,
This is the death of air.


The parched eviscerate soil
Gapes at the vanity of toil,
Laughs without mirth.
This is the death of earth.

Water and fire deride
The sacrifice that we denied.

Water and fire shall rot
The marred foundations we forgot,
Of sanctuary and choir.

While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin
Over the asphalt where no other sound was

I was still the same,
Knowing myself yet being someone other

Too strange to each other for misunderstanding,
In concord at this intersection time

"I am not eager to rehearse
My thoughts and theory which you have forgotten.
These things have served their purpose: let them be.
So with your own, and pray they be forgiven
By others, as I pray you to forgive
Both bad and good.

Between two worlds become much like each other,
So I find words I never thought to speak
In streets I never thought I should revisit
When I left my body on a distant shore.

Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us
To purify the dialect of the tribe
And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight,
Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort.

First, the cold fricton of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and sould begin to fall asunder.

Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.

And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of things ill done and done to others' harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.

From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer."

Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life

This is the use of memory:
For liberation - not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past.

love of a country
Begins as an attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from.

And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph.

A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.

here, now, always--
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)

💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔

I like these Quaker querys. Some of them require more questions I think. Here are some of my Daydreams and hopes but the short answer is I don't know:
1.)Q:What is holding you back from surrendering all?

A: Isn't it self will run riot? I am selfish, self-centered. I'm all I ever think about! Perhaps surrendering this is impossible!! Perhaps that's as i should be. It's acceptance is a place to begin. It certainly is current experience!! Program I follow in Alcoholics Anonymous encourages us to work with others and to reach out to the alcoholic who still suffers. I've seen this create a community. The problem we have in common is loneliness... And discouragement. Another thing we have in common is hitting bottom. When one has literally faced down death one has hold of a cusp of understanding to bridge the gap between suffering person and suffering person I think. It can give one's testimony the weight of empathy. We are encouraged in the program that this reaching out is what keeps us sober and Serene. One must, of course, experience this for oneself to know it has any effect whatsoever to relieve the intense craving and insanity which being addicted to a poisonous substance is all about.

2.)
Q:What keeps you clinging to the false promises of empire?

A: I am not sure where to begin!! I never knew anything else but these promises, and the propaganda that they are true, I have swallowed since childhood.
First I think I've got to unlearn a lot of this crap!! I am only beginning to understand the depth of deception coming down in these days of Revelation. The short answer to this question why I cling is I fear the loss of  a sense of security of  the upper hand of dominance to enforce my version of Right, which comes down to having power to assumed privilege, to keep things in the status quo/ in my favor. Once that power is challenged one is in a world of hurt MHO. One has to move through the changes that come in accepting grief and loss. The first stage in this grief and loss process is denial. The second stage is anger. The next stage is bargaining. One would do anything to stay out of the next excruciatingly painful stage I think , depression: one's experienced companions along the road warn of full Mourning one has never known. This is what they tell me is included in the journey to accepting one's powerlessness over alcohol but also in all one's affairs. Is this what Jesus came to liberate us from...?
The program assures us the process, though painful, is progress not perfection!!
 3.)
Q:What are the people, places, things, and ideas that you still haven’t surrendered to God?

A: I take a look around me and see that all I possess or think I possess are gifts I have stolen. There is a paradox too deep here for me to comprehend with the little brainspace that I have been gifted with. That must have been intentional!! To be the fool and the fooled at the same time!! I am asked to surrender all and yet cannot surrender any of it!! So I go on... So it be... I assume more will be revealed... It's supposed to go on for as long as it does... You know... from Glory / to Glory... In the program I follow they suggest that when you don't know what to do don't do anything... It's not a cop out... I hope!!

4.)
Q:When will you finally enter through the narrow gate, becoming a brother or sister of Jesus?

A: I just now noticed the question assumes or I will!! It's asking me how I will do it? I'll answer this with a question... What is your answer? When and how will you, Micah Bales, do such if you're not "there" already? In other words when you get there what does there look like? I could use a clue!!


We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Little giddens
~T. S. Eliot