Tuesday, August 15, 2017

Of Bogeymen and Saviors

Let us be clear about the profound immorality of those who love to use Karl Marx as the bogeyman of our time, while they pay lip service to the life and work of a Nazarene now called Jesus. 

Marx lived twice as long as Jesus and eventually died of pleurisy. He has been vilified by many for calling the workers of the world to unite against their exploiters. Jesus was murdered in his early thirties for calling out the inequities of his day and those who perpetuated it. 

All efforts to theologically sanitize his murder aside, the fact is Jesus was NAILED to a rough wooden cross which he was forced to carry on his back to the hill where he would be further brutalized. Like many who suffered a similar fate he was tortured while many looked on, and hung there till he was dead. His was the kind of fate that the theologian Bonhoeffer aptly described in his declaration that:  "When God calls a man, He bids him come and die." This for Bonhoeffer was "the cost of discipleship".

Those who have an interest in maintaining the status quo have always sought to demonize the voices that declare in favor of the poor and the disadvantaged. Popular Christianity is a reflection of the prevailing moral and political values in our society.  In this context those who act out in contravention of those values are invariably isolated and targeted for elimination. 

The false equivalencies that we witness from the mouths of the servants of this status quo are nothing more than attempts to muddle the consciousness of the uncritical among us. These preachers and politicians mouthing off about the assault on their fictitious  “Savior” by those who seek to address the persistent inequities in our society are for the most part just charlatans “making a living”.

And so the poor continue to perish while political opportunists and their lackeys spook the people with their visions of the ghost of Marx. 
And for this "Jesus wept". 

The struggle continues...

Friday, August 11, 2017

Anodynes

“Creative rhymes…
Potent anodynes…
Analgesic tones…
Somnifaciently affected sounds…
Words that heal…
In combinations we feel…
Anesthetic formulae
And stupefacient lies
Won’t change our need for realistic treatise…

Preachers and teachers
Singers and speakers…
Sermons and lessons
Songs and mass visions…
Come now before us
Sounding so spurious
Because they are devoid of real truths…

Thoughts obfuscated
On minds opiated
Will…finally…do us no good—”

Excerpt From: Roy Alexander Graham. “Of Scattered Seed and Broken Souls.” Figtree Enterprises, Inc., 2012. iBooks.
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Immortal

Forever
Like a wind traveling through time
Across many stages…
From everlasting till now…we are…
And will be still
Through all the ages…of time…

And forever
Like a raindrop moving through space…
Returning again to its origin as air…
Through heat and cold
Becoming water
Again…and again

Forever and forever
We are like the wind
Becoming clouds
That fall as rain
To return again
To its form as spirit…

We are the immortals…of the Immortal
Which was…
Who is…
That will be
Forever

Excerpt From: Roy Alexander Graham's  “In My Element.” Figtree Enterprises, Inc., 2012. 

I Saw God Today…

( Reflections on life from a place of wonderful simplicity in Jamaica … years ago) I saw God today In simplicity of life In the hopefulness ...