o god, you pierce me with many arrows. i wish they were 'arrows', but no, they are darts poisonous and cruel. i die a thousand times. why must i consume you? you bring me madness and death. you rip away the veil of this false world and show me things my eyes do not understand. faces, bodies, blacknesses, so close, bumping against me, brushing past me, a celestial highway, but chaos, movement in all directions and none. i fee black velvet, purple streams, faces human, but too large, i see too much o lord. yet i ask for more and more.
today i suffered greatly. i was so amped that my mind could not stay on a topic for more than a few seconds. i could not speak to people without screaming or being cutting and cruel. i lay down but no rest came to me. the entire day was a loss as far as my sacred duties go. i barely could read the psalms. i consumed the body of christ and, for a few moments, while bowing low before the tabernacle, i had peace. otherwise. i am in a pain that i cannot describe. why bother. no one will understand except perhaps for other initiates. and they are few. even my wife, while a mystic, even a prophet in her own way, is no initiate. gabriel my son is too young to understand these sublte but crushing emotions.
i am keeping up my physical disciplines. but that is all i can do. i suppose i am being prepard for something great. and though i am bowed down low, my head is held high. so i can bear this new weight, but my newly empowered shoulders, my new back and torso glorious, my new legs of bone and sinew and steel and marble, they can hold this new weight. yet, it is great. and without careful attention, the tender flesh will become ruined.
o god. i am fully in your world. yet i have lost none of my intentions for this physical, terran world. it is just that it is so vague to me. and the great dance of strangeness is more real than the terran world. i sleep not because sleep only makes me mad. it is only by waking that i can keep sane. yet, yet, i do not know. perhaps the gospel is a lie too great to be told. perhaps we should simply tell the people what the exoteric church tells them: "God is a vending machine: pray and he will give." of what benefit is this pain, this torture, this ecstasy? i am more mad than when i began. i am more beautiful, with greater power, but the sadness and weight and ignominy of my lowly state is not a path anyone would choose without years of the Divine's subtle mind-breaking love.
o god. you also are mad. and i still cannot determine why the world is the way it is. yet, i suppose it is your nature. we are born in screams and tears and blood and feces and hideous odors and yet more tears. so it is with the second, third, fourth, fifth . . . births--each more hideous and transformative than the last. i have become great as i had prayed. and now, my god, i am on a path that i cannot flinch from. i no longer even wish to. not only because even to hesitate would mean pain, agony, death. but because you have transformed me into a creature that i was not before.
it is as they portray the wizards of old----they are ancient with years beyond count, they wander the land helping the weak, remembering the innocent, and making use of the puissant as so many toy soldiers to achieve their globe-wrenching ends. they topple regimes, the take castles, they inspire love. all for ends that they no longer bother to understand.
