YOU HAVE TO LEAVE.
Sometimes you have to leave to grow
and you just need to know—
the journey will take you far from the hearth
and approval
and acceptance
and family and friend
through danger and mithbar and hunger and hurt.
And you’ll be all alone.
The mass of humanity will not choose
to go or grow with you— you have to lose.
so just name that fact inside
and then desert night and lion prowl
that leave you hiding from element and animal
simply come as no surprise.
But you will see a universe everyone else misses.
You will dream new dreams
well off the map of the mundane,
of the people who you truly love but seem
content to never leave Ur for Canaan.
Folks who, will never hear God in the now
and step forward into new possibilities how:
You see, most people try to tell you what to think and do
—they want to have their voyage through you
because they are too scared to leave
the city, the myth, the local cult.
The stories they were given when they were eight
have left them too afraid to travel,
and so they settle into a similar fate—
of comfortable status quo
and common conception.
But you know that nothing divine was ever so common.
In Avram’s day, it was common to carry your gods.
It’s true. You can see old house idols today.
Go to Chicago, to the Oriental Museum
and in the second collection
you will start to see-em—
stone and wood,
some four inches tall,
some two feet tall,
all infinitely short
of the gods they try to name.
But it worked for them for a while just the same.
Avram heard a different divine voice
and it told him for you there is only one choice—
You have to leave…
Because all these people will clutch
house idols that don’t really do all that much
and they will never see a cosmic Hand
who carries you around and makes you a statue
of divinity that actually matters— a human!
one that actually blesses the house of the world
one that actually does justice
one that actually never
stops creating and unifying
and one that laughs at religious limitation.
Because those are the borders of your old land.
It was human religion,
collective gyration with no imagination,
that has not blessed nations
and can’t speak pidgin.
As one sage says…sometimes
you need to change out the wineskin
and after you drink that…do it all over again.
Hang with me now, this is bigger than you and me
this is about the actual meta-verse
and I want you to see:
The long-tail of religio-culture,
and lore read literally
has produced a grab bag of house idols…
that don’t really do anything and leave us idle.
Is the text divine or does it try to name divinity?
Yes. That’s the question. It’s what I mean.
The sacred writ.
The sacrament.
The calendar.
The songs and convocation.
These things can serve a purpose
when they help people name divinity
in ways that help human unity.
But the alter ego of the sacred is idolatry—
to replace the divine itself
with the image,
the name,
the practice,
the dogma the tenet— and place it on a shelf.
When we all know intuitively
that God is too big to name
and evolving just like we,
if not in essence,
in how we try to present divinity.
How do you known when
the thing that names starts to replace it—
the signa for the res—
People are migrating like Avram.
hearing something new and far off
and they are leaving, leaving, leaving
your civilized, cleaned up City-of-God-stations
for the wild and brave new world
of possibility and re-creation.
And so the divine name is unafraid—
God is the moving target par excellence.
And the Spirit is sneaks.
Avram had to go when he heard her speak—
to new names and destination
for the sake of all peoples of every nation.
Do you hear the same voice?
If you do, you will not rest until you leave.
You have to leave.
There is no other choice.