Formed of Stone

When Arthur pulled the sword out of the stone to become king ... he became someone else in an instant ... because he overcame stone. This has remained one of the images of my life. Arthur was in charge of the stone though many had tried to set the sword free, it took it as a teenager. There was a place for ancient wisdom which is where Merlin comes from but ancient wisdom is only worthwhile after the impetuous acts of the young.

That's why I've tried to keep my "school boy heart."

Many years ago I wrote this song that I could never quite finish. "Sir Galahad and Sir Lancelot, sailed off the end of the world. Looking for adventure another Camelot, just more dreams to unfurl ..."

And that is me. Or it's who I want to be. Sailing off the end of the world looking for new adventures should be the way we live. Once you've touched Camelot ... or love or perfection or holiness ... well then you so want it again. So once is never enough so you keep looking cause new dreams need places to grow.

"But Guinevere is sleeping now and Merlin's simply disappeared. And Arthur went and stuck the sword back in the stone ... when will the Holy Grail appear?"

That last ling about the Holy Grail came from my dear friends Mitch and Dedra. I could never figure it out by myself. They did it for me. In the end, it's about the search for what we want ... who we are ... what we want really.

When I wrote the lines though, I was at the Jefferson Street Baptist Chapel and doing radical stuff. Homeless people lived in Sunday School rooms, Baptismal pools were their bathtubs, young kids from across the city of Louisville came and brought this energy and five little old ladies were the glue that held us all together. We were there at the beginning of homelessness, AIDS, the crumbling of access to the American Health Care System ... and like the young Arthur believed with everything in us that it doesn't have to this way.

But the stoned Southern Baptist faith didn't allow for such activity. They wanted the sword back in the stone ... NOW! ... God Dammit! And that is how I learned how religion is run.

It struck me as the height of hypocrisy as the first thing that Jesus did after he was killed and buried is have someone "roll away the stone" so he could get out. No that's wrong ... I suspect he did it himself. "Ain't no stone gonna hold me down," he said when he got up. "I've had enough of dead. I'm gonna live!"

And it amazes me all of the ways that people chose the stone. Stones are heavy things, blocking your way, hiding the sun, keeping the dead in their tombs. It's funny to me that graveyards have tombstones that seem to say "The stone won. You had a life once but ... stones win in the end. There's just out engraved faces here. Everyone else is buried."

What stones do of course is keep things the way that they are. They hedge you in. They force you to see things only one way. They are status quo ... the way it's always been ... "One way!"

One of my favorite pokes at the hypocrisy of religious rules is from Monty Python's "Life Of Brain". It is the stoning scene ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIaORknS1Dk ) where an old man is being stoned to death because he told his wife one night "that halibut was good enough for Jehovah." You're not supposed to say the name of God in Jewish religion so they stone him (well, the women dressed as men stone the enforcer of the rules in the end ... but it is hilarious and I love it). And it accurately reflect the ways of institutional religion. Which is why I love Bar Church.

But I know a lot of people who live under rocks. They're like flounders swimming along the bottom of the sea with two eyes on one side of their face because they only see things one way.

"We all started off as sand and dust," a friend wrote me last night, "I wonder what our bonding agent is?"

That's the question right? What is it that holds us together? What makes each of us ... us?

For a lot of people it is the stone that forms us. We grow up to be immoveable rocks. Sometimes we're thrown by others but most of the time we just do it the way its always been done. Live up to the expectations of everyone else.

Well I don't believe in any of that. Ask my Mom.

Stones are to be rolled away so that we can be born again ... and become something other than who we are ... to have the opportunity to become what we were created to be.

Sure ... sometimes crucifixions are involved ... marriages, careers, faiths, politics, religions ...

Those can be some pretty dark times.

But then the stone is rolled away ...

And sunshine burst into the once dark caves.