Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit Summary (Take 2) #wcagls
Tamara read my unpublished post from Day #1 and advised me to sleep on it. She said that while she agreed with it all, it wasn’t edifying. And she is probably right.
So I heed the advice of my wise wife and leave draft #1 safely saved and unpublished perhaps to arrive on the net another day but likely not.
At any rate, here is take #2.
First, I really am curious what was going on at Hillsong 20 years ago. Whatever it was I bet it was very biblical and therefore timeless. It sure produces good people and I hope something similar unfolds at PAC.
Second, I thought of this poem often during the day as I tried to make sense of what I was hearing and experiencing.
“Walking Around” It so happens I’m tired of being a man. The smell of a hairdresser’s has me crying and wailing. It so happens I’m tired of my feet and toenails, Still it would be a pleasure I don’t want to go on being just a root in the shadows, I don’t want to be so much misfortune, This is why, Monday, the day, is burning like petrol, And it drives me to certain street corners, certain damp houses, There are sulphur-coloured birds and repulsive intestines, I pass by calmly, with eyes and shoes,Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)
It so happens I enter clothes shops and theaters,
withered, impenetrable, like a swan made of felt
sailing the water of ashes and origins.
I only want release from being stone or wool.
I only want not to see gardens and businesses,
merchandise, spectacles, lifts.
my hair and my shadow.
It so happens I’m tired of being a man.
to scare a lawyer with a severed lily
or deal death to a nun with a poke in the ear.
It would be good
to go through the streets with an emerald knife
and shout out till I died of cold.
vacillating, extended, shivering with dream,
down in the damp bowels of earth,
absorbing it, thinking it, eating it every day.
I don’t want to go on as a root or a tomb,
a subterranean tunnel, just a cellar of death,
frozen, dying in pain.
when it sees me arrive with my prison features,
and it screeches going by like a scorched tire
and its footsteps tread hot with blood towards night.
towards hospitals where skeletons leap from the window,
to certain cobbler’s shops stinking of vinegar,
to alleyways awful as abysses.
hanging from doorways of houses I hate,
there are lost dentures in coffee pots
there are mirrors
that ought to have cried out from horror and shame,
there are umbrellas everywhere, poisons and navels.
with anger, oblivion,
pass by, cross through offices, orthopedic stores,
and yards where clothes hang down from wires:
underpants, towels and shirts weeping
slow guilty tears.
