IRNF – novel excerpt

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Like I said before, we are a farming people, so we keep a farming Jesus. Accordingly, he shows up different for everyone. I don’t get out much, but I have heard telling of a man called Christ dressed in an Armani suit wearing sheened leather shoes. Animal leather. Alligator. Three piece pastels and torn jeans and wife beater. Overalls. Big and small. I mean fat, I’ve seen a picture of some Christ characters up in Canada, a big big brown faced man with a patch beard and short cropped black curls. The man told us he was clay. He said he was nothing but a branch. The way. A path. He turned into an old man before an empire’s eyes, and died better than anyone ever had. Telling stories. Supposedly, he kept chickens as a kid. Preferred their company over sheep. There is a myth we rarely mention, of him calling Judas down to his side, and whispering something dramatic and revelatory in his ear, as was his way. A kiss on the cheek. Soft, raspy, tumbling speech, bubbling along the crevices of his lips like a creek. No one knows what words, of course, but this whisper was in the record. He demanded they write down everything. And they did. Preacher pulls out the new testament from time to time, but it is rare. In there you find books from all sorts of interesting people. Judas has one. Mary wrote two. Peter, the rock, never got one down, but Joseph, Jesus’s father, wrote a stout tome of lyrical poems.

“Tomatoes. Are you listening? Red womb of orange seed. Loose tower of viney green. Trellised tall. For they would surely fall. From the weight of their own progeny.”

The minister was on about tomatoes again.

Does being good mean being uncompromising?

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Is part of Jesus’s “goodness” the idea that he was in a position to refuse the tropes and expectations and standards of his times, of the career he was attempting? Saying you’re the ‘Son of God’. Performative, highly selective healing and even further-fetched miraculous stories beyond the reproach of anything resembling proof. Not lies, necessarily, more like exceptions, compromise. Does being good mean being uncompromising?

Thinking about this, what if Jesus’s philosophy, his rebellion, was not so much the widespread army of the poor at his back, spiritually content and eternity filling their heads, which did in fact prove to be the most difficult culture for a Roman to tax. What if his ministry was a Trojan Horse of sorts? Does that not explain Christianity’s impact on society ever since its inspiration’s life and times? How it successfully and nearly single handedly toppled an empire, a couple actually, fractured Europe, all while being simultaneously a prized tool and the eventual downfall of every government organization that ever adopted it. 

Christianity may not be a belief system, a religion, it could be a curse. The final act of an innocent man murdered in the public eye, declaring he will now be the ghostly conscience haunting us all the rest of our lives. Why a rich person would bring the curse of Christianity down onto their house, willingly, I do not know. Even Jesus warned against it. Time and half recorded history has shown whatever bait Christ provides is thoroughly fishhooked. 

Designed to ensnare and incapacitate the Roman.

Section from Fathers and Sons: An Appalachian Adventure

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

“Jeremiah can. He believes the church is keeping people from going after God. We’re ruining Jesus’ philosophy by presenting him as untouchable, unrealistic, embodied in sacred language, with you, pastors, up on a pulpit preaching and us, sheep, facing forward. These long diatribes about sanctuary design. Mobile benches and picnic tables. Every service a different array. Giant stone fireplaces with rocking chairs in front, and the pastor walks around serving food and refilling cups. More than doors, he wants open windows, giant tents, walls that roll up and fire-pits in fields and secondary sermons, conversations and getting lost in the woods. He wants church equal parts daycare, assisted living, community rehabilitation, mixed with everything national parks and campgrounds already are. He says there will be gardens and goats and chickens and the church, an immortal food source for community.

He says we got it wrong. Jesus worshiped us. He died to feed us, to strengthen us, called himself our lamb. Jeremiah says Jesus was communicating to him specifically, for him to hear these ideas. He says every true Christian feels like that, like Christ specifically lived and died to transmit a powerful, revolutionary message direct to their heart. To shake us awake, not to worship, but to be the new Jesus in the world.

John, he says this enough that I remember it all. He says there aren’t enough crosses. If we all walk toward love with determination, knowing we will likely be persecuted in the process, there aren’t enough crosses, aren’t enough Romans, for all of us. As long as good people are afraid to suffer for goodness, good people will be props for bad people. He says all this to our therapist. And the man just nods. Nods and doesn’t respond.

John, I know I’ve said too much, but your son told me God put a shroud over him, and he doesn’t know what people hear and see when they look at him, the truth is masked, they don’t actually hear his words, or see his face. He calls it his veil. He calls himself the loneliest man in existence. He says, with full confidence, he’s never been happy. Not once. He knows happiness exists, he’s seen it in our faces. But believes he’s never felt it himself.

How can someone say that, and think it’s true?”

Someone You Call You

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

I often tell myself, they see the world through their own eyes. They lay themselves down at night. We judge how a window views solely through a filter: distance. But when it comes to ourselves, there is none. We can not without consequence deem ourselves unworthy, as if we’re in the center of an ocean in a sinking boat with a spare one to climb into handy. For lack of the existence of a better word, you’re stuck. With you. I’m not. Love your enemy, as you love yourself. Thank you Professor Jesus. Let’s say this another way. The people who are good at chess play both sides of the table. Enemy is a storytelling device, a two dimensional rendering of a far more dangerous four dimensional threat. You are someone’s enemy. Often, more importantly, your enemy, is someone else’s you. Thinking. 

Emotions, empathy, if this isn’t a human generated wireless exchange of energy, I don’t know what could be. But just because you look at someone and feel something does not mean that feeling has anything to do with that someone. It’s you. Your brain looks out at a larger world it can not control and paints in the blank, dimly lit spaces with you, your worst fears, hidden desires. Other people are fun-house mirrors, they shrink the mountains in our eyes into scarce specks of dust inside their own. And through that window, distance, you glimpse you in the face of someone you call you.

You sentence them to death. 

Because deepest, within each tiny heart cell that beats same as your heart,
you sentence yourself. 

Revenge just feels right in way justice never does.

Because revenge has distance in it. 

And justice only exists inside of us.

Gospel Salad – excerpt from an in-progress novel I call ‘If Rome Never Fell’

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

“Mr. Parker, has anyone checked out King Jesus Loves His Mustard Greens?”
“Yes Beth, I’m sorry, it’s out.”
“How about Spicy Kale and the Kingdom of God?” Parker shakes his head solemnly. “It was a long shot. Okay, I’ve seen it a hundred times, but, what about Gospel Salad?”
“Yep. That’s a good one.” Parker stands from where he was seated in the bend of a horseshoe shaped set of tables, in the rotund church library. The ceiling was twenty feet up, and the shelves climbed that high, handmade ladders on hammer wrought rails encircling and keeping guard. “When the cucumber-
“Mary the mother of King Jesus.”
“Sings The Ballad of Garlic Oil it makes me laugh every time, no matter how many times I’ve seen it. And that’s a lot.” Parker has selected the thin case that holds the film, specifically designed to resemble the sleeve of a slim old pamphlet style book. The bottom shelf was children’s education and entertainment, right behind his seat, down low, almost hidden.
“That’s a serious song.”
“Really? It’s all about how garlic isn’t really good though, I thought it was ironic. Because garlic is delicious.”
“No it isn’t Parker. Garlic in certain things helps make those things delicious. But no one eats garlic alone. It isn’t good on its own. That’s what the song is about. How God makes decisions to put things that don’t taste good into other things because all in all it makes everything more delicious. But if you ate a handful of garlic all on its own, before you had ever had it in a soup, you might leave it out of every recipe forever on afterward.”
“Well said little Beth. You’ve learned me a thing this morning.”
“Thanks,” she offered casually, the young girl, no older than thirteen, behind a flip of shiny dirty blond hair and gone.

What are we feeding to these kids, Parker thought.

To Pieces

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

There is more to the present than a gift.
Wrapped in red gold green paper.
It sits.
Everything.
The whole universe.
As long so you don’t know what is in it. It is everything.
The greatest gift there ever was.
Only as long as you don’t know what it is.
What’s under the tree isn’t Christmas.
There isn’t a tree alive big enough.
They were all cut to the ground years ago.
No one ever leaves a present wrapped too long.
Which is why all the great gifts are gone.

It’s hard to wrap a song.
Or a poem. Or a thought.
Or both of them. They’re odd.
Loose in the corners and dense in the center
and the tape just won’t stay on.
I appreciate the thought.
But was hoping for something to tear open.
Or even at least a pressed paper box.
I know that’s asking a lot.
But this is a particular season.
When no one needs a reason.
To ask for more than you’ve got.
Not just any present moment.
Something store-bought.
Wrapped tight.
Ready to be torn.

For on this day maybe two thousand years ago a child was born.
Torn up wrapping paper on the floor.

And soon, that baby grew.

And said we will have earned the kingdom
eternal life
redemption
the very hereafter
everything
the very moment
we can discern a gift
without having to see
it torn open.

Well fed martyrs #oldjournals

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Turn. Change. Transfigure. The trinity of our people.
Our people, used loosely, for we have never come together as one.
Failed, where ants and honeybees succeed,
at creating and sustaining efficient colonies.

Community. Congregation. Culture. Concentrated into cults.
Letting children light their candles.
Thinking drinking symbolic blood makes a better person.
Group-think denial-grace came at no cost,
when it earned its chief revelator a cross.

Transformed torture devices into symbolic vestiges of sacrifices
we, as a people, are not yet prepared to make. Flimsy. False. Fake.
Even if we were to nail up a martyr or two, our crosses would probably break.

We’re different. We’ve changed. We’re transfigured.
Also, as a whole, people have gotten bigger.
We might need to upgrade to an anchored metal frame
to sustain the weight of such well fed martyrs.

Modern Christianity – Old Journals

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Can the livestock lie down with the wolf?
A lamb of short cut wool. Nude colored
and halved black hoof tapping shoals noisily in the dark.
Stalked by the wolf black as night, red in tooth
a blood matted mouth, grinning. A greeting
only to the innocent glowing white lamb,
friend to friend.

How can it be? The lamb remained a lamb bald and weak,
small and sleek. Or has the world worked hard hungry hands
over the offering? The grass fed sacrifice, reshaped dense,
sharpened bones into slicked back horns,
tiny trembling feet raised cloven hammers,
pounding ground and snorting dust and air.
Our innocent lamb now works and bleats to inspire fear. Pure no longer.
Tough and mean, still convinced beneath a thick skull it appears to be meek.

And the wolf, a beast howling hunger up at a full round moon,
a predator pitifully calling on company gurgled out a vertical throat,
outpouring pain and a gut wrench of sorrow. A friend with a voice also,
conscious of harmony, listening with sympathy, at songs sung lonelily.
Sweet, uplifting tones when times are good, and behavior tame, otherwise,
there is an ape in place of our angel, whose fists lay down lessons of pain,
obedience, trembling submission only to wait a little while,
and then call student come crawl deep beneath covers and cuddle. Embraced.
In the same soft arms that were just hard, tense, hands formed of fists,
capable now of good thorough petting.

The mythological hunter, once roaming and stalking in tight-knit droves,
has been reshaped into a pet, brown eyes for Man. Batting and staring.
Hungry to please, begging for scraps, sharing the fleas.

And the lamb is grown into a ram, lunging before a hyper dog’s raised ears,
wildly smiling while the sheep rears. Both give and take. Equally tease.
Playing games and ignoring the other’s presence with ease.

But when those ancient voices speak up now in an animal’s mindset,
it has become the wolf who lies down to the lamb on its hind legs.

Poor Jesus

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

To the Christian churches of America, I do not recognize the legitimacy of your denominations, but I like your Christ. A man who was raised in one of the most heavily indoctrinated and legally binding cultures ever to exist. What you eat and how you killed it, when you work, when you rest, how you dress, even edits to anatomy, at an early enough age so as to not make edits to memory as well. The laws of the land literally carved into stone. But a legal system changes good into obedient. Bad becomes the measurement of consequences. And without someone chasing around popping hands when they reach for an extra cookie, there won’t be one.

The world could not care less if you eat an extra cookie. Extra cookies are not always healthy. Over time, poor health and a sugary expectation of appetite form their own form of punishment. Eventually murder stops happening because the very action creates a blueprint for how to handle the culprit. There is no thief who does not safeguard against being robbed. They know what they did was wrong. How it invites every other member of their society to take advantage over their loose views of property ownership. I can not imagine the desperation in the thief’s prayer that what all they stole will stay stolen. Paying for things with that currency is the most surefire manner of having a bunch of stuff you will never get to own. No one wants that. They just believe they can get away with it. And that if they get away with it, no harm was done.

That is where legalism gets us.
Moral outsourcing and apologetic justice.

But Christ bypassed all that. Boulders etched in reminders of common decency. A millennia since spent inventing punishments and consequences and new paddles to slap tears onto blank faces. Christ said love your neighbors as you love yourself. But love is a many misused word in our time. So, because I am the unabashedly heretical, blasphemous, sacrilegious for the sake of curiosity sort, I’m going to edit that sentiment. Consider your neighbors as you consider yourself.

Maybe we all fall short of love. But consideration, we might still be capable of. Can we write all the laws needed to govern cookie access? Do we teach mantras like one per person? Do we say, well if you want more, you need to participate, lace up those apron strings and learn to bake. This is what legalism does to us. This is the pillar old Judaism was scratched into. And these are the conditions of the culture Christ woke up within and declared himself the embodiment of. And he said that if you consider your neighbor as you consider yourself, you will take two cookies off the counter. You will have had to morally process that your desire, will more often than not, be present in your neighbor. Good desires. Bad desires. Why do we waste time delegating these subjectivities. It isn’t cost effective, and it cripples moral thinking.

I was raised in a legalistic society. In a lawbound church organization. Educated in a rule-based bureaucratic government-funded form of daycare. And yet this name, this man, the rugged moral individualism toting philosopher, found me here. Were you not listening? Or do you just not actually believe? He didn’t want faith to be a reaction. For all beliefs to be attributed to obedience. And we went ahead and shaped everything in his name exactly the opposite.

I say this all the time, sometimes humorously, this time not so much. Poor Jesus. I feel so sorry for that man. He had thirty three years to describe denominational church structures and candle lighting and the what color stole against what color robe. He didn’t. He said love your neighbors as you love yourself. And love God above all else. I guess for modern people though love is more of a pastime. A romantic holiday, or shape of candy, or cut flowers or glassy looking stones. So I’m going to put my soul on the line and really edit the phrasing of one of my favorite philosophers.

Consider your neighbors, same as you would consider yourselves. And consider your source above all else. Consider all things.

Jesus was literate, bright, capable of writing on paper as well as carving stone. The fact that he didn’t take time to do more of it is a great sign. There is no more potent scripture that came before or afterward, than all the words Christ did not take time to write.