A Place Where No One Flinches

Leona painted her face with trembling hands. White greasepaint smeared across her cheek like fog crawling over glass. She didn’t look in the mirror long. She was afraid of recognizing herself, and afraid of not.

Outside, the circus stirred like something drugged but dangerous. The calliope screamed its crooked lullaby. Lights buzzed. The smell of animal musk and hot sugar thickened the air.

“Button,” came a voice, dripping sarcasm. “You're on in ten. Let’s not make it political tonight.”

Vico DeLaurentis. Ringmaster. Architect of ruin. His red velvet coat clung to him like a memory of dignity. His breath smelled of whiskey and resentment.

He leaned in, too close.

“And Button,” he sneered, “try not to pop a tit onstage. The kids don’t need the trauma.”

Leona didn’t answer.

He smiled wider. “You know, some nights I watch you from the wings. All that paint, those hips, that new little girl voice. You almost pass. Almost. It’s fucked up.”

He lingered.

“I dream about you, you know. Hate sex, mostly. I know you're still packing down there.Does that make me the freak, or you?”

He touched her wrist.

She stepped back. “Don’t,” she said, quiet as a blade.

He grinned like a infant god who’d never been told no. "Look at you. You’re pretty sexy when you’re angry.”

The show went on. Leona juggled and danced, made balloon animals and took a pie to the face. The children laughed. But inside, she felt the shape of a scream she hadn’t yet made. Something building, brimming, ready to burst. 

Later, in the tent of velvet shadows and candle smoke, Ramona laid down the cards.

The Moon.

“I keep pulling this one,” Ramona murmured. “Like it’s stitched to your shadow.”

Leona stared. The card shimmered—two beasts howling at a pale, unblinking moon. A path ran between towers. No end in sight.

“It means illusion,” Ramona whispered. “But also madness. Memory. Masks. You walk the path in the dark and no one sees you walking—but it’s still real.”

Leona touched the card. It was warm. Faintly wet. Almost... breathing.

“They talk to you,” she said. "They hum. They warn. They bleed, if I listen too long.”

She turned another card without looking. The Tower.

“Trouble’s close,” she muttered. “But you knew that already.”

Ramona leaned in, voice low and reverent.

“You ever hear the story of Kali?” she asked.

Leona shook her head.

“She wasn’t born in a cage,” Ramona said. “She was born under a blue eclipse in the forests of Assam. The locals called her Bhairavi, the Fierce One. Said she spoke only to widows and ghosts. She once dragged a poacher into a pond and left only his belt buckle.”

Leona blinked.

“She was free,” Ramona said. “Until Vico bought her from a dying zoo for cheap. Told everyone he’d tamed her, but that’s not true. He broke her. Beat her until her eyes dimmed. Now she performs. But she’s not there. She’s dreaming of the jungle. She paces like she’s tracing a map back to it.”

Leona swallowed hard.

“She watches you,” Ramona added. “Like she sees the same chain around your neck.”

Then Ramona leaned in even closer, voice lower, like a ritual whispered in the bones of the earth.

“You ever hear of Vepar?”

Leona blinked. “No.”

“Third spirit in the Goetia,” Ramona said, eyes unfocusing. “Appears as a mermaid, lovely, gleaming. Rules over the wounds of sailors. They can rot a man from the inside, but slowly. With beauty.”

Leona shivered.

“My grandmother used to say: Everyone’s born with a Vepar inside them. A demon that learned to survive by hiding behind our charms. Our sweetness. Our masks.”

She tapped the Moon card. “Some of us just learn to name them early. Most don’t.”

Leona’s mouth felt dry.

Ramona smiled, gently. “You named yours. That’s why you’re still here.”

They kissed that night behind the tent, slow at first, then not so slow. Straw in their hair. Greasepaint smudged across jawbones. Ramona’s hands beneath Leona’s shirt, skin damp with sweat and heartbeat. Leona’s lips trembling against the hollow of Ramona’s throat.

It wasn’t just tenderness, it was possession. Not of each other, but of themselves. A claiming. A remembering.

Leona moaned, quiet and long. Ramona whispered something soft in a language Leona didn’t recognize. The world narrowed to heat, wet mouths, salt, friction, breath.

It was the kind of kiss that leaves a mark on the year.

But magic costs.

Days later, after a show, Leona wandered to Kali’s cage. The tiger rose to greet her like a silent cathedral.

“You’re too holy for this place,” she whispered.

Then she heard him.

“You keep whispering sweet nothings to that beast, someone’s gonna think you’re kin.”

Vico again, stinking of lust and threat.

“I saw you and the bearded witch behind the tent. Real romantic. Real tragic. You really think you get a fairytale ending?”

Leona turned, spine straight. “You don’t get to ask.”

“You think you’re above all this?” His voice cracked. “You think a wig and hormones make you a woman? You’re a dress-up doll with a dick—”

He lunged.

She backed into the cage bars with a cry. He grabbed her arms. Hot breath. His mouth twisted. “You want me to stop? Then say it like a girl. Say it in that new cute little voice."

A wind ripped through the field.

“I said,” came a voice behind them, “don’t touch her.”

Ramona. Barefoot. Glowing. Her eyes were stormglass, unblinking.

In one hand: a tarot card, held like a blade.

The Tower. It trembled with heat. Edges curled, smoking.

“I read it earlier,” she said, stepping closer. “Didn’t know who it was for. But now I do.”

Vico turned, laughter dying in his throat.

“You’re both sick—”

Kali roared from behind the bars.

Ramona smiled. “And she’s hungry.”

The air thickened. The earth seemed to sigh. The candle in her tent blew out, though no one was near it.

“I don’t curse people,” Ramona said. “I just read what’s already coming.”

She reached forward. Placed the Tower card on Vico’s chest.

He flinched. It burned.  And then, he ran. A shadow dissolving into shadows.

Leona fell to her knees. Ramona dropped beside her.

“He was going to—” Leona started.

“I know, baby.”

Leona looked down. “He’s not going to stop.”

“No,” Ramona said, voice calm. “But we are.”

That night, they opened Kali’s cage. She stepped out slowly, with the dignity of an ancient queen. Stretched once. Vanished into the woods without sound.

They packed what they had. Left the tent, the sawdust, the smell of gasoline and shame.

They drove through the night in Ramona’s rusted truck, neither speaking. Only the road sang—humming its low, mournful, holy tune.

When they woke, it was to birdsong. Real birdsong.

They had arrived.

The city was nothing like the world they’d known. There were no maps. No gates. Just gardens. Endless gardens. Wild lavender growing from lamp posts. Vines curling around street signs. Fig trees splitting open sidewalks. Bees, fat and unbothered. Children barefoot and unafraid.

They stepped out of the truck into sun-warmed stone. A breeze touched their skin like a promise.

They walked without direction. No one stared. No one asked. A man with no arms offered them tea. A woman with horns sold peaches from a cart made of bone and moss. Someone played a harp from the roof of a cathedral with no walls.

Ramona turned to Leona.

“I think this is it.”

Leona blinked. “Heaven?”

Ramona smiled. “Not quite. Just a place where no one flinches.”

They found a garden behind an ivy-covered door. Slept beneath the fig trees, their bodies still smelling of earth and each other. When they woke, still dark, Ramona kissed her again—deeper this time. Mouths open. Fingers in hair. Skin pressed to skin. A kind of devotion that tasted like sweat and honey and stars.

The Moon hung high overhead. And somewhere in the distance, a Fool stepped onto the road again. But not alone.

The Noise of Your Songs

Yesterday was Sunday,

and all I could think about were the millions gathering in praise

while their neighbors are being hunted --

not in metaphor, not in shadow,

but in plain sight.

On sidewalks.

On jobsites.

In bedrooms and classrooms, no longer safe.

They invoked God's will as if they had no agency,

as if heaven required their silence

more than their courage.

As if faith were submission,

not resistance.

They denied the material:

the hunger in a child's belly,

the cough in a poisoned lung,

the eviction notice folded on the kitchen table --

as if the spiritual is all that matters,

as if the body is a burden to be endured, not a vessel to be honored.

They dismissed human suffering

as if it's inevitable.

As if it's someone else's calling to intervene.

As if it's not their place

to stand between empire and "the least of these."

But wasn't that the whole point?

How easily comfort recasts itself as righteousness.

How quickly love becomes selective.

How often the name of God is spoken

not as a balm,

but as a boundary.

And yet,

there are still mornings,

like today;

when the light hits the window just so,

and I remember:

the world does not need more belief.

It needs more becoming.

"I can't stand your religious meetings.

   I'm fed up with your conferences and conventions.

I want nothing to do with your religion projects,

   your pretentious slogans and goals.

I'm sick of your fund-raising schemes,

   your public relations and image making.

I've had all I can take of your noisy ego-music.

   When was the last time you sang to me?

Do you know what I want?

   I want justice -- oceans of it.

I want fairness -- rivers of it.

   That's what I want. That's all I want."

--- Amos 5:21-24

So Long, Maestro: A Requiem for a Musical Genius

Brian Wilson, the visionary architect of Southern California’s sonic dreamscape, has left us. Today, the world tilts a little out of key. The tides seem to pause, the sky wears a subtler blue. We have lost not just a man, but a fragment of the divine — the boy who heard symphonies in the wind and turned sand and sorrow into music.

He didn’t just write songs. He dreamt them. From Surfer Girl to Good Vibrations, his harmonies were cathedral-like — sun-dappled sanctuaries built out of ache and elation. And in 1966, Pet Sounds arrived like a comet trailing stardust, an album so tender, so strange and beautiful, that even now it sounds like a secret whispered from another planet. "Wouldn't It Be Nice" is not merely a pop song; it's a love letter folded into eternity, a lullaby for the hearts that still believe in what could be. Hearts like mine. 

But beneath all that lush orchestration, the Wrecking Crew sessions, the genius of layered vocals and sweeping harmonics — there was the wreckage of a childhood too cruel for poetry. Murry Wilson, his father, was a tyrant with a belt and a bitter tongue, a man who hit Brian so hard he lost hearing in one ear — and then took credit for the music he could never have imagined. The very man who should have been his first refuge taught him early that love could be conditional, and violent.

And later, as the walls of his mind began to collapse — voices, fear, isolation — the very brothers and bandmates who had once harmonized beside him left him behind. They boarded planes to tour the world, singing his songs, wearing matching stripes, while he stayed home in bed, weeping into the silence. There was no lifeboat. Just a piano. Just the dogged clink of ivory, trying to build beauty faster than the darkness could take it.

Yet somehow, still, he composed. Because music — oh, music — was the lifeline. It was the place where Brian became whole again. He heard colors. He stitched aching melodies like threads through time, pulling us all into a world where sadness didn’t have to be survived alone. In "I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times," he told the truth plainly: he wasn’t. He was out of sync with the world. He was made for something better. Something softer. He was tuned to a frequency this world too often fails to hear.

And yet, we heard him.

Los Angeles grew up under his spell. The Beach Boys were its sun-slicked soundtrack — surfboards, Mustangs, barefoot freedom — but it was Brian who filled the city with an invisible golden resonance, a kind of sonic afterglow. He made the Pacific sing. He made the car radio a chapel. He gave youth a heartbeat.

And beyond the cars and girls and waves, he gave us something purer: the sound of longing, of the sacred ache to belong, to love, to find peace. He was a boy who wanted to build heaven out of harmonies — and he very nearly did.

Brian Wilson was not just a man. He was a visitation. A candle lit at both ends. A conduit for the infinite dressed in flip-flops and falsetto. He gave us more than songs — he gave us glimpses of the sublime.

I'm so honored to have been alive to see it, hear it, feel it.

So long, Maestro. We return you to the Heaven from which you came.

Thank you for making this place beautiful, and for giving this man something to strive for, both in art and in life.

Tattooed Theology (Matter Matters)

I've been living inside the strange grace of Flannery O’Connor’s imagination—where grotesquery becomes gospel and every wound hums with the low, electric current of divine confrontation. I’ve returned, again and again, to Parker’s Back—a story soaked in mystery and flesh, inked in the theology of Incarnation.

O’Connor did not write from sentiment. She wrote from scar tissue. Her stories do not soothe; they confront. They insist—almost violently—on one unrelenting truth: spirit is not separate from matter. To pretend otherwise is not merely dishonest. It is heresy.

To be enfleshed, as Christ was enfleshed, is to bear the unbearable weight of both divinity and decay. It is to ache with the whole body for the healing of the whole world. Not just the salvation of souls. Not just some pieced-together theology of escape. But for this world—this burning, breaking, beloved world—to be transfigured. The Kingdom, after all, is not waiting in the clouds. It is “within you,” Jesus said. Among you. Within bodies.

So I want to say this plainly, without qualification:

To dismiss suffering—to regard it as a necessary prelude to paradise, or to speak of the world’s unraveling as merely “a sign of the times”—is not faith.

It is cowardice clothed in piety.

It is spiritual bypassing.

It is a refusal to weep with those who weep.

Last week, the president posted an image of planes taking off with the gleeful words: “Let the deportations begin.”

And since then, ICE has brought down hell among the working people of Los Angeles and many other cities. They've tossed flash bangs to dissuade the gathering crowd. They've waited outside courthouses where immigrants—doing things the right way—were seeking asylum and legal protection. Mothers torn from their children. Fathers disappeared into cages. All while the president rejoiced. And the pro-lifers cheered.

Is this pro-life?

Is this faith?

Silence is complicity. But even worse is celebration in the face of terror. Shame on everyone who supports this evil.

Ezra Klein wrote, “The emergency is here.” He wasn’t being alarmist. He was being accurate.

The signs of crisis are not metaphysical—they are material:

 Human beings kidnapped and disappeared by a system we pretend is legal

Programs for the poor, the disabled, the voiceless—slashed and burned like the forests under threat.

A proposed autism registry, that should terrify every human with memory.

And a chorus of public lies, desecrating truth like spit on the Gospel.

I feel this grief in my body. In my nervous system. In the shortening of breath. In the tightening of my jaw when I read the news. That matters. Not because I am the center—but because the body knows: someone else’s suffering is not abstract. It is embodied. Like Christ on the cross. Like the migrant crossing the desert. Like the trans kid facing erasure. Like the mother being told, again, to carry what may kill her.

Prayer without action is not prayer. It is a form of religious theater.

We cannot whisper “thy kingdom come” while building walls to keep the kingdom out.

And yet I’ve heard Christians—many—say with untroubled confidence:

“We always knew the world would get worse. Our hope is not in this world.”

But O’Connor, like the mystics and prophets before her, would call this what it is: a heresy.

To deny the sacredness of this world—to abstract hope into some unbothered realm beyond genocide, hunger, or fascism—is to blaspheme the very act of Incarnation.

If Christ did not come into flesh, then what are we doing here?

If God does not dwell in bodies, then the Eucharist is a lie.

And if bodies do not matter—black bodies, brown bodies, disabled bodies, poor bodies, queer bodies—then the crucifixion was just a myth, not a revolution.

Ram Dass once said, “Compassion is not a mental construct. It’s the trembling of the body when you see someone else in pain and you know it as your own.”

And Chogyam Trungpa taught that the spiritual path begins with raw fear—that moment when all strategies collapse and you realize you’re not above the suffering, you are inside it.

So I will keep pleading—not from a place of political outrage, but from a deeper place.

A spiritual marrow-place.

A place of trembling.

I plead for Christians to remember that we are not saved from the world.

We are saved with the world.

Because the Cross was not an escape route.

It was a door into radical solidarity.

And the Resurrection?

It was not a magic trick. It was a declaration that matter matters.

Farewell to the High Priest of Freak Theology.

Sly Stone disappeared—again and again—and now, finally, he’s departed, age 82. But let’s not kid ourselves: he left the building decades ago. What he’s done now is float permanently into the stratosphere of American music, headfirst into the funkadelic firmament, riding a chorus of wah-wah pedals, broken promises, and celestial overdubs.

Sly Stone is dead, and the world just got a little less funky. But don’t you dare call him a casualty.

This man resurrected rhythm from the ashes of Motown smoothness and white-bread rock. He unleashed chaos into soul and called it A Family Affair. He took all the sounds—black and white, gospel and acid, protest and party—and mixed them like he was summoning angels and setting them on fire at the same time. You want to talk about integration? Integration ain't your college brochure. Integration is Larry Graham's bassline gurgling up from the underworld while Sly whispers revolution through a purple haze. Integration is a band that looked like a commune and sounded like God losing His mind in a psychedelic disco.

Sly was the high priest of freak theology, the sermon in the key of E, the psalmist who declared that fun was sacred and the sacred was funky. He didn’t just bring people together—he electrified them into one body, sweating and moaning and dissolving in 16th notes. In a country splitting at every seam, he stitched sound together like it was the only real flag we had left.

And then he vanished.

Coke. Paranoia. Industry vultures. A thousand empty promises and an RV parked somewhere in the mythic junkyard of American ambition. People called it a tragedy. Maybe. But don’t confuse collapse with silence. The man was still there—in every slap of the bass, in every DJ who ever looped a breakbeat, in every artist who said "let's go weirder." He lived long enough to see his sound sampled, resurrected, worshipped, and mimicked by people who weren’t born when he was storming stages in a robe and Afro and talking to God through a vocoder.

Sly Stone broke the frame. He didn’t just bend genres—he annihilated them. He fed funk through a meat grinder, filtered it through revolution and LSD, and served it to America with a wink and a question: Are you ready?

No, Sly. We weren’t. We never really were.

And now that you’re gone, what’s left?

A groove so deep you could bury empires in it.

A scream that still echoes through civil rights ghosts.

A mirror held up to America—cracked, beautiful, glittering with sweat.

You were the dream and the come-down, the bandleader and the burnout, the preacher and the punchline, the prophet who set the pulpit on fire and called it Saturday night. And you never said goodbye. You just let the reverb carry you home.

Rest in power, Sly.

But let’s be honest:

You’re not resting.

You’re probably still mixing somewhere beyond the moon,

getting the angels to play tighter, louder, dirtier.

The jam doesn’t stop just because we can’t hear it.

I’ll catch you at the funky after-party..

Through the Looking Glasses..

She was ten, and the world had finally come into focus—violently, wondrously so.

Trees were no longer green clouds glued to brown trunks. They were a thousand intricate decisions, each leaf deliberate. Street signs were not just whispers to adults anymore; they spoke to her, too. The world, she learned, was edged.

The glasses were heavier than she expected. They smelled faintly metallic, like pennies or science. But it was the precision of them that made her feel a little dizzy, as though she had been promoted to a clearer version of existence she was not quite ready for.

Then, her brother called her four-eyes. It was said with a smirk, casually cruel. He didn't even mean it. It’s a reflex—like sneezing or  teasing.

Still, she began to wear the glasses less. The blur was softer. The blur did not name her. 

Her parents didn’t push. They encouraged.  Gently. Like gardeners coaxing a bloom rather than demanding it.

“Try them for dinner,” her dad said once, sliding the plate in front of her like a peace offering.

“You might like reading better with them on,” her mom added later, placing a new book at her  bedside, spine uncracked, world unopened.

One night, she fell asleep—or pretended to—on the couch, glasses still perched on her nose. She felt them before she heard them: her parents entering the room, their footsteps tender as breath.

They leaned over her, not speaking at first. She  imagined they were studying her the way one does a painting or a newborn animal—something both familiar and newly miraculous.

Then, she heard her voice. Soft as dusk.

“Have you ever seen someone look so beautiful in glasses?”

A pause. And then, his voice—deeper, certain:

“No, never.”

They lingered for a beat. She held her breath, afraid it might shatter the moment. And then they tiptoed away, back into the rhythm of dishes or bedtime or marriage.

She kept her eyes closed, but not out of pretense anymore. She was trying to memorize this—this weightless kind of love, the kind that doesn’t fix or force or correct, but simply sees you, perfectly, even as you’re still learning to see yourself.

Later, when she opened her eyes, the room was  darker, but not dim. Through the lenses, the ceiling became constellations of tiny cracks and shadows. The air looked clearer somehow.

She left the glasses on.

The Memorial They Deserve..

Today, I find myself thinking about the young men of my grandfather’s generation — boys, really — boarding ships bound for North Africa, or the blood-soaked beaches of the Pacific. I'll bet they were terrified, most of them, though you wouldn’t have known it to look at their faces in most of the photographs. They stood tall, cracked jokes, smoked cigarettes with shaking hands. Scared out of their minds, perhaps, and trying like hell not to show it.

Before the war was through, they’d be asked to summon a kind of courage most of us will never have to imagine. They would crawl through hellscapes of mud and fire, would witness things too awful to tell their mothers when the letters home came — if they came at all. 

Some would be among the first to step into Nazi concentration camps - places where the full horror of human cruelty was paid bare. They saw the emaciated survivors, the piles of bones and discarded shoes, the silence of a place where so much suffering occurred it will likely never be forgotten. After seeing that, they weren't just there under the auspices of fighting for a symbol or a flag, they knew that they helped pull the world back from the edge of total darkness. 

Many of them died there, far from the quiet neighborhoods and corner diners and baseball fields they called home. They died soldier’s deaths — in trenches and beaches and fields with no names — casualties of a cause bigger than themselves, a cause they chose to believe in.

But don’t let the sepia photographs and stone memorials fool you — these were not marble men. They were dreamers. They were kids with plans. They were thinking about holding their sweetheart’s hand in the soft flicker of the movie house, about the sound of the bat cracking at the ballpark on a summer night, about sitting down at a worn kitchen table with their folks, laughing over a pot roast and mashed potatoes.

They dreamed of coming home. They dreamed of this, Today. They probably dreamed it would be a little more peaceful at home, but that's besides the point. 

Look around today. Look at the families stretched out in the grass at the park, at the smell of charcoal and burgers on the grill, at the kids laughing, sun-drenched and barefoot. Look at this little slice of American peace, and take a moment. Take a deep breath. And remember them.

And while we remember them, let us also remember this: True heroism is quiet. It doesn’t need a slogan. It doesn’t strut or shout. It is sober, and often lonely, and rarely comes with fanfare. In an age where some in power are more interested in projecting strength than practicing humility, more invested in the performance of masculinity than the preservation of decency, we must resist the temptation to let our fallen be reduced to a prop The memory of the dead is not a tool to be wielded for political gain, nor a mantle to be draped over any party or politician.

In a time of polarizing conflict and vitriolic discourse, let us remember that America’s obligation to the Fallen does not end at the moment of death — No, what begins at enlistment, continues beyond death. To truly honor them is to see them as whole people, with names and stories and hopes, not symbols. The Fallen must never be used as tools for political means. They deserve more than soundbites. Their families deserve our care, our memory, our gratitude.

Our country deserves a people that will keep their promise to the Fallen and to one another. This place, despite the upheaval, remains a repository of the hopes and dreams of millions within our borders and around the world. If we allow cruelty to settle into our hearts and our policies, we betray the ideals that the men and women we honor today died defending. Their deaths demand more of us - more decency, more courage, more grace. 

May God bless their sacrifice — tender, terrible, and true. And may we honor them not just with words, or flags, or moments of silence, but by living the kind of lives full of the joy, freedom, and everyday beauty that they never got to come back to.

That is the memorial they deserve.