A letter to James

My dearest James,

We find ourselves here again in resurrected bodies. I do not remember how many arguments we’ve had over the centuries of trying to rescue our legacy from disaster. I only know that I am weary of arguments and I continue to long for the reconciliation of all things in the anointing of divine grace. To see that moment unfold into history has been my dream the entire time. What eternal torture to watch my dream sabotaged by my own mutilated words in the hands of serpents who made them a fruit of knowledge to hold over the world!

I just wanted to shut down stupid arguments for the sake of building safe, intimate community; that was the agenda of my letters (which I wish they hadn’t kept). I wanted them to feel the grace that I felt in my body, the enveloping presence of the vine of love that gives me my words. I wanted them to stop trying to prove themselves with performative piety so they could find the voice of love themselves and receive her guidance directly.

I didn’t tell them to worship my words; I said to imitate me as I intimate Christ. Do what I do. Write your own letters. Keep refining the poetry I never intended to be permanent. Deepen the glory of our intimacy with the divine breath of life by exploring and experimenting with the embodiment of divine grace, knowing all things are lawful but not all things are beneficial, trusting love’s guidance that deepens the more deeply we trust her.

Binding my words in leather and making them an idol to manipulate the masses for political gain is the worst possible way they could have ever betrayed me. Why do they worship my words instead of the love that would enter their hearts and give them far better poetry than I ever wrote if they were ever willing to stop trying to prove themselves to God?

Did I really create these white men who never stop making me look terrible? Was it my words that cursed them or was it their abuse of them? Are they all my resurrections? Or do I just wake up horrified in some of them? Why do so many of them want to be the spitefully zealous heresy hunter I was before I repented?

They are my eternal conscious torment: these confident serpents who rule the church from their pulpits using my words. What torture to watch my words make the rich feel pleased with themselves for their sober selfishness as they nod gravely and piously to their pastor’s puritanical posturing against the moral depravity of the weirdos who are threatening the sacred order of the white nuclear family where the father is in charge. That’s what they took away from my letters. They made them the filthiest of rags; they never found the grace I was trying to show them.

I said to stay away from the haeretikos, the overly opinionated one who creates division. That’s who I was before I met Jesus, a divisive, vindictive, murderous persecutor of love. I played the part of Lucifer, the light-bearer who is absolutely right in all his accusations and seeks absolute control over others. I was convinced I was right and the people who were wrong were so dangerous that we needed to imprison and stone them. And I wasn’t all the way healed from being Lucifer when I wrote my letters, but I wasn’t the one who decided to make them into a poisonous fruit.

Do you think I have ever gotten Stephen’s stoning out of my head? I saw heaven reflected in his eyes and I was so haunted by that moment that when the voice called to me from the same heaven, saying “Why do you persecute me?” I knew my sin to the core of my bones. I was the haeretikos, the divisive, opinionated one who crucified the messiah in my puritanical zeal. I was the devil.

But then they made “heresy” into their word for being wrong instead of being murderously opinionated and controlling. Every “heresy” they condemned in their centuries of arguments was a failure of their ministry of reconciliation; they could have kept the conversation open to find a deeper truth.

Did they even know the vine of love who gives us our words when we have trusted her grace? They stopped being prophets and became intellectuals. The anointing that allows us to listen as Abraham did is lost when we turn into anxious performers and connoisseurs of orthodoxy. The breath of life cannot move our hearts if we have locked them away in a tower to heaven built of correct answers.

Death is not restful for all of us. It is for those who die after disappointing, disregarded lives. People who had no impact on the world have no regret to swallow as they watch time continue to unfold and they learn and deepen their intimacy with love by watching the theater of humans living out the story of God.

Heaven is not a place of forgetting. There is no divine glory to be found elsewhere in another reality that makes this world strangely dim. Fully alive humans are the glory of God. The dead worship God in heaven by watching us live. Our lives are the drama where they deepen their dive into divinity. They want us to finally enter the age of restful feasting they have been waiting for many generations.

But there is no rest for a poet who watches his words ruin the world without any ability to edit them. I resurrected into so many bodies who idolized my words and became toxic versions of me. There’s nothing more repugnant than to watch all the worst versions of yourself interpreting your words to the world. James Baldwin said to be black in America is to be in a continuous state of rage. I wouid say the same about being the author of whiteness, because all of it is my fault, or at least my words were a primary catalyst for the toxic behaviors of western civilization.

I will not be delivered from my centuries of torment until all the devilish versions of me repent of abusing and betraying my art by making it a prop to justify their power. And those who die without repenting for their blasphemous betrayal of Christ will spend their death in eternal regret until the earth is healed of the hell that we made. It really is time for an age of repentance. How can we bring it to pass? I just want the world to learn how to rest.

So what can we do James? How do we help them? I’m at a loss. Please bless us with your wisdom.

In the name of the one who has never stopped being crucified by those who say they love him,

Saul who was always the least of the apostles