Zion, Inc.

This revelation is brought to you by the City of Enoch Country Club.
The asphalt prophets have paved the burial grounds of the United Order.
We preach a theology of prudence. Why resist when the world has so much to offer?
The Gospel of thrift has become the Gospel of wealth.
The millennium is here, but who knew it would take place in a mall?
The beautiful name of Zion used to hawk merchandise to our masses.
Has Mormonism become a pyramid scheme of the soul?

Pumice and Water

(I found this poem in a back corner of my hard drive)

Pumice stone and ice cold stream water are my bread and wine this Sabbath
These ancient emblems of volcanic body spilled in atonement, at-one-ment for the land
The catastrophe blessing its priesthood
I hug cold stone-lined trails reverently approaching a tabernacle of ancient lava kneeling in still silent prayer
The windswept expanse whistles like a sad organ
My temple, my refuge, carpeted in green moss
Chipmunk, grasshopper, and dipper my congregation
My covenant with the earth renewed

-October 2007, Crater Lake National Park

The God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Spring

I sit in a steel chair, listening to the rhythm of well intending white shirts and Sunday dresses relate a 4,000 year old text to their morning commutes.

Exodus 3:2 There the angel of the LORD appeared to him [Moses] in flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed.

V. 14 God said to Moses, “I am who I am.”

Outside, through the west facing window of the Sunday school classroom, the tiny yellow and green buds, flowers and leaves are emerging from the tips of maple fingers; stirring and tickling the wind-laced sky. The shiny green leaves take their first breaths of warm spring light in an April afternoon.

As I sit, staring at the trees, I wonder if perhaps the great I AM, is better interpreted as WE ARE; for surely God was present in those trees as much if not more than a brick building called a church.