Sunday, November 22, 2015

Meeting God


 
MEETING GOD

by

Anthonystjoseph

     I have been wanting to share this for a while.  Recently my mother passed away and amongst her things I found a letter addressed to me.  It was strange when I found the envelope because the envelope was really old.  I mean the envelope was really, really, really old; the envelope was so old it was more than yellowed with age, it was brown and almost in tatters.  I saw that the envelope was addressed to me so I opened it.  Why had she hidden it from me?  How could a letter so old, brown and tattered be addressed to me?  What I read was startling to say the least.  The letter was from my great-great-great-great grandfather but yet in still it was addressed specifically to me. 

     I sat down and started to read the letter and I immediately dropped it as I started to cry.  What in the world was happening to me and why was all of this going on?  The letter was written by a man who lived more than two hundred years ago but it was addressed to me and claimed to know all about me.  I cried because I just didn’t know how much more of this spiritual stuff I could take.

     As I had come into my spiritual understanding years ago and the impact that these spiritual elements have always had on my life I was overwhelmed once again.  But as the journey goes on it seems to become more comforting in the fact that I am not going crazy but it also becomes more unsettling in the aspect of having to do it alone. 

     I think about the letter as I look at it on the floor where I dropped it.  I look around the room and wonder if someone is playing a massive trick on me and my life as I often think someone has to be behind this.  I decide to have a glass of wine.  I think about all of the mysterious things that have happened to me throughout my life and go into that contemplative place of asking myself the question again, ‘Why me?’

     I shook the feeling off more easily than usual, as living a full life of all of these magical and symbolic things happening to me, I had gotten quite use to it in spite of the centuries old letter being a new turn of events.  I finished the glass of wine and poured myself another glass as I sat down and decided to brace myself and read the letter.

     I do not know how to tell you what was in the letter.  I do not know what to make of what was in the letter.  So in consideration of just delivering the truth, I will just tell you what the letter said.  Now there is one major drawback in this letter because of its age and the condition of the paper, the full letter is not there, but I will give you exactly what it said, word for word, and you like me will wish there was more to the letter.  Here is what was left of the letter:

Dear Tony,

     You do not know me but I am your great-great-great-great grandfather.  You may wonder how I know you or even of you since I lived long before your time so I will answer that question first.  I was sixteen years old when I was attacked by a lion and was viciously mauled whilst trying to save my little sister from the attack.  The village witch doctor was summoned to my death bed and did everything he could to try and save my life.  He told my parents that I would not live and most likely would not survive the night.  In fact, I didn’t.

     The morning came and the village witch doctor pronounced me dead.  This is where the story becomes important for you and the necessity to share this with you becomes obvious.  In fact, I had died.  I had passed to that other realm that you like to call the afterlife.  I met several of my ancestors and they loved seeing me.  They also told me that it was not my time but I was going to be meeting someone very special.  They told me that I was going to be meeting God.

     You can imagine how I felt being given the opportunity to meet God and at the same time finding out that it was not my time to perish and that I would be going back to my family.  Why was I chosen for such a meeting?  My ancestors in the afterlife told me it was because they wanted me to deliver a message to you.  When I asked who you were they said you were going to be my great-great-great-great grandchild Tony who would eventually start calling himself by his first and middle name combined while adding ‘saint’ in the middle since you were named after Saint Anthony and Saint Joseph.  They said you would call yourself Anthonystjoseph.

     Since you would not be born in our country or on our land I was told that I would be sent to a foreign land myself in order to learn your language.  This was necessary so I would have the method to write this letter to you in a language you could understand.  I feel we have both been blessed in the need and importance of this letter because we, in comparison to others, know that there is more to our world.

     Before I get to the message I want to tell you about meeting God.  It was a momentous occasion to say the least.  I guess I had been prepared for it as I had heard of the religions in the East that worshipped Allah and had been told that Allah actually stood for Arm Leg Leg Arm Head but I always thought that was just a coincidence.  And then there is the actual word of the Bible that says, ‘God created man in his own image but I was just not prepared for the truth.  When I entered the second room in the afterlife and turned to meet God as I was told to turn, I was shaken when I turned and there before me, stood a Man…

By

Anthonystjoseph

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Thursday, November 19, 2015

I Am An Angry Man


 
I AM AN ANGRY MAN

by

Anthonystjoseph

     I am an angry man.  You may ask, why am I angry?  I will tell you why.  I really didn’t speak much as a child.  You see, I had memories.  Something was different.  The life I was watching and the behavior I was seeing was different.  Something was off.  My world had become different and I had to observe to try and understand what happened.  What had brought about this change? 

     I had never been told a lie before in my knowledge.  The first lie I was told was remarkable to me.  I was not aware that someone would say something to you that wasn’t true; why would someone do such a thing.  I was dumbfounded.  I learned and witnessed that people will lie.  It was new to my soul.

     I had never seen someone strike someone before.  I witnessed someone hitting someone and it was new to me.  I was attacked and then one day I attacked.  I struck someone in the face and it felt like I had rocked and struck my own soul.  I can still remember the moment that I struck the other boy in the face and the mutual impact that occurred because indeed, my soul felt it and it jolted me to the core.  I have never struck anyone since.  That’s a lie, you see, I’ve learned; I was attacked by a bunch of individuals once and I did strike, it was self-defense and I won…  I am learning your rules and I don’t like it. 

     I have studied mankind’s history and it is clear that mostly, man is an ugly creature…  Our end results seem to produce pleasant fruits and it seems that we can make it.  The problem is that the good fruit of mankind is like the fruit of a vine or the apple on the tree.  The fruit of mankind represents about one to five percent like the fruit of the tree only represents one to five percent of the tree.  Mankind needs to improve its goodness and luckily unlike the tree, we can choose to be fruit. 

     It seems the longer I live the more I hurt.  The compassion in me seems to overflow and almost overwhelms me sometimes.  My brother says God told him I was the King of Passion.  It amazed me when my estranged and mostly unknown half-brother told me this because at that point he had not witnessed my growing passion and anger at the atrocities of mankind that I was developing an extreme distaste for.  I was becoming more and more angry at mankind as a whole.

     Two college aged kids I had known in the early Nineties at social functions in Denver, Colorado randomly called me The Angry Man one day and it struck me as odd.  You see, my anger had snuck up on me.  It is true that at that point in time I was trying to develop a small newsletter to help fight police brutality and was constantly preaching against it and other things but I was completely unaware that my outward disposition was coming off as angry.  I just had a desperate need to make the world a better place.

     There may be something wrong with me that causes an overabundance of empathy that makes me sympathize with unfairness and inequality and I have come to understand that it is a symptom of many.  Martin Luther, Malcolm, John F. Kennedy, Cesar Chavez, Susan B. Anthony, and Jesus himself suffered from an overwhelming desire to make the world a better place and I guess I should be glad that whoever creates humans decided to put a small portion of their genetic makeup in myself.  I only hope that my words can contribute at least one percent of one percent of what these men and women have done.  I long to make the world better; I know that in some people that I have met I have made their world better.

     In the dictionary it says that passion is anger so I guess I can be called passionate about a lot of things.  Because I am passionately angry about the acts that man commits against other men.  There are men to this day who enslave other men and especially enslave women; my soul screams as a witness and says, ‘How can they do this?’  When I learned of acts such as England leasing China to CHINA I asked myself, what in the hell!  I sometimes tell myself that I am clearly not one of you because I don’t understand.  Yes, I am a passionate man when it comes to this stuff.  Yes, I am an angry man.

     Something is changing in me for I am becoming more and more passionate as each day goes on.  I am now becoming a person who is so passionate that when I witness the fruits of mankind such as someone sacrificing themselves for the greater good I become emotional.  When I see an underdog of a human being achieve the impossible I well up with tears that come from the depth of my being because I feel there is hope in our tree and its fruit.  I feel there is a chance for the tree of mankind itself to continue to bare the fruit of wellbeing.  I feel there is hope for you; I feel there is hope for us.  Yes, I am a passionate man when it comes to this stuff.  Yes, I am an angry man.

By

Anthonystjoseph

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Sunday, November 15, 2015

My Heart


 
MY HEART

by

Anthonystjoseph

You made your decision long ago

When it came to my love

You just said no

 
I have accepted your choice

I have accepted your plan

I have accepted the fact

That I’m not your man

 
I offered the world

Unbeknownst to you

I offered my heart

A heart of pure true

 
Believe I’m thankful

For the straightforward answer

My love for you

Was becoming a cancer

 
Now I’m free to explore

I’m free to live

The heart I gave you

Is now free to give

 
By

Anthonystjoseph

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