All Dogs are Secular, All Djembes are Evil..and All Fasting is Time Travel

As I sit here beside my secular dog..


..computer propped up on a syncretistic djembe..

..listening to non Christian (so non Christian that I could only show the back cover, as the front cover, as any Sigur Ros fan knows, contains nonfrontal nudity!!) worship music,
procrastinating about getting to my spiritual work,

I digress.

No, I PROgress.

That opening sentence was worded so as to reconvert me once again from the naughty gnosticism that was bundled and embedded in the USAmericanevangelicalism that brought me to faith...and heresy.



There is no spoon, and no secular.

And no such a thing as Christian music.

Matter matters.

And as you can see by the photo, my dog is a saved saint and not secular.

There are no Christian bookstores for that matter.

I AM indeed stalling re: getting to my "religious/pastoral" business of the morning (typing official minutes of our church network's annual meeting), but what I am doing now (blogging on a wordly blogging platform about how God is blessing me through a "secular" CD as I reflect on a "secular"..or worse.."syncretistic" book I just bought at a "non-Christian" store.)

That's the point.

Fasting is time travel.

Having collected quotes from Google (a "wordly" search engine, by the way) on various arts and ideas that have been called the equivalent of time travel..

I realized while reading a chapter from a "pagan" magazine (Conde Nast Traveller) included in a chapter in a "syncretistic" book ("The Best American Spiritual Writing 2008") that I just picked up (discount rack, of course) at a heathen store (Borders) in a secular (Riverpark) shopping center...

...that fasting is time travel.

Uh oh, I guess I should have not stopped off in the world after the pastors prayer meeting!!

I have struggled to articulate to myself and others the feeling I experience coming into, living in, and coming out of, a fast. It as if fasting creates an alternative reality...the real one, of course.
(I know, I know, we have been told we can't ever talk about our fasting, as we will lose our reward when you think we are super-spiritual...well, that is a bit out of context, and besides...once I give my next analogy, you'll think less of me, not more (:.....)

Sometimes the only analogy I have for it is drugs! There was a moment, I remember well from the 1970s, when the marijuana would kick in, and I would enter that other world. A la The Wizard of Oz turning from black and white to color. Not that the drug zone was always colorful or good, but it did transport us. And there was always that moment when you "came down" or eased out of the trip....transition back to reality.

The zone I enter and acculturate to when fasting...the place of non-eating...is rewarding and bizzare. Like no other time, I realize how our entire culture...and church culture..revolves around eating. Now, food ain't evil (or I would be a true gnostic), and I agree with St Wolfgang how crucial church "meatings" (see Thesis #4 here) are to Kingdom life...

..but only in the dasting zone do I see what Richard Foster sees so clearly:

In a world dominated by Pizza Temples and Shrines to Golden Arches fasting seems out of step with the times - out of place. (link)

The world we live in is out of step with the times.
Which is why fasting functions as time travel.

All right, having quoted the officially Christian author above, time to quote the dreaded nonChristian source:

Three hours later, I was back in central Osaka, and around me were plate-glass offices, beeping cell phones, trucks, and giggling girls. Flashing lights gave off the time, people rushed to commuter trains, and in McDonald's the cash registers were clicking hectically. Like Rip Van Winkle, or so it seemed, I had awoken to a world several decades out of sync. So soon, so soon, I thought, the fire turns into ash again.
-"The Magic Mountain," page 10 (careful clicking that secular link, a demon might get ya)

The author had just returned from a Buddhist (gasp!) monastery, a place and zone of fasting and discipline and an "air of weightedness and remoteness that seemed to give the place its power".

The secular world I live in is good and of God (The earth is the Lord, and the fullness thereof).
Yet the wordliness and animating empire that wraps around it,..and the principalities that piggyback on it ...can often be sourced in satanic systemic evil..

..of which the most subtle and insidious might be the "decades out of sync"-ness.

I need to time travel more often.

Sometimes that's in my secular Toyota with an anointed secular novel.
Oftentimes that will be via fasting.

Thank God a pilgrim to a Buddhist holy place was used by Jesus to call me to that conviction.

Or maybe it was Satan..after all, I am listening to forcidden music..gee, the singer is gay..
..and maybe my computer picked up some cooodies (and a virus) just by nature of it resting on the djembe.

Don't you know the history of djembes?
They were known a healing drums" in ancient African religions..
(Besides, the Violet Burning sometimes use them for worship songs!!
Watch out, this is the blog you were warned you about!)

Oh, well.

Knowing all that, this while blog post can't possibly be of God.

I had better cast out those demons, and get on to my spiritual business.

Crank up the Sigur Ros, and fast.