Being born again, the City of Death, House of Life, God, vice, and wildness

***

To be born again is to be born out of death into the realm of Life. And it is only because we are at first born into death that we must be resurrected to life. And then we must live in that life inside death, for in truth there is no death to die, there is only birth to be born.

Time it is for us to live again and die no more; to live in this House of Life, though it looks out onto the City of Death.

            The City of Death, where anti-life creeps into Life, creeps in and denies life, doubts life, fears life, strangles and rigidifies life, dams the flow, and damns those who fall from the free-flow of life into the inert stasis of Death, which kills Life with fear, and doubt, and shame, and pain.

            And so I say kill Death. Kill Death by living Life. Kill your Death with your Life. For it is each of our own choice to drink from the River of Life, and eat of the Tree of Life, or to drink from the Well of Death, and eat of the Tree of Death.

To become it all you must first become nothing. Which is to allow God through you, unhindered onto the world, and to allow the world through you, unhindered back to God.

In fact, entry into Heaven is based on a lack of vice, rather than the accumulation of virtue, because the pursuit of virtue is itself a vice. After all, the greatest characteristics of the spirit were called beatitudes, not virtues.

            I cared to be with the souls I had met and held while climbing, and with the ones I could no longer remember.

            For we must go wild amongst those who would seek to contain us. We must not tame our wonderful wildness, but let our wildness untame us.

            Swallow it, or spit it out, but for God’s sake take another bite.

***

These fragments are taken from unpublished writings by Jack Haas, selected from the notebooks 1990-2005.