Whitehorse adventures, faith in Iceland, God, Abba, rapture, and wonder

***

              Working at the Whitehorse fish hatchery, clipping the adipose fin off  of eight-thousand stunned salmon fry per day, while my back-woods, female co-workers held belching contests was harrying enough on its own, and then one day I’m almost fired because I’m twenty minutes late because the late model pickup truck I had caught a lift in had plummeted off the ten foot high ditch because the two guys driving it had been up all night drinking, as is the custom in these parts, and I had already lunged across the cab three times to save our lives and was too late with the last grasp and down we went. And up I came, out of the cab, with murder on my mind for these two idiots, but I held my punch, and caught another lift, and told myself the whole way that this was the way things went in the Yukon.

We must say ‘I am God’, with the same intimacy, understanding, and universality, as saying ‘I am flesh’, or ‘I am human’, though on a much grander scale. It is to say ‘I am God’, but not to limit God. It is the personal recognition of union with the impersonal which allows for this statement, without pride or arrogation. It is as if one is saying ‘I am Godness’.

Happiness? Happiness is a poor compromise, a mediocre emotion. Give me rapture, give me wonder, give me bliss, or let me sleep.

I had to become both inside and out of being. I had to be the microcosm and the macrocosm, the creator and the created, only then did I feel whole.

            Faith in Iceland: I went there on account of four dreams, in the last of which I entered a thrift shop whose sign had SOS. Then while there, hitchhiking and feeling impatient and not knowing God’s will, I decided that “Faith is accepting that everything is as God wants it to be.” And at that very moment a car pulled over driven by a beautiful young blonde woman, going the 300 km to my exact destination. On the passenger seat was the CD cover for the rock band ABBA, the Father (does faith=father?), and while the music was playing on came the song SOS.

It’s easy to latch hold, and hard to let go, as with all things like love, knowledge, hope, and identity. It’s in the letting go that the truth comes in, though it’s often a hard one to swallow.

God’s will is my will, but only because is runs from His will into mine, and not mine into His. By this token God’s will and thoughts are my will and thoughts, for we are not separate, we are one.

I had to sing below meaning, below purpose, below attainment in order to dissolve and blend into the one, for the fumblings of the ego are anathema to God.

***

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