He sets the lonely in families,
he leads out the prisoners with singing . . .
The wings of my dove are sheathed with silver,
Her feathers with shining gold.
– Psalm 68
Background music of ‘Song to Woody’ by Bob Dylan. My adventure in hitchhiking across the United States in June of 1967, from Lansdale, Pennsylvania to San Francisco along Route 66, stalled in Elk City, Oklahoma. Prior to that I had gotten two long rides through Pennsylvania and into Ohio, and regular rides all the way through Indiana (where every ride seemed to be seven miles to the next town), Illinois and Missouri (where every ride seemed to be 40 miles to the next town). The next town I needed to reach was Sayre, Oklahoma. For whatever reason, no one would pick me up in Elk City. Wherever it was that I was left off in Elk City by my previous ride, it wasn’t far to walk to the outskirts of town and stick out my thumb. I must have been there for about an hour, when a police car rode by slowly, observed me, but left me unmolested. I walked up and down the highway a bit, to change my luck, but another hour or so passed, and still no takers. I spent considerable time staring at the road sign that announced Sayre as the next highway town. Sometime after I had been in the town a couple of hours, the police car came back and invited me in.
The police were friendly enough, and asked for my identification, so I produced my Pennsylvania driver’s license, which ended any discussion of my age or state of domicile. They took me to the Elk City police station. They wanted to know where I was going and I told them California, which did not seem to elicit surprise or any other strong reaction. Perhaps they were used to people hitchhiking through town on Route 66, or had a laissez-faire attitude towards things in general. I told them I had my father’s permission for this trip. They had me call my father, whom we reached without any delay. I talked to my father briefly on the telephone, and explained the situation. He didn’t display any strong emotion either, although he hadn’t heard from me in a couple of days. I handed the telephone to one of the officers. My father confirmed that I had his permission to be doing what I was doing. The two police officers more or less shrugged, and asked me no further questions. I believe I asked them where the bus station was, or they may have suggested I take the bus. At any rate, I don’t remember spending much time doing any more hitchhiking in Elk City. I got to the bus station. There was no direct bus to San Francisco, but Greyhound bus tickets to Los Angeles from Elk City, Oklahoma, cost about $45 in 1967, and I had about $60 with me, so that was a ‘go.’
The two-day bus ride from Elk City to Los Angeles followed Route 66, and we stopped at many of the towns along the way. In the various Greyhound bus depots I saw my first American Indians not on television, frequenting the Greyhound buses and stations. I saw where some lived along the highway, which was disconcerting. These were very small homes which were dug-in to the ground with corrugated metal roofs; they looked like bomb shelters, with narrow window openings peeking up just above ground level, the result of poverty, not warfare. I saw my first real hippies hitchhiking in Arizona – two young men of about 20 years old or so, with long hair, down on their shoulders, with sleeping bags and backpacks, sitting or standing under a highway underpass for the shade, hitchhiking. At that time, long hair on young men was conspicuous, a hippie signal; you only saw it with the few rock-and-roll bands who had become visible out of the San Francisco scene, like the Jefferson Airplane. I felt the thrill of anticipation, of realized hopes – I was getting closer to my destination, to the people I had read about, was going to see and be.
Somewhere along the way a girl of about 18 or 20 boarded the bus and sat down next to me, a pretty, friendly, self-confident brunette in a short skirt. She was older than I was, and at the age of 16, I was somewhat abashed, and awe-struck. At that point in my life, I had never had a girlfriend, or gone on more than one date with any girl, which would have been an arranged, formal, school dance. She started asking me questions, where I was going and why. I explained to her my goal of going to San Francisco to be a hippy. She was encouraging and talked about her hometown, Los Angeles, and what was going on in the counter-culture scene there. She had friends who had gone or were going to San Francisco. Our conversation was pleasant and passed the time. As we got closer to California, I started asking more questions about the geography of highways and Los Angeles. I was experienced enough as a hitchhiker to realize that where the Greyhound bus station would leave me, was not necessarily the best place to start hitchhiking from. St. Louis had been a confusing place to hitchhike through. She became a little flirtatious, and demonstrated the geographical point she wanted to make by taking my forearm and laying it across her knees, to demonstrate some Los Angeles highway or another.
When we arrived at the Los Angeles Greyhound bus station, she was met by a friend of hers, another young woman of about 18 to 20, with sandy blond hair, who wore both a short skirt and platform heels – the song ‘Walk This Way’ comes to mind – my first vivid memory of Los Angeles. The style of dress was different than what I was accustomed to in Pennsylvania, and what I was going to in San Francisco. I went over to the ticket counter and found out that the cost of the bus ticket to San Francisco was about $10, which I could afford. I didn’t want to spend any more time hitchhiking, I wanted to be there, so I bought the next ticket and was on my way.
My seatmate on the ride to San Francisco was a middle-aged Bay Area woman who was also pleasant and encouraging. She wasn’t surprised either, that I was going to the Haight-Ashbury, but she didn’t have much other information to offer. I arrived at the San Francisco Greyhound bus station in the afternoon, after a trip of about six hours. My first problem was that I didn’t know where the Haight-Ashbury district was, or how to get there from the Greyhound station. A more organized person would have purchased a map, consulted with a policeman, etc., but if I were that prudent, I would not have been within 3,000 miles of my geography problem anyway. Someone pointed me generally in the right direction, so I found Market Street and began walking, to where Haight Street runs down to intersect with it.
It was about a seven block walk from the Greyhound bus station to the intersection of Haight and Market Street. Market Street is level, so it was not difficult; once at Market Street, I was uncertain of which street was Haight Street, so I checked each street sign carefully along the way of my walk. Along with my sense of adventure and excitement, there was understandable anxiety about where I was going to sleep and what I was going to eat. Being 16 years old is almost by definition an irrational state, but it was also an age where I more or less assumed someone, somewhere, would take responsibility for my food and shelter. That’s what I read in Time Magazine, and it was an age, and I was an age, that whatever you read in Time Magazine, you believed.
The media of 1967, including the Dick Clark Show, which was all rock-and-roll music and dancing in Philadelphia by local teenagers, presented tirelessly the mystique of California, San Francisco, hippies, psychedelic rock, the Jefferson Airplane, the summer of love, etc. the Monterey Pop Festival of 1967 was already becoming legendary. Dick Clark’s interview of the Jefferson Airplane was memorable, because he treated them, and they clearly thought about themselves, as people from a different mind-set and culture altogether. ‘Tune in, turn on, drop out’ was no mere cliché at that time – the Jefferson Airplane said all their music was about “love” – they said it seriously, and Dick Clark took their answers seriously. People looked differently, acted differently, and were really dropping out.
I was caught up also in the emotional devastation of my parents’ separation, and ultimate divorce, that was announced to my brother and I a few years before. He and I bounced back and forth between my mother and father, between Ambler and Lansdale, and for him, between private school and public school. I was caught up in the crisis and controversy of the United States over Vietnam. I had attended the demonstrations on April 15, 1967 in New York City’s central park against the Vietnam War, at the urging of a genuinely political friend named Marc. We took a bus which was arranged from Philadelphia (I think arranged by the Quakers, the Society of Friends), and arrived at New York City’s central park. The numbers of people were massive; we couldn’t get anywhere near the speakers, but you could hear the chant “hell, no, we won’t go!” I was two years away from getting my draft card. The expectations that my father had expressed to me in 1965, that the war would be over by the time I was 18, were not looking too good. Very middle-class teenagers were sing-songing, ‘Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?’
Like millions of other fathers who were World War II veterans, my father was not encouraging his teenage son to enlist for duty in Vietnam. No one thought the Viet Cong were going to bomb Lansdale, Pearl Harbor, or even Bangkok anytime soon; an argument about falling dominoes was for President Johnson, General Westmoreland and state department officials, not for parents of teenage sons. Not even my Uncle Bob, who was in the National Security Agency and held a job in Washington D.C., who had very conservative politics and an ultra-high security clearance, and who thought every day about the possibility of a first-strike nuclear attack from the Soviet Union, was touting the war in Vietnam. He had a 13-year old son too.
Underneath that, there was the continuing national grief and trauma of the assassination of President John Kennedy. For many Americans, the world stopped being an orderly place after that. In another part of the world, the Six-Day War had been conducted between Israel and the Arab countries of Egypt, Jordan and Syria that same month of June, 1967. At that time, few in the United States, at least that I knew of, grasped how significant an event that was – its effect would be longer reaching than any of the things we were demonstrating over or even grieving over. Years later, my Uncle Bob told me that he had been involved in gathering electronic signal intelligence from the Six Day War; without disclosing any confidence he pledged me to, as a result of gathering that intelligence, the United States was quickly and reliably assured, in real-time, that there was no need to intervene on behalf of Israel.
Near the intersection of Haight Street and Market Street, I saw a girl probably my age or only a little older, who was clearly a hippie by her clothing, headband, and long straight hair, so I went to ask her directions. She would know how to get to the Haight Ashbury. This was an interaction that was unlike any I had previously experienced, because of her manner of speaking and responding. Her speech was flat, slow, and devoid of expression or emotion. The expression sometime used was ‘spaced out’ – it was distinctly the catatonic style. She was the first person I ever heard use the expression, “Like, wow, man.”
To appreciate it, I have to write it like this: “Like wow man.”
She understood what I was saying, she answered my questions, but there was clearly something I needed to gather in here. Her manner was deliberate; the actual content of her responses was rational and responsive. I was being ‘schooled.’ She was demonstrating ‘this is how we talk and act in the Haight-Ashbury.’ The fast, busy, expressive speech of people from the East labeled them outsiders, not West-Coasters in the know, not hip in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury.
The Haight Ashbury of 1967 was a different culture than other drug cultures, but they all develop a certain style and code. One of the difficulties in recounting these experiences, now as a 66-year old Christian, is that even when I am not recounting actual drug use (where I will draw the veil of modesty wherever possible, so as not to be giving instructions or encouragement), it is difficult to describe the places and people without narrating and describing a certain ‘drug use style.’ The journalist’s charge to tell what happened, the narrative of my sojourn to California, is at tension with the Christian’s duty to point people to better conduct, not worse. Sandwiched somewhere between Allen Ginsburg and the Apostle Paul lies an autobiographical account that I want to tell, about the grace of God abounding to this ‘chief of sinners’ – but you’re going to have to bear with me a little. Not only do I need God’s grace, I need some of yours as well.
With my directions now the model of simplicity – walk up Haight Street (but I forgot to ask how far) – I encountered the geography of San Francisco. There are hills going from Market Street heading in the direction of the Haight-Ashbury district, and I was tired and hungry. It was a strenuous walk, maybe 45 minutes on a warm summer day, with significant slopes, when I was expecting it to be on the order of ten or fifteen minutes, and expecting every block to be the last.
I walked through the Fillmore District. At that time, pre-redevelopment social engineering, pre-dot com bubble, the Fillmore was a mostly African-American neighborhood, parts of it like other big-city ghettos of the 1960s, and parts socially and ethnically mixed. Although I didn’t know it then, one reason that the Fillmore had become so African-American is because the compulsory internment of Japanese citizens in World War II had left considerable vacant housing in the district, where many Japanese-Americans had resided. The housing was filled by incoming African-Americans picking up wartime defense jobs in the Bay Area. My thoughts were limited to ‘where will I sleep, where will I eat, and am I there yet?’
When I climbed the last sloping hill I had arrived at the intersection of Haight and Baker Street. At the beginning of Buena Vista Park and the Haight-Ashbury – I was there. There was a gas station on the corner, which had a visible water fountain. I walked over and got both a drink, and also a soaking, because the fountain was leaking and spurting water in different directions. It looked as if I had wet my pants. Although no one was watching me or even visibly in the area of the intersection, I was mortified the way only a teenager could be. I didn’t want to start walking down Haight Street, and mingling with the hippies, fabled as they were in my mind, when I looked like I had wet myself. There has to be some rule of human memory at work here which a neurologist should explain, or perhaps another Marcel Proust will begin a lengthy novel in a similar vein, but it is remarkable how clearly I remember that incident after 50 years. Buena Vista Park began immediately across Haight Street and I decided to retreat into the woods there, until my pants dried. Not an auspicious start.
The Haight-Ashbury though, had its own logic. I wandered into the most heavily wooded area of the park, and promptly ran into a hippy, sitting there, looking every bit as content as the cat in Alice in Wonderland. He was just there, be-ing. He did not find it unusual that I should wander in on his seclusion, and he invited me to sit down. He was probably about 20 years old, in my mind, then, rather mature. He was brown-haired, had a short beard and somewhat curly, longish hair, and a peaceful way of expressing himself. If he told me his name I don’t remember, but those formalities did not seem to matter to him. He was mild and still, as he sat there when I arrived, and mild and still when I left.
After a short period of time, he invited me to smoke a joint with him. I had never smoked a joint, but I certainly wasn’t going to admit that, and I readily agreed. We passed his joint back and forth. I do not remember any sensation of getting high, or remember any other particular sensation. I asked a few questions about food and lodging, and he responded with a vague answer. But we commenced a lengthy conversation about all manner of universal truths, the nature of the universe itself, and other metaphysical topics. He drew me a sketch of the eternal yin and yang on the small patch of bare ground between us, to illustrate the masculine and feminine principles and the eternal balance of universal forces. Since I was short on knowledge of eastern mysticism and the balancing of universal forces, I shared with him what I had learned in 10th grade physics class about the fundamental laws of Newtonian physics. He seemed to feel we were on the same, equal plane, and he accepted my observations with just as much interest as I accepted his. It really did seem rather as if time were standing still. Childish or childlike, it was a very different kind of conversation.
After some time, I bid him adieu and wandered out of Buena Vista park and generally down Haight Street, looking for some location where services for indigent teenagers were being offered. I don’t recall having to go too far, before I found myself in a storefront office of some type. There were other teenagers around. Someone there told me that a church was serving meals, and a number of us wound up being driven there in the back of a pickup truck or van. I don’t remember which church; but I do remember they served spaghetti. I made a friend there named Gary, who was about three years older than I, and we began to hang out together. He was local to California – his hometown was Burlingame, California.
While we were there another hippy or beatnik-type, older, about 35, asked if we needed someplace to stay, and said that we could stay at his place. His name was Dunbar, and he apparently was on a kind of mission to offer housing to runaways and teenagers. Later on that summer, because of his activities, he would be mentioned in an article in Look Magazine about the Haight-Ashbury, and described as a “lone-wolf looking” type of hippy. He was gruff-looking and had dark hair, not that long, and although not clean-shaven, had no beard. He was dressed in working clothes, not the colorful tie-dyes or psychedelic colors that were popular. The place that he had to offer was not in the Haight-Ashbury, it was out in the Mission District, maybe in the neighborhood of 25th and Potrero Street, although that is a guess. Gary and I wound up staying in Dunbar’s flat in the Mission District for the next six weeks, sleeping on the floor. Dunbar rented the second-floor flat with three other ‘socialist-idealists,’ Leo, Steve and Jim (all to be described later), who were in their late teens or twenties. I have no idea how the four of them met, but it had to be through a left-wing political activity or group of some kind.
Dunbar was a kind of throwback to older socialist ideals that characterized the Wobblies (the Industrial Workers of the World) and utopian socialists. If he had been born earlier, he would have traveled the road with Woody Guthrie and probably been a character in one of his songs. The Look Magazine writer had captured an element of his personality quickly and accurately. To my knowledge, Dunbar had only a passing interest in drugs or alcohol. He did not make sexual overtures to any of the teenagers who stayed in the flat or even flirt with the older teenage girls. He did not engage in conversations about ‘the Revolution,’ the Haight-Ashbury, America, the Vietnam War, or even much about ‘labor,’ ‘big corporations’ or ‘capitalism.’ He appeared to be motivated by a personal vision. His statements on topics which interested him, like socialist idealism and a new or better society, were generally short and to the point. That was his underlying reason for scouring the Haight-Ashbury to offer free housing to teenagers and travelers. He had some health issues at night when he had to get up to clear his nose and throat, which were gross sounding, which I attributed to his advanced years. At the age of 16, everybody and everything was new to me, so I didn’t ponder Dunbar much in the next six weeks, but in retrospect, he appears to be a singular figure. He was a socialist dreamer from an earlier age, dropping into a 1960s psychedelic cultural explosion, to carry on like Don Quixote, faithful to his own inner lights.
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It’s time to stop the narrative until our next visit, and think about poetry. After all, this is a coffee house – to get started, perhaps we can play Charlie Mingus’ Goodbye Pork Pie Hat (which was an elegy itself for saxophonist Lester Young). I would like to write a letter to Allen Ginsburg, to communicate with him. Perhaps I want to debate with him, but of course that isn’t fair – he can’t debate back. Everything he says or believes that I know about him is captured in his poetry, or not at all. Perhaps I want to capture the beauty of the way he writes and observes, but reverse the spiritual direction. Where does tragedy meld with faith?
Here is Allen Ginsburg’s Psalm II:
Ah, still Lord, ah, sweet Divinity
Incarnate in our grave and holy substance,
Circumscribed in this hexed endless world
Of Time, that turns a triple face, from Hell,
Imprisoned joy’s incognizable thought,
To mounted earth, that shudders to conceive,
Toward angels, borne unseen out of this world,
Translate the speechless stanzas of the rose
Into my poem, and I vow to copy
Every petal on a page; perfume
My mind, ungardened, and in weedy earth;
Let these dark leaves be lit with images
That strike like lightning from eternal mind,
Truths that are not visible in any light
That changes and is Time, like flesh or theory,
Corruptible like any clock of meat
That sickens and runs down to die
With all those structures and machinery
Whose bones and bridges break and wash to sea
And are dissolved into green salt and coral.
Brother Allen, you write so beautifully, hoping to express those images that strike like lightning from eternal mind, hoping to find those truths that are not visible in any light that changes – but I fear that you yourself consider your hopes to be somewhat forlorn, a brave gesture offered by a man walking through a prison, with the gallows at the end. You fully expect your lease to run, your tattered flag to be lowered. But you are mistaken, to think that time and death end all things and there is nothing left under the wheel of hard reality, but to sicken and run down to die.
I give you my hand, I offer you my rhythmic help as we tapwalk down the concrete halls, look up at the coiled barbed wire, hear the drumroll of the guardboots behind us and the slam of steel doors. I will wail in harmony for your locked-down jailhouse tears and have seen the stark cell you inhabit. We wear the same blue uniform. I will pass you notes through the bars.
Certainly there is a natural optimism to express while we are still at large, although the arresting forces gathering ahead are too obvious to ignore – here, now, we quiet foresight, we rejoice for dark leaves that they may also turn light. Even prisoners have hope. I will try to have more content to offer than the old universal principles, revolving in endless cycles, etc. I tell you that God has seen all this before the first star came screaming from the womb – He has put more into us, than any salt and coral sea can dissolve. Mortal sins are mortal, to be sure, and mortality is powerful, but a death-killer has come to reign.
We exist, we exist, because God has made us – there are layers to us also. Time and death and exhausted passion are so powerful, so definite, so final – until Jesus passes by and matter-of-factly, tells you that they are not. He who is from before the beginning and after the end, will tell you, nothing is final, nothing is acceptable, nothing is rejected, until he says so. The clock of meat is in his hands also. We have a better key, a better shield, than poetic petals which may resist bravely, but cannot withstand businesslike death with his appointment book and his beckoning finger and his relentlessly efficient guards.
Poignant, ethereal, wistful and tragic is your poetry, ghost to ghost you speak, but there is a higher poet. You should listen to your cellmate. Yes, time is assaulting you like a relentless battalion, breaking bones and bridges and scattering the beautiful petals. But you love, and you sin, and I cannot say yet, what my Master will say, about melding the unmeldable. Like any jailhouse lawyer, I should have an argument prepared and a position to advocate before the Judgment to come, but find myself speechless. The layers God has placed in us are deep, and if we uncover a few, we have not arrived anywhere near the bottom, where the soul looks out.
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Fear not, reader. There is more poetry to come.
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Thirteen years later. Mendelssohn’s Reformation Symphony comes to mind. I became a Christian through the solitary process of reading, including reading much by and about Martin Luther. When I converted, then, I was reading also, Augustine’s Confessions. At some point, he made it clear that if one is a Christian, one ought to be baptized and be joined to a church. I was 29 years old, had no experience with Christian churches except for some perfunctory attendance as a small child. I did not believe I had ever been baptized; rather, church attendance was part of the general pattern of social conformity of the 1950s (an impassioned objection to which was lodged by Ginsburg’s poem ‘Howl’) that had been the impetus for my sporadic attendance at a Sunday school, dropped off by one of parents. So, since I needed to join a church and had been reading Martin Luther, I deduced that I should be baptized in a Lutheran Church. I knew nothing about contemporary Lutheran Churches or contemporary Christianity; I was the product of theological arguments 500 years old or older, all expressed in terms of the written word in a book I read in solitude.
The first and most local Lutheran Church I called had on an answering machine. I left a message, explaining that I wanted to be baptized, and waited. After a period of some days, it was clear no return call was forthcoming. I was determined though, so I found a telephone book and called the next most local Lutheran Church. That was Centennial Lutheran Church of Kimberton, Pennsylvania, a small country church with thick white plaster walls. There I reached a secretary named Phyllis and was soon talking to the pastor, Dr. James Munz. We made an appointment for a Friday evening meeting at my apartment, probably on November 14, 1980.
Pastor Munz arrived promptly with his dark suit and white collar, slender, smiling, full of energy, with a broad face and smile and quick dark eyes. It turned out that he had a PhD in Chemistry; hence his title ‘Dr.’ He was puzzled at first by my call; he thought I must be asking to be baptized because I was going to be married and it was a requirement of my bride-to-be or family. I explained all about my reading program, about reading Martin Luther, understanding justification by faith, reading the Gospel of John, reading “I am the bread of life” and believing, being converted, etc. I explained to him about Villanova, explained somewhat my background beyond that.
Pastor Munz appeared to be delighted by all this. We got into a lengthy discussion about Luther, justification, imputed righteousness, all sorts of more or less esoteric theological topics that he didn’t normally get to discuss with laypeople. It was an animated conversation that darted all over theological issues of the Reformation. I had read Joseph Lortz’ books on the German Reformation, which had set the background for my reading of Luther, and I was reasonably informed about events, doctrines, positions, arguments of the Reformation, all topics 500 years old. At the end of our meeting, we made arrangements for me to come to Centennial, a church I attended for the next dozen years. I was to be baptized there within a few weeks, a memorable experience still.
Jim Munz was an important person in my life for that dozen-year period. There was a great deal in me that was unstable, dragged and diverted by passions, temptations, doubts, and questions that were no laughing matter – questions not about God, but questions about who and what I was. Jim was (and I would expect still is) a man possessing a genuine faith, evidencing the Holy Spirit, a man of intelligence and a sense of humor. He was also a stable role model, when stability was essential. His own faith was evidenced when he entered the seminary, after having obtained his PhD and also serving some years with the Peace Corps in Africa; Ghana, if I remember correctly. He served there with Nancy, his wife, equally slender and willowy, a folk singer and guitarist extraordinaire. At some point he disclosed to me that he was called a ‘fundy’ in seminary (a ‘fundamentalist’), because of the seriousness of his faith. He had enough confidence in my theological reading, though, to set me to teaching the adult Sunday School after I had been attending his church for about six months. We did a lengthy study on Isaiah in the adult class, a book near and dear to my intellectual heart from that day to this.
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Today there are some spiritual things that I can say. Not every circumstance is ambiguous. Spirituality may present a plain declaration as easily as floating poetic images. All the words, drawn from various silkscreens of my life, point to a particular person. If a man is in love, he should be prepared to say why.
I love Jesus because he accepted and embraced the mission and calling his Father, our Father, gave him. He set his face sternly toward Jerusalem. He knew what the outcome would be, and why. His courage in the face of certain death was not for his sake, it was for our sake.
I love Jesus because of his model of faith, faith in the garden, faith in God to raise him from the dead. I love him because of his obedience to God his Father.
I love him because he acted with enormous love, because he wanted to bring us up, not pull us down. I love him because he endured the injustice, the mockery, the betrayal, the willful misunderstanding and malicious envy of the people around him, because he loved so greatly and obeyed so deeply.
I love Jesus because he endured enormous physical violence and cruelty without complaint. He obeyed, through blows to his head, through insults from the world – and through lacerating flogging. He accepted death by crucifixion. He thought of others on the cross.
I love him because he taught us about God and the spiritual life, when we had no idea of what he was talking about. If he had not spoken to us and shown us who God is, we would be left with nothing but guesses and the Deist puzzle.
I love him because he healed us, loved us, taught us. I would not know who I was or why I existed, until he explained and sent the Holy Spirit, so I might both love and understand. He led us and leads me still. I love him because he not only did miracles, he helped us to understand what they meant.
I love him because of that resolve, that firmness in the right, that was directed toward a darkness that we created creatures could not imagine was capable of being overcome. I love him because he gave his blood for an eternal purpose, a purpose none of us understood.
I love Jesus because he is the one who loves my soul. Before him, my life was a shambles. And my soul would not know what a free breath was, if not for him. The wings of my dove are sheathed with silver, her feathers with shining gold.
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