Website of the Week: On Earth As it Is

On Earth As it Is is a project broadcasting prayer as story, and story as prayer. It is a continuous cycle (think of it as an exibition of ∞) of narrative and monologues addressed to God from different positions of faith. A new piece is posted each week, and the writers so far include Melanie Rae Thon, Erin McGraw, Michael Kimball, Ken Baumann, Adam Robinson, and ASU's own Melissa Pritchard. Need some reasoning behind the force? Erin McGraw writes, "Because destruction might pave the way to salvation, but salvation can be destroyed again."

Here's an excerpt from Melissa Pritchard's contribution, "Decomposing Articles of Faith":

Maker of Heaven and Earth

Samuel Beckett remembered his mother’s womb, even its color.

I recall being hanged on some medieval gallows.

I met a soul mate in Prague last summer—a Pakistani diplomat who claimed his hands had been cut off in a former life, and that he had known me for lifetimes. I insisted my head had been cut off in a former life with the result that in this life, it has made me afraid to speak up for years, and has given me an hysteric’s loathing of necklaces and neck scarves. Perhaps in one of our lifetimes together, she quipped drily, you lacked your hands and I was minus my head. Oh yes, most definitely, said the kindly, if not kingly, Pakistani man, lubriciously rubbing together his attached hands.

We believe what makes us happy. I am happiest believing in God, not so much the

Singular deity, the divinely molded One, but a permeable, porous, timeless, palpable outside-the-law essence informing all things high and low. God as: good vibration.

And Of All That Is Seen and Unseen

Swimming in the pool yesterday morning, I came upon a small sickle shaped eucalyptus leaf, floating on the water’s turquoise surface. The leaf was blackened with hundreds of ants, the leaf their life raft. I picked the leaf out of the pool, laid it on the ledge and studied its miniature horrorscape—the ants on the bottom layers were clearly deceased, the ones at the top, a few, not many, were still alive. Survivors. How had this tragedy unfolded, how did hundreds of ants—and were they of the same tribal declension?—wind up on a eucalyptus leaf pale and hooked as a nail paring, and what of me, their Deity, come upon them, rescuing those still alive—would they tell stories of me, of the great wet-head, chlorine scented deity who saved them? Will religions and sub-religions be built around their extinguished memory of me? Is that how God looks down upon us We Willie Winkees on earth, ants heaped on a curving leaf in various stages of fornication, a-sup, a-reveling, a-death and a-dying?