Hello and welcome to a very bizarre & offbeat place (as strange as the mysteries of quantum physics, as unusual as the comedy of Andy Kaufman, as leftfield as surreal art, as pretentious as this sentence)...

My name is Mark Douglas Antony Verma. I was born in the 20th century, the Year of Our Lord 1971. The date makes me what Baby Boomer sociologist types like to call a Generation Xer. This means I'm supposed to despise the culture of Boomers (the 1960s, et al) and that I love Nirvana, MTV, Nintendo, etc. Actually, I do think the 1960s Hippies were well-meaning but naive and I did once overdose on flannel (as Boomers can recall where they were when Kennedy was shot, I can recall where I was when Kurt Cobain blew his brains out), I actually happen to be a hybrid of modernism and postmodernism. I love 1970s culture (punk, funk, 70s soul, New Wave, disco, flares). I like the fashions and attitude of modernism (Ben Sherman shirts, Target patterns, etc as well as Globe chairs and so on). But I guess this is actually postmodern 'retromodernism' as I am fascinated by the form of modernism and certainly don't don the fashion to make a statement or own IKEA furniture to show how thoroughly modern and anti-tradition I am. I actually happen to like tradition and ritual and appreciate the substance of older forms, not devoid of content like things in the postmodern epehemeral world, forms which have an innate ability to connect a person to the ideas and beliefs and experiences of people who lived centuries or even millennia ago, forms that can even help connect one to God.

Which brings me to the final (and most important) aspect of my existence. I am what many people call a 'Christian' but what I call a student-disciple and spiritual brother and soul comrade of the god-man Jesus Christ. If this Jewish rabbi had merely been a man when he walked the earth (like Buddha) then he would be my guru (an ancient Hebrew version of the Mahareshi Mahesh Yogi, a Judiac Deepak Chopra, a Galilean Dr Phil, a Nazarene Oprah Winfrey). But because he was also the Son of a living, breathing, God Who Is There, a spiritual deity made flesh incarnate, he is my Saviour. People often cringe at such language but I respond by asking them to think about all the bullshit and ripoffs of their life, all the hypocrisy, all the experiences where hope and dreams fall short of their imagined marks, all the tears, rage, loss, and despair which hits your brain, your consciousness like pieces of broken glass, as the John Coffey character described it in The Green Mile. I ask them to perceive their life as one of shadows, where light is in short supply. Then I tell them that it is precisely from a life of contentless, grey, temporary, angst-riven, drab, pointless, meaningless ennui staring at the walls of nothingness and void that Jesus has 'saved' me.

I also tell them about the form of Christianity - what I like to call The Way (as the early Christians did) - that I have been 'saved' into. I like to tell them that, far from being a merely fundamentalist, simplistic, dogmatic code of moral living (surrounded by unthinking, Bible-parroting automatons), it is a life of faith and mystery, of good times connecting with amazing human beings (sharpening me as iron sharpens iron) as well as periods of almost unthinkable sorrow - a life of both mountain-top joy and the valley of the shadow of death where I coexist with Christ and the darkness, the three of us the only citizens of a hellish abode of the heart, but manageable, sometimes only just, because of Jesus. Manageable because he has walked the pathway of pain first, because he has taken all such misery upon himself, at the time he was brutally put to death all those years ago, nailed to a piece of wood as an ultimate sacrifice, paying, with his blood, for all the spiritual filth my selfish actions have churned out, like a factory with smokestacks pouring sin into the atmosphere of earth, polluting all around.

People also seem to cringe at the word 'sin' which is when I tell them to imagine all the guilt they have felt, all the people whose feelings they have hurt, all the selfish decisions they have made, all the darkness they have mined from the far side of their moon and dumped on the surfaces of people in their orbit around the sun of a lifetime to date. I tell them this is sin. I tell them that my sin combined with their sin, and with all the sin of every person who has ever lived, who lives today, and who is yet to come, congealed together in a cosmic giant black snowball of sinfulness which was heaped upon the shoulders of Christ at the time he died, like a lamb to the slaughter. I tell them that sin, which placed a hitherto unbridgeable gap between me and a holy, pure, transcendent God Who Is There, was de-fanged because of this act so that the way now exists for me to connect to the Cosmic Creator. I tell them that Death is no longer a source of fear. I tell them that Destiny now informs my days. I tell them that the way is clear for them too. I tell them that the God Who Is There has promised to reveal himself to anyone who asks him to do so. I tell them that unlike human beings, the God Who Is There keeps his promises. I tell them that I take nothing seriously except the God Who Is There because there is no gap between what he says and what he does (unlike everyone else) and, as such, you can take him at his word, The Word - made flesh in the form of Jesus Christ two thousand years ago.

I have always loved writing. Years ago I worked as a journalist as this was the only way, it seemed, to make a living from writing. Now I even work in a library (another way to be close to words). Inspired by the God Who Is There, I decided to post some of my writing online. Friends had asked me about various pieces I had written and it seemed a good way to make the work easily accessible to them. I also believe that, occasionally, the God Who Is There has given me, like countless others over the centuries, an insight or three and that he wanted me to make it all available to all and sundry (they were not 'my' revelatory titbits but his - and now here they are). I also figured it made sense to put all my writing - good, bad an ugly - online so as to illustrate my development as a writer and even Christian. Before, I never used to involve God in the writing process. But I now endeavour to share my entire life with him, involving him in the trivial to matters of ultimate importance. Since I began to do this, my life has entered a more amazing realm than previously. My writing has taken off and landed on mysterious moons and faraway planets of the imagination that I had never before conceived.

So I present to you, whoever you are reading this right now, various things I have written. Enjoy, vilify, respond however you like - feel free to email me about anything you want - I like discussion and debate. I may disagree with the lifestyle of a gay liberationist or the dogma of a Muslim fundamentalist but, in the words of that God-hating Enlightenment-era satirist Voltaire, I will defend their right to say what they wish to say (a 'right' that derives from Jehovah God - the ability to choose whom to follow or what to believe - rather than the UN Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1948, upon which the 'rights theology' of postmodern culture rests).