The Order of the Soul

Dear Eugene,

Yesterday I was talking to my friends about Trump, and this is what I said:

"Trump is like a mirror, or magnifying glass. He didn't make people turn into this or that. He simply helps to reflect, magnify what is already there. So what was already there (or not there) in this 'Evangelical Christianity' (that helped to put him there)? Do we find trace of such things (or absence of others) in our own particular brand of Christianity?"

I shall begin to answer my own questions.

Trump shouldn't surprise us. A fertile soil is cultivated to give growth to what we see today, and let me say my hands were in the soil too.

Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won't be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
Has crossed the threshold
And it has overturned
The order of the soul

A certain Canadian prophet told us a while back already.

We don't have to go far; we don't even have to search.  Everything speaks Trumpism.  We take it all in without questioning.  We join in the conversation.  What goes around comes around.

This morning I read on CNN: "Body of Nobel winner's wife found at Illinois landfill."

The news article was bracketed by two pictures: one, at the top, of the Nobel winner and his wife smiling, the other, at the bottom, a bigger picture of a worrying lady with a head full of silvery hair, with this caption: "Scarborough Funeral Directors are Fuming That People Know About This (Experts In Money Insurance)."


If one clicks on the bottom picture, one will be directed to a certain website that claims: "Brilliant Funeral Insurance Sweeping Canada (How Canadians are fighting back against the cost of funerals)."  And there, I can start to plan for my own death, to extend my life's winning streak to somewhere beyond the grave, where beside the gates St. Peter directs his approving smile straight at my approach.

Nothing is sacred anymore.

What should have stopped us on our track to reconsider life, to ask questions, to long for God, to cry out to God in a new way, was quickly dispelled by desecration.

"Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like."

The gates of mercy were opened at the news headline, but we shut ourselves away by the time we turned the mouse-scroll by a mere half circle.  Like a subconscious reflex.  We shut God up out of habit.

"There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places."  Our hero Wendell Berry said that.

Yours, Alex

Comments

  1. TimMarch 20, 2018 at 8:32 AM

    "No unsacred places..." Alex, as you've already pointed out, this past Saturday evening was a place and time in which much that's been desecrated was breathed upon anew before our eyes, resacralized. A threshold, a liminal space, in which Trumpisms are at least momentarily left behind.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AlexMarch 20, 2018 at 9:05 AM

    Yes, indeed, sacred space rededicated.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One World, This

Image
Dear Eugene, I am sure some would object to what I said yesterday .  Based on the kind of education we are getting, maybe we should all object. Well, science can explain a lover's kiss , one says, We must know this by now.   Things that go on in a lover's head, bring to bear a series of trigger working together and crossing paths to conjure up what finally a poet would pick up the slack to call "romance."  It's simply a release of chemical cocktail that heroin and cocaine too can effectively concoct, just as "obsessive compulsive" in its serotonin-ian nature to give us a long good memory, just as culturally conditioned, almost like a basic human instinct. Who are we (to answer yesterday's question again) to say what actually  "shapes" us?  Science can explain ourselves to us, and does a better job every next morning.  The rest are just tassels on the fringe, perfunctory footnotes to scientific facts--the only truthful account of actua
Keep reading

He Walks Our Line

Image
Dear Eugene, The sun is brilliant today, best time of year, not too hot, not too cold, not too anything , a good life hangs finely in the balance of a myriad of capricious elements, mostly hidden, many I won't even come to identify let alone make sense of before my little life ends. Two mornings ago I read in the news that a suicide bomber attacked a voter registration center in Afghanistan, killing 31 people.  Yesterday morning the headline was gone, and I had to search online to see the casualty was then more than doubled. If I didn't quickly scan the headlines Sunday morning I would not even know something like this had happened, like the registering voters knew not a bomb was in their midst, and by the time they knew for sure there would be no point in knowing, let alone trying to make sense of the blast or piecing smithereens back together.  A line was drawn to divide before and after, life and death, hope and despair; a line that gives and takes away the meaning of
Keep reading

A Word for the Caveman

Image
Dear Eugene, We could imagine when a caveman was chased by a T-Rex, the nature man would naturally cry for help. His shriek would have been a plead no less earnest than ours when we lost control of our vehicle to an evil sheet of ice.  If after years of high education we could in our final moment at least wrap our spinning head around the physics of skating in a ball of metal into our death, the caveman wouldn't have the luxury of comparable enlightenment to come to terms with his demise under the chicken-feet of a leviathan. Who was the caveman crying to?  In whose name was his prayer going to be answered, if at all?  And if he could not even utter an intelligible syllable comprehensible to himself, who was going to speak on his behalf when he was most in need to be spoken for? Now these are the questions I would ask a Christian if I am not one. Not too long ago a pastor tried to warn me about N. T. Wright by saying he's cool with the dude and all, but make sure I
Keep reading