He Walks Our Line
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 many lives. No life walks away from the line unaffected.
Yet I asked myself: What is the point of me reading the news any way? What is the point of acknowledging a sorrow that I know not enough in my heart to give meaning to my tears, if I actually shed them at all? It is obscene to ponder on someone else's darkness when my prayer has only to do with my sun keeping shining on me. (Give us this day our daily not-too-anything...) I was affected by the rude interruption, for sure, but I walked off from the line unscathed.
Last week someone told me he was greatly distressed by what his chiropractor told him about himself, the body he inseparably inhabits, all the while blissfully ignorant of its secret, death-seeking ways. He doesn't really want to hear any more news about his Self. "Have you seen a chiropractor lately?" he then turned around to ask me.
To live another day in peace, we might not want to know too much about anything. Who wants to sift through the rubble of non-meaning to find any possible meaning, especially when all evidence points to the futility of our quest?
To live life as if it has meaning is to trust somehow it's all meant to be good, not just ultimately but even now, that there is reason--even joy--to jump up in the morning and face another day.
This trust certainly cannot base on mere head knowledge of proven "facts" or even highly probable hopes. For every "scientific breakthrough" there must be another hundred devastation lurking around the next bend, evils we don't even know yet the need to name. If I trust in science, what I can "prove" to be "true" and nothing else, then the only honest feeling in me should be a cancerous growth of fear.
Who cares if my great-great-great-great-grandson will no longer need to fear cancer in his day? He is not me. I fear cancer and it kills me, not him. I am not magnanimous enough to live the life of a cheerleader for some possible future good many generations' remove. My offspring will have something bigger than cancer to fear anyway.
Nature programs about survival in the wild are the most depressing shows. We watch animals killing or be killed in slo-mo and hi-def as a beautified ritual of exorcism. There's nothing to "learn" other than everyone and everything will eventually die miserably into its lone personal non-meaning. I don't know why I want to be "educated" about it, if this is the only way to tell life's story. I often admired the narrator (usually with a majestic British accent) for keeping a straight face and not bursting into a cosmic shower of tears or dying of violent cynical laughs.
Yet, with this mind-numbing one-note tune of a "survival" story in our head, we still wake up from our night of dying and born again into our resurrection every morn. Sometimes the sun is brilliant and other times we need to lie to ourselves to keep believing the sun is still there, wondering if we should stay dead for good.
Whatever you call it there is this gut feeling in us that says: As long as we choose to believe there is reason to live another day, there is meaning to live it. It is a tautology, a self-fulfilling prophesy, a trust that somehow it's all meant to be good. Even this very next day.
Who are we trusting? What do we trust in?
One needs to be offended if this gut-feeling of a trust is dismissed as blind faith. To call human's reckless abandon to live meaningfully a "blind faith" is like telling a teetering toddler, "Why don't you stop trying so hard to stand up? What's the point? Drop dead already!"
Of course this is just human talking, I am sure some would say. Countless other things lived and died without so much as a fizz to speak about any possible meaning. We are the kind that has the consciousness to make stuffs up, invent and innovate, for necessity and for fun. We talk and talk and talk, like our life is dependent on our speaking, making up stuffs that cannot be "proved," so that we can find a reason to keep on keeping on.
Our biggest invention, some say, of course, is God, the Giver in whom we "trust." And it is only natural then if we don't worship the real Giver we must find something else to worship. We must place our headlong trust, heedless confidence in something and worship it for its life-giving power.
David Foster Wallace once said, "...here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness."
Wallace hanged himself when he was 46.
I don't know what finally devastated him. I don't know if something finally "ate" him up even when he knew the trick is "keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness." No one can judge.
How does one keep the truth "up front in daily consciousness"? What does this exactly mean? What does such a person look like, talk like, smell like, live like?
It is easy to tell when a person is being eaten up alive. A hater we could smell from 50 feet away. A worrier we could spot for the 50 tons on her back. Sometimes you can hear the marching steps of cancer cell. We are all diseased, and for that it is not hard for us to see the dis-ease growing in another person.
But what does a healthy person look like? A life that unapologetically brims with grounding-on-earth meaning and reaching-for-heaven vivacity? A person who speaks of ceaseless meaning endlessly, talk and talk and talk, keep creating stuffs of hope and faith and love, as if he is the Giver, the Word of truth himself, in whom we seek to trust--if we only know who he is?
Is s/he a prophet? A visionary inventor? A moral guru? A tech wizard? The King in the jungle of survival? A revolutionary vanguard? The biggest philanthropic investor? An artist with a mythical presence and transcending visions? Beauty that does not fade? A great healer of brokenness, piecing our smithereens back together?
A Word that speaks for you and me and for everyone, living or dead or dying, who draws a line on the ground and says, I walked it too. Now follow me and be whole again.
We lack a glorious imagination to visualize this person.
In the name of Jesus, the Word, Alex
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 many lives. No life walks away from the line unaffected.
Yet I asked myself: What is the point of me reading the news any way? What is the point of acknowledging a sorrow that I know not enough in my heart to give meaning to my tears, if I actually shed them at all? It is obscene to ponder on someone else's darkness when my prayer has only to do with my sun keeping shining on me. (Give us this day our daily not-too-anything...) I was affected by the rude interruption, for sure, but I walked off from the line unscathed.
Last week someone told me he was greatly distressed by what his chiropractor told him about himself, the body he inseparably inhabits, all the while blissfully ignorant of its secret, death-seeking ways. He doesn't really want to hear any more news about his Self. "Have you seen a chiropractor lately?" he then turned around to ask me.
To live another day in peace, we might not want to know too much about anything. Who wants to sift through the rubble of non-meaning to find any possible meaning, especially when all evidence points to the futility of our quest?
To live life as if it has meaning is to trust somehow it's all meant to be good, not just ultimately but even now, that there is reason--even joy--to jump up in the morning and face another day.
This trust certainly cannot base on mere head knowledge of proven "facts" or even highly probable hopes. For every "scientific breakthrough" there must be another hundred devastation lurking around the next bend, evils we don't even know yet the need to name. If I trust in science, what I can "prove" to be "true" and nothing else, then the only honest feeling in me should be a cancerous growth of fear.
Who cares if my great-great-great-great-grandson will no longer need to fear cancer in his day? He is not me. I fear cancer and it kills me, not him. I am not magnanimous enough to live the life of a cheerleader for some possible future good many generations' remove. My offspring will have something bigger than cancer to fear anyway.
Nature programs about survival in the wild are the most depressing shows. We watch animals killing or be killed in slo-mo and hi-def as a beautified ritual of exorcism. There's nothing to "learn" other than everyone and everything will eventually die miserably into its lone personal non-meaning. I don't know why I want to be "educated" about it, if this is the only way to tell life's story. I often admired the narrator (usually with a majestic British accent) for keeping a straight face and not bursting into a cosmic shower of tears or dying of violent cynical laughs.
Yet, with this mind-numbing one-note tune of a "survival" story in our head, we still wake up from our night of dying and born again into our resurrection every morn. Sometimes the sun is brilliant and other times we need to lie to ourselves to keep believing the sun is still there, wondering if we should stay dead for good.
Whatever you call it there is this gut feeling in us that says: As long as we choose to believe there is reason to live another day, there is meaning to live it. It is a tautology, a self-fulfilling prophesy, a trust that somehow it's all meant to be good. Even this very next day.
Who are we trusting? What do we trust in?
One needs to be offended if this gut-feeling of a trust is dismissed as blind faith. To call human's reckless abandon to live meaningfully a "blind faith" is like telling a teetering toddler, "Why don't you stop trying so hard to stand up? What's the point? Drop dead already!"
Of course this is just human talking, I am sure some would say. Countless other things lived and died without so much as a fizz to speak about any possible meaning. We are the kind that has the consciousness to make stuffs up, invent and innovate, for necessity and for fun. We talk and talk and talk, like our life is dependent on our speaking, making up stuffs that cannot be "proved," so that we can find a reason to keep on keeping on.
Our biggest invention, some say, of course, is God, the Giver in whom we "trust." And it is only natural then if we don't worship the real Giver we must find something else to worship. We must place our headlong trust, heedless confidence in something and worship it for its life-giving power.
David Foster Wallace once said, "...here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness."
Wallace hanged himself when he was 46.
I don't know what finally devastated him. I don't know if something finally "ate" him up even when he knew the trick is "keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness." No one can judge.
How does one keep the truth "up front in daily consciousness"? What does this exactly mean? What does such a person look like, talk like, smell like, live like?
It is easy to tell when a person is being eaten up alive. A hater we could smell from 50 feet away. A worrier we could spot for the 50 tons on her back. Sometimes you can hear the marching steps of cancer cell. We are all diseased, and for that it is not hard for us to see the dis-ease growing in another person.
But what does a healthy person look like? A life that unapologetically brims with grounding-on-earth meaning and reaching-for-heaven vivacity? A person who speaks of ceaseless meaning endlessly, talk and talk and talk, keep creating stuffs of hope and faith and love, as if he is the Giver, the Word of truth himself, in whom we seek to trust--if we only know who he is?
Is s/he a prophet? A visionary inventor? A moral guru? A tech wizard? The King in the jungle of survival? A revolutionary vanguard? The biggest philanthropic investor? An artist with a mythical presence and transcending visions? Beauty that does not fade? A great healer of brokenness, piecing our smithereens back together?
A Word that speaks for you and me and for everyone, living or dead or dying, who draws a line on the ground and says, I walked it too. Now follow me and be whole again.
We lack a glorious imagination to visualize this person.
In the name of Jesus, the Word, Alex
Dear Eugene,
ReplyDeleteI have learned firsthand from an early age about the ambitious nature of lines.
A year before Expo 86, for a bookmark drawing contest at my local library, I submitted my masterpiece of bold, vivid lines defining the cityscape rising in anticipation of the world fair. The lines drawn must have impressed the judges: I was conferred 1st place.
So I became further emboldened with an obsessive focus on creating more ambitious lines. The next year in art class, I sketched grander, wilder lines to depict the architectural mystique of "Chinatown" for the city's multicultural art contest in addition to painting my most imaginatively vibrant lines and swirls of the "Pacific Ocean" for an international children's art competition. For both entries, I emerged in the top 3.
By the time I entered college, I was certain of my ambitions: a direct, platinum line - an expedient pathway towards a radiant career & reserved seat of privilege in the Ivory Tower just for me.
But the platinum line I had imagined towards success - in its crudest version - soon halted. I lost vision, my grades tumbled & "upfront in daily consciousness" mocked me. I was the hater recognizable from 50 ft away. None of my award-winning lines of childhood art could have consoled me.
We must have somehow journeyed together in your book, "The Pastor," recently gifted to me by an earnest friend: "When the sun came up, I knew I was in the wrong place at the wrong time doing the wrong thing." (p. 83.)
Indeed, the delicate balance of "capricious elements, mostly hidden" eludes my understanding of ambitiously drawn lines defining boundaries and directions. The trajectory & margin of my life may never collide into the scope of influence required to change multitudes of lives in the most dramatic magnitude but help me, Jesus - through Your Word - to rely on Your strength in defining a meaningful roadmap for my life & others & to walk the line as You have done.
In Your Name, Jesus, Echo