Talking Trash


Dear Eugene,

Growing up is as much about unlearning as learning.

No one can survive without learning to preserve one's all-important self.  No one can truly live without dying continually in ways big and small to one's petty little self.  One doesn't need to trumpet a great religion or tall calling to know this much is true about life on earth.

So what is the fine balance--if to speak of a balance is even a correct frame of mind to comprehend this contradiction?  Is there a scale to adjust how much I should choose to keep or lose myself?  A spectrum of just the right mix of give and take?  And based on what?  If I cheat the scale and did what I didn't mean to do, does it still count favorably to my humanity, or am I risking a deep-down rotting of heart that will one day produce a stench indisputable and inexcusable?

Jesus said to his disciples, "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.  For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it."

Did Jesus talk about a balance, a fine-tuning of our level of comfort, a nuanced situational ethics?  Do you see a scale here?  I didn't either.  How are we supposed to respond to a declaration as ham-handed as this?

I guess most of the time we just don't respond.

We heard what was read and uttered our perfunctory Amen--like, who is going to disagree with the Bible, especially the red-letter words?  We don't even have enough time and energy to learn how to properly put our life together; who can squeeze out an ounce of motivation or willingness to unlearn our ways of hunter-gatherer?  If I can keep up with the latest "scientific findings" about what I should feed my kids and actually find a way to feed them accordingly, it would be a triumph of will on my part, a podium moment, an Oscar speech that deserves its gold-plated hashtag.

Losing our life?  We are too busy scrambling in the dark, too confused about what we are trying to gain in our life, to even start to think about what it means by losing it.  We are wind-up toy that must run its course to wobble and rumble through life, that words go in our right ear usually tumble out of the left wholesale, through too short a straight tunnel to flirt with a chance of remembering, let alone making a difference.

You can tell I am going nowhere with what I am trying to get at here.  I am telling you because I know you don't need me to draw a sermon conclusion to truly listen to me.

Sometimes I kinda wish my Christian friends would at least be honest enough to talk trash.

Yours, Alex

Comments

  1. UnknownApril 14, 2018 at 11:45 PM

    To extend this trash talk, I am becoming more aware of my rubbish goals, needs & identities mounting on quicksand. The wound-up toy will soon halt in its abjectly sorrowful course to contribute to trash. Lose our trash & gain all!

    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