(Re)collecting


Dear Eugene,

If you can pick a season to experience a life-changing tragedy (that you must face by the end of the year), what would your choice be?

Hopeful spring?  Youthful summer?  Dreamy autumn?  Cosy winter?

Around Valentine's?  Just before/after Christmas?  Back to school week?  Tax season?  Mother's Day?

Don't worry, I have nothing heavy or profound to say today; it only sounds like so.  In fact, I think the weight of this question (which I personally have not heard asked) is in how matter-of-fact it all is when tragedy strikes.

It just happens; what are you going to do about it?

Not that you have not heard of something like this happening before.  Not that anyone has pledged to make you the exception.  Not that the possibility never crossed your mind.  It kind of just happens, like in the final scene of "The Departed," which in the script reads:


COLIN

(accepting it, sort of,but only in a COLIN way)
                       OK.
The Colin character (Matt Damon) just said OK (in a very DAMON way) when he met his final comeuppance, something I am sure he saw coming.

But that didn't stop him from getting grocery and fine wine, what he was doing entering this final scene.

More than a few times in my life I've heard someone said If  they are going to crash my car they better total it.

I thought, Wow, you really got it planned out.  Just curious: Can they hurt you too?  If getting hurt is part-and-parcel of your wishful plan, is there a limit to how far they can go (so that you can get the money for a new car and still be not too broken to derive joy out of it)?

 Would you take a chance of dying?

 We are always taking a chance of dying when we choose to live another day, step out to buy another stalk of celery, take in a sip of fine wine.

I don't really know where I am going with this, but I do know why I started.

I recalled a year ago this time I knew not most of the big changes that would transpire in a mere year, and that the face of things and people that occupied my time and my heart then would morph into something and someone else, strange but familiar, a new spring that summons back the old but needs not being limited by laden nostalgia, hazy memory, or bad records.

Last summer a week before an annual backyard barbecue that a family would host and I would expect to receive an invitation as indeed I had, something as anti-backyard-barbecue as one can imagine happened to this family and now the only recollection I have of what that barbecue could have been is a void.  Since then I tried a few times to fill it up and after every attempt the void gets bigger and last summer feels more distant.

Was it really less than a year ago?  I can't presume anymore. I am not trying to sound Proustian.  More than once in the past months I did struggle to pin down the moment when I first received the bad news about this family.

Now the concluding statement.

What are you getting at?  I am sure you are asking.  I have five different concluding statements, each facilely satisfying and profoundly inadequate in its own petty little way.  Give me another quarter hour and I will come up with something more and more clever.

Kohelet, the purported writer of Ecclesiastes, is, literally translated, a Gatherer.  (The usual name given to this nameless writer is "Preacher" or "Teacher").

I suppose I could steal his concluding remark after his much backbreaking "gathering."

"That’s the whole story. Here now is my final conclusion: Fear God and obey his commands, for this is everyone’s duty."

Well, I suppose too a good sermon can come out of this.  A good sermon that helps no one ("Meaningless!").  The Gatherer opened a can of worms instead of closing the lid on anything.

Every preacher needs to do his/her own backbreaking gathering.

Gathering still, Alex

Comments

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