One and Last


Dear Eugene,

"The glory of God is (wo)man fully alive."  So said an early church fathers Irenaeus.

I don't know Latin, but I heard it is a bit of a mistranslation.  What he actually said is even more controversial: "For the glory of God is the living man, and the life of man is the vision of God."

I am sure the full glory of God is more than the living man, but what Irenaeus said has a context and he's talking about a vision of God most fully available to (wo)man as we experience this life.  A refined statement, yes; a rarefied theology, no.

I am a coarser man so my way of saying the same thing is to ask what I believe to be another essential human question: "How can (wo)man be given so much and end up losing it all?"

A yet coarser man Nicky Santoro, the Joe Pesci character in Scorsese's Casino, is even more passionate and particular in his articulation of the human trouble: "It should have been perfect...but in the end, we f-cked it all up. It should have been so sweet, too. But it turned out to be the last time that street guys like us were ever given anything that f-ckin' valuable again."

"Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces."  It should have been so sweet, too...

He came down through fields of green
On the summer side of life
He prayed all night

 Then he walked into a house
Where love had been misplaced
His chance to waste

 And if you saw him now
You'd wonder why he would cry
The whole day long

Life should have been so sweet, too.  But at the end, we are just street guys given something valuable.  For the first time.  For the last time?

Life is our one chance to waste.

Yours, Alex

Comments

  1. KateOctober 5, 2018 at 5:30 AM

    Dear Eugene,

    “How can (wo)man be given so much and end up losing it all?”

    In the brilliance of the desert morning sun, I was among 3 postgraduate students invited to speak to high schoolers about a dark topic in Las Vegas: the secrecy of opioid abuse. With the guidance from 2 of our professors serving as our mentors, we had partnered closely & planned for this event over several months. For my 30-minute speech, I had deliberately arranged with the co-presenters to be scheduled last on our agenda. I loved the art of public speaking & I seemed to find a sense of thrill in presenting the final words to a crowd. I wanted to package our joint presentations for the group like a shiny gift box cinched with an ivory satin ribbon.

    But my teen audience did not look thrilled as I stepped forward to deliver words which I had memorized & rehearsed too many times before. I was greeted with rarefied silence as if death had breathed into our thoughts & strangled our neck of will to live, to thrive. I saw eyes of varied contours but all glared like holograms shifting between pain & shock. I did not even remember what I had said to them. At the end, I posed a question. A hand waved to offer a personal story of drug addiction & recovery. Then a few more young arms raised to volunteer perspectives. I heard someone weeping. I saw nothing more. I felt like I had been gifted something immeasurably sad - without the need of a ribbon, with the final words yet to break through.

    “One and Last… Life should have been so sweet, too. But at the end, we are just street guys given something valuable.”

    Yours, Kate

    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