Hold Them Together

Dear Eugene,

A premature baby who spent five months in the hospital without even one visitor was adopted by a pediatric nurse.

A couple adopted six children just to finally kill them all with themselves, drove the whole family off a cliff in an SUV.

If we can hold both of these together and say, Yes, it makes sense, it makes sense to me as a human being, seeing what I can in the mirror, that Yes, like the nurse I can love and fight for justice in a big way and for the long haul, and Amen, I can kill too, sometimes, if given the chance and reason, everyone in sight, myself included if necessary.

Anything that holds these two pictures together is speaking truth about humanity--a novel, a sermon, a "holy book," a social media portrait of the Self, anything that proposes to say a word about human being.  Anything that wrestles not with such fundamental is evasive, dishonest, and ultimately self-defeating.

It is not a matter of being "positive vs. negative," or "optimistic vs. pessimistic" about humanity; these are false dichotomies, reductionistic categories.  You know it is a bad sermon when you hear one stating black or white.  We know it is bad politic when we are called to be either red or blue, as if it has to do with being right or wrong.  We know.  Deep down.  In a quiet room.  Alone.

Though we can hardly help ourselves but keep perpetuating falsehood, as in giving a thumbs up or down to the most superficial reading of things and people, in the name of being supportive or congenial to what is goods and in solidarity to zero in and denounce the bads.

And if we are being superficial in our tweets and texts and FB posts, it's not because we succumb momentarily to the shortfall of the format but are otherwise sane and lucid about humanity: we lie just as much in our theology and politic and business dealing and, before and more importantly than anything else, in how we relate to people closest to us, people we should have learned the most and most specifically for having wrestled with both the angel and demon in them more than occasionally.

Still, years, decades, two sides of the same bed, enough diapers to suffocate a whale, hospital trips and car accidents, countless vacation dollars, in and out of the valley of the shadow of death, we look at their face, our spouse, our child, our family, our friend, and still insist on seeing a flat surface, a vacuum with a label on top, suggested serving, content advisory, concise and precise and totally misleading.

We say life is tough and that's why we need to watch stupid shows, read bad books, believe in advertising and moan our way to the next vacation to stop life from happening if only for a moment.  No, it's the other around: we get lazy about life, shut ourselves off from the truth, know not the others and not even ourselves, and then life gets tough and tougher.  We are reading every alphabet on the label but when looking up to the face, we see something strange and perplexing and decide it's too much trouble to figure this one out and probably time for another counselling session or relationship manual.

We are people "whose eyes are open but don’t see a thing, whose ears are open but don’t understand a word, who avoid making an about-face and getting forgiven."

Easter.  Good News.  What Good News?

Yours, Alex