You,
“All
in the great boat of God.”
I am content to think of it
all as a mistake. The fiery messages in my youth of sermons, the inner witness
of something more, the careful laid out logic of the thing and the pull of the
other thing into nihilism and nothingness. I am content, for a very brief
second, to think of all it as a trick of the mind, the illusion called meaning
and the desperate grasp of the infinitesimal human mind to elevate itself into
galactic prominence. I would be content but not right.
The problem I always had
with religion or faith was that it did not speak to me. It had a way of setting
unnecessary landmarks and goals. It had ritual and ceremony. It had conscience
and guilt. None of these things spoke to me. I wanted wholeness and life. I wanted
pleasure and joy. I did not want the voice of man, because I knew what man was
as I was one myself, speaking to me over the voice of God. It did not make
sense and it still does not because man is weak and will always, always break
your heart. Or put more accurately, I am weak and I will always, always break your heart. It made no sense to me that
the absolute terror and horror of the world could be circumvented by the saying
of a few prayers and the placebo of a few words. The group think inherent in
the blind faith of fools did not resonate with anything my body, soul or heart
was into then and even now.
It had to become personal. It
had to speak to the individual. And it finally did. I was close to the end of
teenage years when I had an encounter with the One who is all ones at once. It was
not dramatic. I was not blinded on my way to the nearest watering hole or super
market of ideas. It was a gradual call finally answered. It filled me with a
compulsion and an unholy rage that was just my former self fighting the coming
blue. I was not myself and I was home and myself at the same time. It did not
cure me of myself. It told me when I would die so the fun could really start. Decades
later I still struggle with that first imprint. There are a thousand daily
reversals to the life of faith. This is necessary. If we ever gauged the life
of faith by anything other than character being formed, step by step and over a
lifetime, then we would become our own gods and our standard will always be the
outward flourishes. This is such an inward thing.
The biggest lesson of all
has been my own evil. Being such a competitive git I functioned on the early presumption
that I was better than the lost and sick souls around me. That has never been
God’s point. He has always told me I was the lost and sick soul and all those
around me are my brothers and sisters. He tells me to love them because I get a
clue from that about loving myself. When I see them act in terrible ways I see
my own acts refracted back to me. I get a clue of how much I must be loved
beyond sin by the One who told me these things when I was seventeen years old.
It is all in. All must get
into the boat of God. Because every human heart is broken and lost. Life breaks
us all, the bearded suicide said. All in. There are indeed levels to the
sickness and gross crimes coming from our common frame but all in for healing
must begin. No other idea or person or law or position can save the human heart
as a whole. All in. Grace, Love, Faith, Hope, Kindness, Forgiveness, Strength
and much more are the real hallmarks of the faith. We are on a journey to these
things together. It is not a race with a tape to see who gets there first. In the
end it is all in or nothing at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment