How many July fourths can you remember? I remember the one I went to see Phish in Philly that year, that one in Germany, the Cheese show in Steamboat, a few at the farm, one at camp… these are all out of order but I’m free to remember them any way I want aren’t I? Aren’t you?
So I’ve been invited to attend Sunday school with grandma on Sunday and being the religious studies expert that I am (ha ha ha) I’m so – excited? Is that the word? Grandma hasn’t been to church in a good long while since Pop had his stroke and couldn’t attend himself, so it’s a really good thing I think for her to start back, the community missed her. She went this past Sunday for the first time in a while and seemed to really enjoy it from what she said. What she really enjoyed was when she talked to Pastor Miller and told him that I was going to come next Sunday and he took a personal interest in it. As she was leaving he told her he was looking forward to seeing me next week and that he’d like to show me around personally. Oh boy, what did I get myself in to? I hope it’s something deep, I think it is, in a not too deep way. Chuckle. I want to be careful not to sound aggressive when I ask the questions I’ve been asking about the Bible and Christianity for some time now, the fine and subtle points I learned to pick on when I studied religion as an academic. I want to be careful because I’ve been doing that sort of questioning for a long time now and it gets to a point where you start to wonder if my exposure to so many different sets of truth has turned somewhere along the way to have a type of gridlock, paralyzing effect on me. In a way I worry I sort of flooded the system and lost touch with my original motivating force which was to dive into the deepest hardest brightest truths about life and perhaps religion was just another deep pool of water search through to find who else knew to love God, to feel God, to be in touch with God in all aspects of nature, without, of course, being naÔve about the hokey pokey sheepherder stuff. I know that I am in touch with God, it is the underlying principle that allows the proposition of the question to even be possible in the first place, which it is since we are asking it. Get it? It’s more than a principal really, because it’s a known. That I know God exists is my bedrock, but now what exactly God is or looks like or where the boundaries between me and God or God and me are, those sorts of things are still out on the table. Every year it seems I need a bigger table to lay out all the new things pointing towards the character of God and me I come across, and at some point I want to simplify. Clutter is for confusion, is for the search and the collecting of data, for opening up space or Providence to hook together the non-linear self-evident realities of it, but how long is that going to go on? You can’t think your way to happiness, God is not an intellectual lesson to be learned, it is, it is, well what is it? He? This? Us? You? I? The? Am? Really, what is the arrival of an understanding of God like? This is not a rhetorical question people, I’m really asking you, what’s it like? Tell me about it, please. I need something smart to say on Sunday…
It feels like I’m getting defensive about something. An output of some sort? Input? A clog? A clot? A kink? An opportunity to have a better flow? How do I look at it with most Quality? Most truth mixed with most uncertainty? How does one live on the cusp of the wave? When you get away from it you just think you’re getting away from it. It’s just for a moment you think it’s vaporized itself for something and you manage to fall back asleep and then it’s a week later when your baby gets stuck in traffic and you turn irrational again and fail to make the rational connection to the illusion you had of getting away from it. It can get bad.
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