Journal 4-27-05
A few days ago, on this very campus, I graduated from college. Even as I write it, it seems like a lie. ‘College’, to someone who hasn’t been through it, at least to me, always carries that illusive, grown-up quality that grabs you in movies and make you wish you could live out such lucid, adult experience. It was like watching John Wayne tote a gun around and treat women like dolls, or watching old what’s-his-face wagging that cigar out of his mouth. Something about it was real, and my life isn’t. Something about the ‘college’ you see on tv and film is real, and mine is not.
Maybe it has to do with the way art doesn’t just represent reality, but it interprets it, and done well, places events up, not as the stream of nothingness that each one endures every day thinking “does anyone care what happens to me”, but as a ‘Tragedy’ or a true blue ‘Victory’, a moment to last, to be remembered, a personality that won’t get driven into the ground for a new, disposable road to be paved.
I guess we all feel our lives are like a flower in the dark of the forest that no one ever realizes is there, and ask ourselves whether it makes a difference to have one more little forest flower in this tub of a universe. We lie in bed at night and wish with all the wish in us that we do count. Even if we buy into a dys-teleological evolution, we still wish that we were not equal to that smear of dirt we trust the washing machine can get out of our favorite denim; we want to be more than matter. I guess that’s why sometimes I sit and stare at stuff, like my walls, or my face in the mirror, and I wish that it wasn’t just stuff, like everything else.
I wish God were something, someone, I could see, like my futon, or my SpongeBob SquarePants pajamas. But then again, I guess I’m glad that he’s not, or he’d be just like the face in the mirror that’s simply bone and skeleton, a thing equal to rocks, monkeys, and mountains. I do not want God to be equal with rocks and mountains, something a scientist could lay out on an uncomfortable table in one of those rooms the doctors keep cold to make you awkward. But I still wish I could see him. A Christian friend of mine had explained to me that God has his ‘Glory’ (I’m not sure what ‘glory’ is, although I know in the original Koine-Greek New Testament it’s doxa). Anyways, this glory would kill a man, ever he was to come across it, and so I should be happy not to have it in a box in my bedroom, waiting for me to draw too close and open it (like in the end of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark).
Don’t tell anyone this, but I still wish I could see him, even in his glory. Don’t you ever have those days where you’d rather have God come down in his full poise and charisma and have his glory burn you to the wall and into oblivion, than last another moment without seeing his spike-marked hands and spear-stabbed side, or just his eyes? Let me die; just let His ‘Glory’ fall.
I think ‘glory’ might be like what it is to see a gorgeously beautiful woman, so raving-hot that you nearly fall down at the sight of her; you long to taste her and are overwhelmed at the notion that she even exists. I love and hate that feeling at the same time; I’m so defenseless and knocked-out by it. I guess I’d hate and love seeing God at the same time, won’t everybody? I don’t mean that God has a hot body, but that if his glory is ‘seen’, then it must be in that category that goes off of human ‘able to answer’ charts, like beauty and love- who dares to explain them? You look, or listen, or hear, and you fall into a place where your heart is barreling down canyons and weaving the moons of Saturn. I’ve endured that from a pretty face or two, but I’d rather endure this ‘beauty of God’, that apparently would kill me the way a lamp kills the dark in your bedroom when you get too scared too sleep and have to turn it on. On a side-note, I hope that when I get married my ‘hottie indicator’ gets shut off somehow, or at least stuck on only one channel (my wife’s).
A friend of mine wrote this neat new worship song called “glimmer” where the chorus says “just a glimpse of you, just a glimpse of you, any more of you is more than we can bear, any more than just a glimmer”. I hate that song. I wish I could like all songs, but I don’t have the talent. I hate it cuz I think, “what I stupid thing to say to God”, ‘I only want a little bit God, not too much’- what kind of moron doesn’t want God to end all the pain and treachery of this cosmos, who wants ‘only a glimmer’ of God? I want the whole thing. You ask for pennies if you want to, I’ll ask for trillions. If God gave me ‘more than I could bear’ I wouldn’t be more happy. I don’t want a glimmer, or a glimpse, I want to see what eyes aren’t allowed to see, I want miracle!
We can’t pack our bags and say ‘well, you know we can’t take that much’, let me and this too-skinny- too-ugly- body if mine burn away if I get to meet God, I mean, what kind of attitude is all this “just a glimpse of you” stuff? Honestly, I swear I don’t get it. Isn’t the death of this plank-eyed man than I am what Christian spirituality and Life all about? “No God, just a glimmer, please, I don’t want to get hurt in all this, only a bit would do”- Lets lose this ‘God is holy and exalted, therefore you can’t imagine he know even your name attitude, be more sorrowful and humble’ attitude and admit that we know he loves us and is acquainted with every hair on our noggin, that in Christ (whatever that mysterious phrase entails) we can go before him with confidence and dialog with him about today’s Calvin and Hobbes, the hefty pimple that has taken up residence between our eyebrows, and how we love the way the summer breeze seems to fill us with life, right up until you get a mosquito in your mouth. And we can see God. On the cross, on the streets, in the sick and the poor, and the tax-masters, in our dreams, in The Passion, in the upper room, and in each others lives, and I’ll be dammed if I didn’t seek to know God, and even to get a chance to suffer as he did, so I can know him, so I can have ‘more than just a glimmer’.
Anyways, now that I’m graduated, and I have two different BA’s, I think the world says that I am a ‘man’. I always saw people that had past the ‘college’ time as real, certified, grownups. Now I can become a professional, and get a mortgage, and load up debt so I’m tied down and feel like I’m stuck. Or not. I don’t feel ‘done’, and I kinda want to get put back in the oven. I thought by this age I could stop crying myself to sleep and get over the issues of being a messed-up kid in the universe. I was wrong.
Bye.
