Let a story hit you, a second or so of solitude, and you have a life-moment. You might enter the apartment and notice the lights left on, as you read the note on the door reminding you to shut them off. You’re too focused or too unfocused to lash yourself. You ignore the call of computers and the 'webbing' because you desire a bit of space, and sit on the sofa. There it is.
The story gets to you as you stare out at the world you are in. You shut off all wishing and intentions enough to see it for the thing it is. Just your life in its present position. No more, no less. Nothing bad happened today, but you feel a longing to have that thing the characters in the story -like most stories- have. Resolution. Redemption. Purpose.
You wish your life was like a story, a book, a movie. At any stage along the way you could bolster and solace yourself by knowing there is a purpose and resolution coming, indeed. You hold back the usual regimen of aims, ambitions, and emotional energy thrown out at the plans and hopes for your life, used to excuse the vain content of each numbered day to your thinking brain. A sadness skulks inside your emotional boundary. Time to jump up and put away your coat and shrug it off. Things are heading somewhere, you tell yourself.
I think one of the reasons a worldview like Christianity grabs my ear and heart in tandem, is that it collects the oddly drab and indefinable moments of our aspirational days and sets them into the storyline of a comedy. There the characters never fail to face cruelties and conflicts, yet the resolution to such striving is set into the machine already. In the Christian worldview, history spreads out on that great canvas called time progressing to its deliberate end. Each of us have our meaning therein. In that space our in-betweens and irksome realities of the ‘now’ hold a tempo. They can be sorted into plot-points in a sequence purposed to entail the significance and redemption we often covet.
and the prophets say we are part of a story.
In a life-moment you expect they are right.
The sad thing is that we are, in all reality, part of the most thrilling, dramatic, humorous, beautiful, horrible, terrifying, electrifying, and wonderful story imaginable . . . but we keep on believing and acting like we are part of the most meaningless, hum-drum, ordinary, run-of-the-mill, I-wish-I-were-a-celebrity-but-I'm-not, dull, undramatic story imaginable.
ReplyDeleteEXACTLY!!!
ReplyDeleteSpeak it Jim!