Tuesday, February 17, 2009

 

Mulishly Rulish

How can I talk about matters of spirit and emotion? I don't even know how to start. Musicians understand, at least to some degree, which is why I take so much solace in music. Currently it's Ooodoo played on a system more advanced than anything else I've owned. It's glorious.

I have no idea who else might understand so I don't bother trying. Attempts in the past have been greeted with "That's nice" or blank looks. So, I have long sessions in Guild Wars, wandering the electronic hills while Bach or Bruce Cockburn echoes in my head.

I should talk with God. I know He listens. We've had some very interesting conversations, some of which I've mentioned here. How can God be real, though? Logic says I'm just talking to myself.

Logic has its place. It's great for troubleshooting and designing. It utterly fails when questions about why one should bother designing or making anything. It also fails when looking into the abyss of the future, and spends inordinate amounts of time looking about for solid blocks with which to build a future.

In the past I kept logic in its place. Oh, the balance was uneasy most of the time and it certainly couldn't be explained. So, I used rules to cover my tracks in the external world so I'd appear normal enough to be left alone.

Ah, to be left alone. My fondest desire. Which sort of started falling apart when God reintroduced himself. Being left alone didn't help when looking into that abyss. Being left alone didn't help me find a reason to go on. So, I became somewhat more open to God's touch but there ensued a long battle.

Note that God Himself never cast this in terms of takeover or slavery. I did that. My slavish devotion to rules for getting along meant that God had to be quite creative so that he could surprise me; I'm good at survival-based prediction. No, what He wanted was a relationship.

Oh, yes, the big religious cliche. A personal relationship with God. Core of a million jokes and parodies. Logic asks how could God care about one broken-down useless man? Logic is what assigns the values. Yep, it's impossible.

Well, what can I say? Life is impossible. The words are about logic but if you read between the lines you begin to note that no one really knows why they go on. Everyone has a justification they talk about but they're all thin as tissue paper, which is quite likely why arguments about this tend to become so heated. Life is made of something invisible, delicate, magic, the interstices between logic and heart, synaptic connections bridged by belief.

Why write about this? Who will understand? I don't know. All I can say is that God has stayed true to the course He hinted at 5 years back while I've waffled and wandered and ignored him. I can draw the trail forward and see... weirdness. One thing a man who wants to be left along can't deal with is standing out. Not that God is calling me to any outstanding role, but just being near Him is enough. One can't change internally without some light getting out.

So, I go back to my attempts to build a solid structure of logic. Something I can understand, something I can design to maintain anonymity. Yet the need for anonymity kind of recedes when I look more to God than anything else. Rules and roles are the past. Relationship is the now and fighting that just leads ever deeper into death.

How many times do I have to repeat this cycle before I allow whatever God's presence in me to grow? Growth is what happens when life takes place. I use rules to make sure growth is comprehensible.

Life requires freedom. Oh, I understand the need for rules. We need to keep from running into each other, but rules are about as effective at bringing about life change as a coat of paint is in rebuilding a collapsing house. How do you rebuild? How do you make something beautiful? Can I trust that God is interested in beauty? I want beauty more than anything else in this world, and God is the most beautiful sight my inner eye has ever seen.

Sight is made of more than light. There are many dimension, many factors for the sensitive. While the world hammers at defenses, a thousand arguments trying to haul me into their camps, God sits and... invites. "Come to Me," He says. "We don't need to argue. I am called the Comforter." And yet... I use rules to wall all of that away. It can't be real. If it were real, everyone would be doing it.

Where did that idea come from? One of the first real things I learned in my life is that truth isn't often found amid a crowd. The herd defines its own kind of truth, but it's not the beautiful truth that I want, so I use my senses to track beauty. Or at least I used to.

In denying God I've denied the deeper truths of myself; I've dropped into survival mode. Ah, what a mistake. God is the inescapable threat. He's here, right here, all the time, like parents I can't hide from. Unlike them He doesn't use any of what he sees against me in ridicule or belittlement. Facts are what we work with, whether the facts are the insubstantial ones of belief and feeling or the incontrovertible few, such as gravity and momentum.

He respects me. I respond by running. It can't be real. How real is a rainbow?

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