#393

393 is an incredible number. Don't even have to explain how cool it is probably. In honor of the graceful mathematics inherent in this integer, my goal for today is to reach deep, deep within, grasp with all the strength I have and try and draw forth something that skews positive. Today I must ignore the prancing demons and rapacious dragons that work hard and smart every day to make the world a grindhouse of misery.

*

Jesus Christ, it's fucking difficult. It even hurts. I cannot raise sword or spear and slay these shadows, and typing furiously is the next-best thing. To say nothing, to try and think about something else these days generates a feeling reminiscent of my flesh being eaten by parasitic worms. I assume. It's the flesh of my spirit, which knows a universe of pain my body can only approximate.

That cuts both ways, though. What we mean when we say joy is transcendent is that it forgets the body, as the spirit is illuminated and warmed by a more complete light than exists in the material world.

Sunlight on the skin is just a game mechanic. Light radiating unto the spirit is real, the real thing. 

To paraphrase Master Yoda: luminous beings are we, not these crude vestments.

*

It is true that rain falls on the just and the unjust. It follows that light shines on them with that same universal impassivity. What can we learn from this? That the universe is not concerned with fair portions or what we think of as justice. There is a higher justice corresponding to a larger picture, to more complete datasets, subject to a wisdom we cannot comprehend, limited as we are by current hardware.

*

What has always struck me ever since I was a child, which so profoundly bothered the nuns and priests I discussed it with, was how in the world human beings can pretend to know the mind of God, if God is God. They would reply that Jesus was man and God, and the word of God was made manifest through him and through his chosen disciple Peter, but I knew enough to know that a bunch of dudes decided that at a meeting, basically, hundreds of years after the fact, and the question stood. They would tell me that I was being  bad boy, that these questions and arguments were heretical and trended towards atheism, and I would reply--directly in some cases, to myself  that Jesus did the same thing with the elders and if Jesus asked difficult questions of his masters, it was my duty to emulate the act. For are we not to imitate Christ in all ways? And therefore, why do we possess and luxuriate and earn and spend while there are slums full of poor people not ten miles from this chapel? Shouldn't we all be as poor as the poorest of us? Shouldn't we spurn the gross material and seek the end of man's dominance over his fellow man? Doesn't almost everything in this book you say is the word of God contradict how we choose to live our lives, admonish us to act upon the very things we ignore, push us to be better than the mere Word and enter into an Act? Isn't God beyond language, beyond morals, beyond history, beyond the future? Isn't the infinite inifinite? If it isn't, how can it be God? And if it is, how can we act this way, as though we were not God, and everyone we meet is not God, and the world we live in is not God? Because we act as though God is dead, even as you force me to pray and sing at him in chapel. But who is this God you make me sing at? Some old man? Just a dude making rules and telling only certain other dudes? A zombie, a corpse's voice from beyond the grave, a mannequin? One that watches only me, and only I have to feel bad and watch my step, only me and the other little people who really care, and lets people who don't care do whatever they want, including wage wars and raise empires and buy and sell human beings? In the name of the Lord? Because if in our ignorance we fuck up our lives literal eternity will be unimaginable torment? Impossible. Impossible. Horrifying on so many levels.

Apparently not. This accumulation did indeed build and resolve in a long stretch of atheism before a return to facing the infinite. All that time since childhood, all that time since then: I still don't get it.

*

Preceding is why I'm never surprised when kids are about fifty times smarter than grownups. Some kids are already grownups when they're kids, and they're the only kind of stupid kid, because they have learned quickly to act like they have all the answers. At least most kids still know enough to ask the right questions, while grownups have trained themselves to be satisfied with easy answers. And that satisfaction, that complacency, is what Jesus was trying to disrupt with his most oblique parables and radical pronouncements. And it is what I encountered in so many of the priests and nuns of my childhood--behind an implacable, enameled wall of starched certainty, which was an insult to the spirit of inquiry they professed to inculcate. 

I do not get along with those who have left childhood behind them as a cast-off thing of little if any present significance or value in general or particular. I am still a child. I hope to remain a child, and fight constantly to preserve myself. Children have a right to be children and be as children are, which is, frankly, quite a huge, frightening, and complex endeavor. A journey fraught with peril. 

There is absolutely no advantage whatsoever in modifying yourself to be a grownup. Grownups have ruined everything. I suspected this as I asked my childhood questions, and everything I've seen and learned confirms it. There is very little defense for the world they have built; the worthwhile bits exist in spite of the main event, and the main event constantly tries to eliminate or pervert them.

*

Damn, did it again. Let's try again tomorrow or sometime, whenever. 

--JL