Making Room

"All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone."

Blaise Pascal

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Dear Kate,

You know how it is, things just happen to you.

Not really.

Things happen, and we take them in.

We take them in this way and that.  Soon enough we get used to one way to take in one sort of thing and our usual way to sort things, and that's how we start to feel things are happening to us.

Since there's usually some sort (that word again) of human agency behind a thing's happening, it only makes sense for us to start blaming people for stuffs, not unusually to finally lump the two into the same sort of adversarial element that our life could use less of and would live and love to see to its elimination.

"If only we could stop this from happening..."  Then what?  Life will be all ok?

Cherry Laurel on my way to work, it happened to me.

Within two minutes and maybe 50 steps, another sort of scenery, an accident happened to two drivers and much inconvenience to everyone else.  The last thing we need happening to anyone on a Monday morning.

I thought about what Frederick Buechner said, as I usually do daily, especially this insight: "Maybe it's all utterly meaningless. Maybe it's all unutterably meaningful. If you want to know which, pay attention to what it means to be truly human in a world that half the time we're in love with and half the time scares the hell out of us. Any fiction that helps us pay attention to that is religious fiction. The unexpected sound of your name on somebody's lips. The good dream. The strange coincidence. The moment that brings tears to your eyes. The person who brings life to your life. Even the smallest events hold the greatest clues."

So it's apparent, isn't it: the beautiful flowers are what we fall in love with in life, and the car accident is what would scare the hell out of us?

Well, that's one way to sort things and take them in.

You see the leaf behind the Cherry Laurel?  It didn't happen to me; I took it in, juxtaposed it with the flowers, matching the holes on it with the tiny round floral anthers.  And those are holes of decay, things that would scare the hell out of us, if we can see the materiality of the leaf for our own.

And how about the sky, the magnificent waves of white on blue against which the accident happened?  Don't you just love that?  Doesn't it make life that much more livable, as compared to us having to settle with a void of non-meaning when gazing up?

Then I came to this room called an office.  If I am in the mood I would speak to people about beautiful spring flowers.  If I am to speak about the accident I would call it for what it is: unfortunate and inconvenient.  And everyone else would immediately know what I mean and respond accordingly, that spring flowers are beautiful, signs of growth and hope, and thank our collective god for arriving at work safe and sound, decay delayed, evaded, at least for today, not implicated in anything unfortunate.

Once the distractions in the room started to happen to me, there's no more need to consider life any other way.  The interpretations are true, prescriptions sound.  There'll be no room for strange ideas.

Yours, Alex

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Dear Alex,

Have you seen her? The one whose back braves you to look at the front, the anointed to whom beauty is ascribed in body and brain.

I remember her in high school. I peeked at her, followed her, loved and hated her and myself for not being the same person. She rarely sat alone in any classroom, swarmed by intrigue.

I still see her promiscuously in billboards, postcards, graffitis - the muse of subliminal impulse, pulse of art, artery gorged with purpose on arrival. If I sit still, I cannot catch up with her. Misery is a lonesome pit in doomed silence. It is not a chosen place to go for one in freedom or in love.

We feel it all over and pay for it dearly, absorbing sights, sounds, scents and sensuality which prompt our decisions about how and what we spend in cash, time and energy. We work to expend, not rest. We are barely left alone. The barrenness of being left out of vacation plan, insurance policy and our fair share of welfare would halt us with a litany of griping.

The world is shifting on tectonic plates and digital atoms. If we can’t make or take it, then fake it and stake your territorial claim in the wake of artificial intelligence and global diplomacy. Our high school celebrities and valedictorians have upgraded to careers and causes in demand, commanding our allegiance to the survival-of-the-fittest mandate. Work more smartly +/- heart of one or more cloned.

"Impossible is nothing” - a promise by Adidas, an official sponsor for the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.

I have just finished my olympic reading of the first book you have gifted me a year ago: The Pastor by Eugene Pastor. On his final page last night, I sat in a quiet room alone. The misery of journeying with Pastor Pete, his nickname affectionately called by the neighborhood children who had known him, was sustained through the end of his memoir:

“The Negev in Israel is a barren, featureless, and seemingly endless stretch of wilderness. There are no mountains, no rivers, no tress. Understandably, it is not a popular destination for people who go to Israel to get a feel for the biblical world. But that is why we were there, Jan and I... It doesn’t take many days of walking through the Negev, that seemingly godless and godforsaken desert, to realize that it might well be the least propitious piece of geography on earth on which to form a people of God that would ‘bless all the families of the earth.’ And it doesn’t take long while walking in the ’steps of Jesus’ in out-of-the-way Galilee to realize that he chose to work with the few run-of-the-mill working-class people to launch and live out the story that is the gospel... By this time we were used to godless and godforsaken, to death and deserts... Amen. Yes.”

Yes to death and deserts? Godless and godforsaken in misery rolling past offscreen space and tolling as the most intimate finale of Pastor Pete after 300+ pages? Is this a joke?

The humor reaps more sorrow in our second glance at the Golden Calf whose glint aspiring dreamy flights blinds our vision truly and truthfully. Misery is me - a performer, a clown bound in the busyness and business of hierarchical pursuit. The higher I climb, the lesser I feel in solitude.

So I return to my quiet room and listen to the whispering of death and deserts, billboards and golden calves. In this room I hope for more silent hours in exploring my next book, "Simply Christian" by NT Wright, to begin asking better questions before responding to echoes about justice, spirituality, relationship and beauty.

Yours, Kate