Sleep, Sacrament, Surprise

“Sleep!” cried Father Brown. “Sleep. We have come to the end of the ways. Do you know what sleep is? Do you know that every man who sleeps believes in God? It is a sacrament; for it is an act of faith and it is a food. And we need a sacrament, if only a natural one.

G.K. Chesterton, "The Innocence of Father Brown"

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Dear Alex,

People don’t change - unless something smacks them hard off-course. I am thinking of Newton’s first law of motion in our Physics 12 class.

Yesterday I got a message I had not imagined. Not for a day or year, not for my life this far. I cried. I hid in the closet. I called Mom on phone. I was inconsolable.

I am the sort who rarely cries. And when I do, the triggers seem to drill down to the same few reasons funneling to the same core cause in my choosing of “a coward’s explanation that hides behind cause and effect” - a mismatch in expectation, Alexandra laughing, leaving, the devil tearless.

Now I do not want to philosophize my tears worthless on screen but perhaps worthy off-screen to weep. I awoke at 3:30 am today with a dream, an awakening refreshed to my state of nonsense. It was a dream about getting lost in downtown and finding my way forward to head backward into the system. So I have sought to write this down and drown my melancholy.

Sleep(less). Do you know what sleep(less) is? The fictional Father Brown shall “come to the end of ways” in the clockwise 24-hour unwinding of thoughts to the start of our ways counterclockwise. Not sleeping is senseless, faithless. Not crying is even more so.

When you don’t sleep and don’t cry, you are starving yourself at the roundtable of a feast, blind to food, castrated from faith, a disembodied head, heart in disbelief. Nothing becomes natural, and the artificiality of nothingness begins to feel more natural.

So I must weasel out of self-loathing, tussle with my internal beasts for sleep, cry more for others, a change most unnatural if it were not for Father Brown’s outcry.

Yours, Kate

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Dear Kate,

Why are we so easily surprised by disappointments?  Why are we so seldom surprised by joy? that would be the same question.

I've led a few discussion groups using NT Wright's "Simply Christian" and asked people to try catching the four echoes of (God's?) voice blowing in the wind (the longing for justice, the quest for spirituality, the hunger for relationships, and the delight in beauty).

I thought that should be easy, even fantasized that people would fight for the Kleenex.  Isn't every song we sing, every story we tell, and--I would even go so far to suggest--every thought we think, every beat of our heart, a search for a rhythm to answer to these echoes?  Why the hell do we work so hard everyday?  Just to know that we will lose it all in the end or in a flash?  The mornings are getting colder here in Vancouver: why wake up at all?  Why not just die in our sleep and stay dead for good?

Instead of effortless personal insights, the groups often labored to give mostly impersonal and insipid illustrations to play along.  We couldn't wait to go back to our victory march.  Whoever dies with the most toys wins.  Whoever can afford the most painkillers rejoices.

Then something happened.

Something unexpected, undesirable, unvictorious.  Maybe an injustice of a massive scale yet minuscule enough to finally touch my turf, like what's happening in Hong Kong, and we responded to it with indignation fresh and flagrant and demanded God to speak here and now and loud and clear to prove Himself worthy.  As if He has never spoken before, that He's been sleeping on His job.  As if He didn't commission us, His so-called "people," to "put the world to rights," in His name, for His glory, and in the Way of Jesus, fully present and always sacrificial.

He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
  and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
  and to walk humbly with your God?

If we live everyday doing just this, what God wills of us, then going to sleep at night shall never feel like coming to the end of our own bitter ways.  We would often feel sad for what God feels sad, that's a guarantee.  But not bitter.  Even less surprised by our reasons for being so.

Yours, Alex