Walk Away

Dear Kate,

I will need to accept, accept it in others, and accept that I will never accept it myself.  The It I am talking about I don't even have the heart to explain: anything that needs explaining is too much for anyone - there, I explained It, our having no need to have anything explained to us.  Because we are all very smart, we all know what is right and would always strive to think and do right.  The other day in church we read the story of Hagar and Ishmael and knew right away it's about powerful, wealthy man (probably white-faced) suppressing vulnerable, young, foreign woman, teenage pregnancy and slavery, and some came to the conclusion that a dignified woman would rather die in the desert than to face her oppressor, even as the story proposes the exact opposite as a triumph of the human spirit, not a blanket advice for people in crisis, but to speak about the disenslaving of humankind by the relentless will and reckless love of God, restoring us from our "desert," our alienation from Him, His re-creation of a good Creation now broken, desolate and deserted, beyond the limits of human settlement and, so we think, the control and console of God, our "barren" wilderness, spiritual and social afflictions, childless, fruitless in all our human endeavors.  If that's what the words God are saying we couldn't hear it, because we don't want to.  We've heard enough and now want to hear something new, which is something old from yesterday and since not too long ago, something narrow, austere and joyless we've come to accept as the only thing acceptable, something to do with what we think is fair and well, what we think we must do and are ourselves doing it fairly well.  No one is asking for any explanation because the truth is plain and so is one being on its side, deaf to the past, dead to the future, dogged in our barren ideology.  Now what was I saying?  I said I must accept that's how it is: this is the world, people around me, nice people, and I must accept this to keep up the nicety, to behave properly, to act acceptable.  Even if I choose life and walk away from wilderness I must accept it will be another one in the next town.  The day I walk away no longer is the day I walk away from God.

Yours, Alex