For He Abides Indeed

04/24/2008 7:57 AM – 8:54 AM

Okay. Here I am. Up. The thing I suppose that I should mention right off the bat is that I had a panic attack last night, and that's what this post is about. It was a small one and this time it was not hell that was it’s fixation but the absolute nothingness of an atheistic death.

The thing is, it’s not the panic attack that’s bothering me this morning, it’s that the two hours I spent calming myself down and, actually, well, “worshipping” is the word that comes to mind most readily, but that’s not quite right, anyway the two hours I spent doing whatever it was that I did made me have to sleep in and now I’ve missed my running schedule. On the second day of it. Well crap. But it’ll be fine. And it’ll be fine. And, behold, all things will be fine. I want to remember the steps or parts that I used to fight the panic attack so here goes: first I fought it with simple aversion meditation, that is, not thinking of white elephants. This was mildly effective. Rather mild, but still, it helped get on to the next stage, which was a weak “it’ll be fine; it’s just a panic attack.” Then I got out of bed and knew that I wasn’t just going to fall back asleep, I had to fight back, so I pulled out that old rusty gun “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.” This was actually quite effective. It focused my emotion on anger to the exclusion of fear.

But I knew that this was not the end of the thing. Anger sinks back too easily into other negative emotions, namely fear, plus, even as I was saying it, I knew that part of me didn’t accept this. I had to fight both the fear and doubt. I used that scene from “Joe vs. the Volcano” where Joe wakes up to a moon that takes up like an eighth of the sky and says, “Oh God, whose name I do not know, thank you for my life.” I started to realize then that what I was using to fight the fear was a metaphor that we use to describe something that we don’t really know the name of. For me, this something is Christ or Christ is this something. I can’t prove it, and sometime it’s not literal, just metaphorical, but it’s there. It’s always there. This brought me to the next part which was the phrase, “Christ is risen.” And I knew what I meant by it. I meant, “Hell and death have been destroyed” or “judgment and punishment have been done away with.” There is nothing more to fear. There is nothing more to fear. The fact of evil has been done away with, we just have these flashes of the hollow place in our souls where evil used to reside and we have not yet allowed to heal over.

I realized that even an atheist has this sense of things. When an atheist says, “there is no God.” He is saying, “There is no more judgment.” There are other parts of atheism that I disagree with (namely that there is no eternal hope in it – psssht – with all the possible things to hope for, why hope that death leads to nothing?), but when the part of atheism that is there says, “there is no more judgment,” I agree. Christ has paid the debt. Evil is no more. Christ is risen. And then I realized another phrase that stated that thing that I was saying, “the Dude abides.” Christ is risen – the Dude abides. That which is merely silly and fun becomes that which is eternal and sublime. What better metaphor for what I mean by God’s redemption of mankind?

But there was more. It was a very busy two hours. Following my favorite metaphysical theorist, George MacDonald, I knew that my hope was that all would be redeemed even to the evilest of evil men, the vilest of demons and that betrayer of us all, Lucifer himself. I had, at this point a sort of metaphysical epiphany, which is that if Christ Risen, the Dude Abiding, redeems all things, than even my panic attacks were redeemed. The panic attack has, already in the distant realms, been turned to path of the redeemed. At the very heart of its being this panic attack was a fumbling attempt of my mind to comfort me. What felt like a vivisection of my soul was an attempt at a caress. So I thanked it. I called it a motherfucking cocksucker, but I thanked it. It’s like the Eucharist in a way, it’s still tasteless cracker and cheap wine down there in the belly, but the eternal fact of it is, I have just ingested the body and blood of my Christ, risen for me. And that doesn’t make sense to me, except in the way that it makes perfect sense. I am my Beloved’s and He is mine. And that doesn’t make sense to me, except in the way that it makes perfect sense.

I’m already running behind, so I think that’s the end of the story for now. I went back and forth between all these things and there were a few more things that I left out, and when I got back in bed, I had a minor slippage back into panic, but I thanked it for it’s attempt, told it to go fuck itself until it learned better manners in the sack and thanked God for the Resurrection of his only begotten Son and told the cosmos and all they that dwell therein – the Dude Abides. So. The Dude Abides. Go now and abide ye also. You’ve nothing to fear. The Love of God is inescapable. Even to cocksucking panic attacks. I'll go running tomorrow. Someday, I'll kiss the girl.