Which is More of the Same. But Builds Dramatically

07/11/2008 7:14 AM – 8:28 AM

I really have little interest in doing this today. Perhaps an effect of not having done it in a little while. But I don’t really feel like doing anything today. I don’t want to read either the Asimov novel that I started or the comic books I’ve brought home from the library. I didn’t wake up in an afraid mood. I just sort of woke up.

I’m thinking about the move lately. That makes sense. Two weeks as of today is my last day at work. Doh – I still have to write my letter of resignation. Later. I’m curious to see what effect the move will have on my mood. Hopefully a good one. Is it enough to move from the city to the town to lift the lingering doubts about existence or is it something that I’ll have to be working on for the rest of my life? Going to Mary’s wedding last week made me think about marriage again. Not that it’s ever far from my mind. Why is love, which is so wonderful, so short on endurance? Why can’t it change everything as I imagined it would when I was younger? Why do we slide back into normalcy? I know the answer that psychology gives – habituation, but why in the metaphysical?

I find the idea of the evolution of human psychology fascinating and terrifying. I’m drawn to it. My nearly overpowering and obsessive sense of curiosity demands that I at least make an attempt to know and understand. But eventually, we run into that wall of unknowability in every field. From an evolutionary perspective, romantic love makes sense, its time-span nearly identical to the amount of time from meeting an attractive mate to the time when the mother can raise a child alone without both of them starving. I hate the idea that this is all we are – moving mud, of no greater significance than inert mud, just mixed more complexly. The deeper you get into science; you see how powerful it is. It can find the reason for everything, but if you push it back, you find that there is no reason for anything. We’re the outcome of trillions upon trillions of rolls of the quantum dice. Our existence is neither inevitable nor impossible. In this story, we are not even god’s bastard children, cast adrift in the cosmos – we’re warmish rocks on the surface of some uninteresting planet endlessly circling an ever-dimming minor star.

To rape or to love makes no difference and no poet of science, no matter how gifted, can light a candle of meaning or mystery in a demon-banished world. We’re meaningless. Our actions are meaningless. Our hopes and dreams are meaningless. The cruelty of self-awareness is meaningless, arising from the void only to fall inevitably back into it without the slightest stirring of the cosmic waters. Vanity of vanities, everything that we value is meaningless, the mere outcomes of a semi-complex, random programming. What we call love is of no more importance than the dust stirred up by a tiny pebble striking the night-enshrouded ground on a moon of Pluto. And where now is my God?

He’s where he was when I lay twitching on the sanctuary floor, having learned to twitch from the Pentecostals who learned it from the Voodoo priestesses who learned it from the epileptics, all of us sure that this was proof of the divine indwelling. There is no proof. There cannot be. We cannot see a hand that holds us, consisting as it does of the substance of our eyes. There is only hope. Hope that love has meaning beyond the mere occasional odd propensity towards the replication of a chemical chain.

I can no longer claim with C. S. Lewis that I was dragged kicking and screaming into the Kingdom. I was stiffer-necked. My heels dug in. My fingers found purchase. The caravan moved on.

And so, alone beneath the darkening sky, I light my candle in the desert waste and say my prayers in the deafening roar of the divine silence.

Let my love mean something. Please, dear God, let my love mean something.