Mind the Gap
Too often my first act of the morning -- [well, it isn’t first, is it, first has changed since we bought the dehumidifier. First, coming down the stairs, is to notice that it’s humming, OK “buzzing obnoxiously” which is good: when full it goes off, telling me to empty it -- two or three times a day, several gallons of water extracted daily from the front downstairs part of the house, which is why we bought it, to rid the place of that musty smell that reminds us we are living in an old folks’ home. See, this letting myself get distracted must be what happens as I keep climbing the fence to peer over the wall at eighty years of age. What’s there? More fence to climb, or a void, or a green valley where I can walk barefoot again, or that dead, dismal, endless district of abandoned warehouses and boarded up houses and dim tobacco shops through which the narrator of C.S. Lewis' book The Great Divorce walks at perpetual dusk in a chill, light drizzle before he comes upon the bus queue? No, I don’t get distracted, I am distracted as my state of being, where was I going with this?] is -- {after turning on the coffee makers, mine and Linda’s, walk down front for her PCNH, eight steps down, concrete path, eight steps back taking care against the wobbliness of the aged -- nobody wants a broken hip, much less to live with an old man who carelessly fell -- back inside, punch the button for “2 coffees”, decide, based on how the day felt as I went out, whether to sip coffee and blog in my chair in the family room or on one of the screen porches, go sit down, open the MacBook} -- to open GOOGLE and click on News.
Clicking on News is bad news because the news is always bad. Click on it first and it colors the day gray. Scan it, yep: bad. Back arrow and click on Gmail. A treat is the occasional email from a bud, sometimes a response sometimes a new thread. If there’s that email and I open it now, it will rework my being of the moment, as in going back to sea, so I take note and look forward to coming back later. It’s a guy thing, eh? Even late septuagenarians can be guys.
Sitting up on the edge of the bed, my thought took me back to Theology 101 at LTSG. Why am I here? Larger, how and why is all that which is around me here?
Largest, what about all that Far Beyond? How and why? Is my God too small? Who or what is God? Is God that which is within my ability to grasp (which is to say, in my image and vice versa, fitting nicely into a creedal box), or that which was/is and “spoke” from outside the infinitesimal dot before the Big Bang?
Does/did that which was/is have an Easter Basket (or fireworks barge) of Infinitesimal Dots, from which to choose one and toss it up into The Gap and speak and watch it explode, burst into a universe and momentarily Be, a brilliant flash of entertainment on some divine fourth of july? How many Infinitesimal Dots are tossed and spoken on a given evening? Below is the Big Bang of one infinitesimal dot.
Let's not leave early, let's wait and see the Grand Finale: all the remaining Infinitesimal Dots tossed at once.
Does/will that which was/is know and care about me? Boggles the mind, I don’t know. And what about this fence I’m climbing, what’s beyond? I don’t know, I am not he who knows not and knows not that he knows not, I know dandelion well that I know not. Knowledge and faith, the twain shall never meet, at least not on this side of the fence; and certainty is ignorance, the knowledge of fools. Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.
Don’t let other people do your thinking.
I’m thinking: on the other side of this fence is a bus stop.
TW+