I am not done with God, nor God with me. I remain obsessed with the notion of the unmoved mover who set the pattern of creation into its initial motion. I stubbornly try to trace my existence back to some infinite beginning—so much so that I loathe the deficiencies and inconsistencies of my intellect, which in the end I always cast aside, for I can’t help but fall into a wondrous rapture before the miracle of life and the turnings and meanderings of my heart and soul and mind and being.
We are trapped in time and limited by its confines, and so my search is hobbled by the simple handicap of being alive, but while I struggle with faith, I am in awe of any true search for explanations amidst the inexplicable. I know that my God is embraced, denied, manufactured and packaged in the fickle streams of my thoughts, which is why and how I distrust the leanings of my head—for as the tree leans, the tree falls. All I can do is dig among the inexorable to discern what is ineffably and eternally real, amidst what is imagined by sensed vision and construed logic from undeniable fact.
As I write this, a monstrous nor’easter is screaming over Cape Cod with snow and wind tearing at the fabric of trees, beaches, waters and the very air itself with a persistent and insistent voice calling attention to itself–and to me—to live within the storm and within the cloud of unknowing. I know there is nothing to know, nothing to parse with words, and nothing to gain from argument and sophistry. God can only be the truth without truth, the reality without substance, the nameless name before the gaping maw of the universe.
I trust that God moves within our noblest actions and equally within the baseness of our greatest transgressions. Out of this stew of the holy mixing with the unholy, grace can be distilled to feed and guide and sustain us through the daunting, heroic odyssey that is our lives. We need to remove ourselves from ourselves, to consciously and deliberately extricate our tangled limbs from the muddy morass that binds us to ignorance, defeat, and despair–to help us move forward into the blinding miracle of life even as we are strapped and clasped to its binding chains.
We are born to live. Death does not set us free. Life sets us free; so that we can die free—with some semblance of palpable holiness clinging to our bones in spite of whatever vagaries besets our lives. Faith, in the end, is the proverbial beggar’s banquet—the promise of a feast that never seems to make it to the table.
Still, I wait, brood, celebrate and live this wild arc of existence within an endless prayer. Gravity tells me I am not in heaven.
But I am damn close. Amen.
