III. Please Let There Be God

Please let there be God. Not a god, because I don't want the abstractions from some men's philosophical calculus. And not that some gods are bad, I just have read those stories and don't want the same conclusion they come to. Please don't let there be just nirvana, an extinguishment of self. It's not that I love self, Christians are taught to deny it, but we eventually long for a redeemed self. Without self, I have nothing to give to God in worship. We long to be freed of the weight and gravity of the self, not the being of the self. So please no nirvana.

And please no paradise, please no endless myriads of virgins. I have lived my life with enough lust for women, I would rather the afterlife not contain more raging fire that will only leave me colder. Having burnt myself in this life, I would not lie long in the arms of 40 virgins before I was an eternal misery rather than a temporal one. The lusty eyes of more women will just make me discontent and more selfish. Please no paradise and no god of that.

And please no endless ladder of karma. I cannot vouch for my future life, that he, she, or it will do any better than this poor creature I am now. I know I can't trust myself from one day to another to get things right, much less one life to another. And how am I to distinguish the unintended consequences of even my good actions? Will what in one life grows in the dung in another life really be joined to god? Please no karma.

And please no seeking the divine in that which is within. Every look deeper into this well is a look deeper into a selfish tangle of soul. If I am to find god within, he was easy to find, yet he is not the god I want ruling the universe. This god is no good, and even if he is, he has no power to do the good. If what I am left with is what is within, as beautiful as it can be when properly framed, I am left with something that ought never be worshiped. Please no god within.

And please not nothing. Please don't tell me there is nothing beyond what is. Please don't tell me if I saw through the universe I'd only see a void. Please don't tell me I am the sum of all my material parts and nothing else. Please don't tell me that in the vast scope of REALITY that to kill is the same as to heal. Don't leave me in a hell for my heaven. Don't tell me the events and loves and hates of my life all extinguish in a blip of nothingness the moment I die. Please no nothing.

Please tell me there is God. The One, and the Three. The found of all goodness. The wellspring of all wisdom. He who is, and was, and is to be. He who before whom there was none, and after whom there will not be another. He who is Holy. Wise. Just. Merciful. The flashpoint of all glory and beauty and truth within the universe. The One from who earth and sky flee away. Please let there be God.

II. Welcome Sickness

I am not alive until I am aware of myself. True self-forgetfulness seems to be what we all long for, yet when we forget ourselves entirely we are as close to death as a terminally sick patient. Those poor, neurotic people we scorn for their continual self-awareness, ringing their nervous hands as they mull over their own brain's workings, they are more alive than you or I. We live in a great paradox where those most alive, at least alive by our rankings, are closest to death. And those who live more like what we consider dying, they are the most alive. We keep our lives tucked away, locked down, bonded and insured; we hedge our risk, and we have in our safe keeping a self-preserved corpse. It's a good thing we like to live dying better than we like to die living. Jesus was spot on, our fallen humanity is an easily predictable thing. Those keeping their lives lose it. Those losing their lives keep it. We are born easily pacified, and the better our parents get at pacifying our raging discontent, the happier we are. The happier we are, it is because the safer we are. And the happier we are because of our safety, the less we live. We are happy to be dead. Not only that, but the less the corpse is dessicated and decomposed, the more restless we get. We don't want the dead to spring alive just yet, it's far too risky to believe in life from the dead. Better to stamp out all trace of life, someone might lose something they couldn't retain, some priceless heirloom might be lost in a rubbish bin so we'd better insure it. My business might go under next year so I'd better have unemployment. It's not that we insure ourselves into a dead stupor, or that we protect ourselves from all failure (and therefore all true success), but we live between the lines so well that we've forgotten failure is something people come back from. We've lost the concept that sometimes disappointment, while smelling like dung, makes really good flowers after the winter is over. Sickness reminds us of health. Those we easily hate make us cherish those we love. And people who truly die remind us to live quickly and profoundly, because we all pass those doors for good all too soon. We leave littler trace than we're inclined to, and even our death rattle is often times a whimper. The futility spun into the fabric of the universe is not without design, creation's groaning voice, she hums of hopeful wholeness that will resurrect into all our gaping wounds. If we have no deformities, wholeness will never be hope fulfilled. If we have no poverties, true riches will never be a shining thrill.