2024-02-09 A Meditation on Reducing All Life

“1 As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God. 2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God? 3 My tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me all the day long, “Where is your God?” 4 These things I remember, as I pour out my soul: how I would go with the throng and lead them in procession to the house of God with glad shouts and songs of praise, a multitude keeping festival.” (Ps 42:1-4 ESV)

There are those who would reduce the human project to so much basic affections and fears, real life occurring in the crux of the two. Indeed, pointing to dreams or waking anxieties and efforts, this can indeed play out. An interesting friend, for all our love for them, is also a bundle of fears and drives. Why not them demote them to the status of yawning matter or mechanical action-response vehicle?

Because of a strange living Belovedness we can discover in this our friend, in this our real relationship, in this our mate or buddy. We can live near to an invaluable life happening, the beloved quirkiness or inexplicable traits where humans meet their common ground, their shared symbiosis, their yin and yang. A gripe or a boast, a humorous habit or behavioral trait, there is nonetheless the sacramental appreciation for the license to imbibe or embrace, to dread or resist, to see real Fear meet real Coping. We cope; we tread the safer route of waking routine and avoidance patterns, proximity behaviors, staying near to the homestead or to the safer workload and mental exercises.

But all this is no cause to dismiss the student of Man’s basic fears and drives, it is only to say that no silver bullet explains things away: life experience itself becomes the staid or hesitant license thus to reduce Man’s effects, ambitions, avoidances. We have arrived at some dogged affection or belovedness simply for each other, barring any sense that the fact of the matter is something to laugh at. Look here, you’re absolutely forgivable, friend. Look here, for once you see the humor in your own wretched past, simultaneously—in good protestant fashion—sinner and justified. Simultaneously coping with the strange voice—a mother or father’s constant refrain—you’re a good kid, and seeing things in another more dastardly light. Of our past. Of things that Satan wants to reduce to selfish pursuits and blanket explanatory devices. We do not laugh at Man’s fears and drives; the heartbreaking relationship with substance or drink, the abusive relationship or self-harmful ways, all these things are indeed getting at what life is about; we declare we hate the drink or the substance, the abuser, and so on, whilst not following a rational track in that matter.

All this to say that it is a Religious matter, the basic life explanatory devices. It is something we approach with an unknown reverence and stoicism because we revere the mystery aspect. We revere that what the church calls “priest” or “sacrament” is an effort and nothing more, an effort to point to a Higher Power. It is an effort calling on each of us to decide if we thus acknowledge such roles in life as sacrament, as priest, as belovedness, as duty bound, as mystery. It is no cause—if we’re graduated to the brave stand in life—to dismiss outright: somehow and in some wise we must make our peace, with said church, with said Call and sense of Duty. No divorce, no separate ways, but the facts of the matter resist explanation, that the one licensed to think in simple language is also a mournful or laboring servant, laboring after that vineyard called Where We’re At, meeting and not superceding the basic life needs or appreciations or things that endear us to each other that we ourselves laugh about.