I wish the Yellow Pages would color-code churches.
Especially in the South. It can be hard to pick out the good black churches, if you don’t know the neighborhoods and don’t know the subtle cues.
What seems like a pretty reprehensible idea on its face takes on a new meaning when you actually want to go worship with the minorities. Voluntary segregation, as opposed to the involuntary ones that created such homogenized subcultures within our diverse culture, can actually make for very interesting social structures. I think it’s pretty cool , for instance, that many years after ethnic discrimination officially went out of vogue in real estate, there is still a neighborhood in Boston that is 90% Italian, and another that is 90% Irish –if for no other reason than it helps you know exactly where to go to find the best canolis and the best brewpubs in town.
The same phenomenon still works along racial lines in most places, but especially in the South. Even within a denomination, there are “black” churches and there are “white” churches, and the services are often as different as, well, black and white.
But if you are just passing through town, and you don’t know the social layout of the place, and you prefer one over the other, it can be hard to tell which is which just by looking in the phone book, which is why I’d like to see color coding.
I slept late yesterday and had to make a snap decision, and I ended up at a white Baptist church because it was easy to find. Then I wished I had been more tired (or free of coffee), because I actually might have been able to sleep through the service, which meant I could have had more computer time last night. Oh well, live and learn.
About the only thing I retained from the experience was some good advice during the sermon about keeping one’s focus on glorifying God. He said every ten days, he “starts his life over, completely,” by taking time to contemplate and meditate on the actions and thoughts and events of the previous ten days and evaluating how well he honored God, or did “God’s will,” through it all. His suggestion was that with each contemplative session he wipes his slate clean and starts anew.
An excellent idea; my only question is, why wait ten days? Why not be reborn every day? Every hour? Heck, why ever let yourself become unborn? Why should we let any past accumulate, to be analyzed and evaluated and indulged in place of where God is –the present. Ah, these one-and-done born-agains. So complacent. In the name of spiritual security they’ve traded the narrow path for the wide plateau.
So then I went to the USX yard near Atlanta and picked up a load to take back north to Cincinnati. I spent the night in Walton, Kentucky off of I-75, at the same exit that has the sign for “Big Bone Lick State Park”—which, if you look at a map of Kentucky, is just down the road from Beaverlick.
Do you think they knew? Could this just be an extraordinary coincidence? How could these Kentucky folk get away with putting these two place names in such intimate proximity in this Puritan country? That’s better than the Amish region of Pennsylvania, where Intercourse is located very close to Blue Ball.
OK…now that I’ve taken the level of Chronicular conversation to soaring new lows…it’s as good a time as any to talk about what happened with Kim Smith and me.
[real-time note: Think satire, everyone, satire.]
I ended our relationship last week. I don’t know, I guess it just sort of lost that sizzle it had at the beginning. All we ever did was lie back there in the bunk and stare at each other, have sex and fall asleep. I guess I just wanted more. I wanted to read her poetry, and talk about all the places she’s been, and discuss the Chronicles and all her ideas about God and life too, and dig great books and great music, and I don’t know, just share some laughs, maybe some non-sexual spooning (Have you ever tried to spoon with a photograph? Doesn’t work very well.), go for walks in the downtime. She just wasn’t in to any of that.
I think it was sort of mutual anyway. She never told me so, but I suspect she was feeling a bit of ennui herself. My life isn’t all that exciting for someone used to the jet set model/Hollywood world. She never complained though, and she was faithful to me ‘til the end –at least I think she was, who knows what she was up to when I was out of the truck…then again, what better deal was she going to find in places like Bowling Green, Kentucky?
So she is gone, and I really do wish her all the best. She did seem like a really sweet girl in her interview, a lot more humble and sensitive than most people in her life station tend to come across. And she’ll probably need those qualities to live down “Catwoman.” If all the reviews and comments I’ve heard about the movie are any indication, Kim is more likely to be the subject of running jokes in late night TV monologues than the Next Big Thing. Her 15 minutes will probably have to wait until she does a real movie.
Now I am alone again with Camerado, and I can honestly say that I have never ever ever been more content. I haven’t had the slightest inclination to hook up with another magazine, or a movie, or a website, or any other collection of two- dimensional, impersonal images of women. Something is lifted, a burden that I’ve carried for so long that I don’t remember what it’s like to live without it. A need has been vanquished –for good? Maybe. It feels that way.
But what is it exactly? I’m not even sure I know. I am sure it isn’t a renunciation of the passions in the classic sense. I still feel a passion to do the things I just talked about wanting to do –in fact, one thing I seem to be saying is that I will accept no more substitutes for the real experience—and I still wonder about who I will be doing them with in the future.
But there’s more. This passion and this wonder do not require fulfillment. If I don’t have anyone with which to do any of these things that are dear to my heart today, I’m fine. If I don’t have anyone tomorrow, I’m still fine. If it takes a month, or a year, or if it never happens again, fine, fine, FINE! The reason I can say that and mean it is that I now realize that, when practiced with detachment, wanting is its own fulfillment. And when it does happen, that will be its own fulfillment, not the fulfillment of something else. Each event in a chain of events becomes its own glorious act of the divine play, and the result is, I am no longer in chains! I’m not looking to create situation “A” so that “B” will follow, and “C” next and so on; I will enjoy “A” for its own sake, and “B” when it comes without thinking about “C” or lingering on “A.” In each scenario there is the fullness of God, and where fullness of God is perceived, there is no want for anything else.
I’ve tried for years to cultivate this understanding on my own power, and I think we all understand why that is bound to fail. But there’s another element to the understanding I hadn’t considered before. Most programs of spiritual development that emphasize detachment also stress a diminishing of “the passions” to facilitate acceptance of the selfless state. The often severe austerities embraced by many God-seeking ascetics of the various Eastern faiths and philosophies are the best example, and we see this clearly in studying the life of Mahatma Gandhi (“I must reduce myself to zero,” he said). In the Christian West, where we seek a more personal relationship with a more personal God, we embrace fidelity and obedience more than self-denial, and the result seems to be that our faith, while not necessarily stronger, is more passionate. More robust, more vibrant. We are far more likely to “make a joyful noise” when we feel the presence of God (and I may be wrong, but it seems that this applies to Judaism as well). My eyewitness accounts of those who seem to be having an authentic “walk with God” in the Christian realm confirm the idea that, far from being passionless, these people are on fire with a burning passion to know God and to act out God’s will on earth etc. There is something very attractive on the deep- down soul level about that.
Again, I’m not trying to pit one group’s “right” against another’s “wrong” –I want to observe the “right” of all sides. The austerities of self-denial seem to have an important place in all faiths; they help us cultivate the ability to feel God’s presence more continuously rather than in fleeting moments or scheduled intervals. There is a valid and important place for them in the lives of all seekers of God.
But it raises an interesting question: is God passionate? Is God ecstatic about creation? We’re so used to thinking of God as an austere authority or Father-figure looking down at us from above and wagging His finger at all of our iniquities brought about by self-absorbed passions. But could the natural state of I AM be a passionate embrace of all that is? Could getting in touch with the true nature of God mean discovering an ecstasy that is too big to claim as our own, one that literally knows no bounds? A fascinating topic to me, and way too large to address as a part of this chapter, so I’ll save it for future ones. [But note: one does not have to delve too far into the writings and poems of the Sufis to see that at least some folks would answer a resounding “YES!” to all of these questions.]
I still have plenty of passions that I cling to as my own. Yesterday morning I got a message saying that after delivering in North Carolina, I’d be hopping across the border to Spartanburg, South Carolina and picking up today for Savannah, Georgia tomorrow morning –roughly a four to five hour trip. It was going to give me the perfect opportunity to stop in and see Ben in Columbia. Ben is a very good friend from the Maryland days and we always have a blast when we get together, which hasn’t happened for about two years I reckon. I pictured Capital City Bombers baseball action this evening and the gin-n-tonics flowing later at a semi-hip Columbia watering hole that Ben has surely discovered by now.
So I called and left a message on his work phone, then lollygagged my way through eastern Tennessee into the Smoky Mountains of Carolina. Well, mid-afternoon the beeper roused me from a semi-napping state to tell me that the Savannah load was “no longer available,” and I’d be reassigned. I was so frustrated –not only had I called Ben, but I’d lost the better part of the day driving-wise by holding back on an open-ended delivery—that I actually punched Camerado (a plastic panel above the driver’s side door). I instantly felt like an idiot and expressed my remorse to my dear Soul-companion, and there was complete forgiveness of course. But it only goes to show how easily we can get off-track and attach ourselves to our own passions instead of being open to God’s. This might be the best litmus test actually: if you feel excited about a specific event or outcome, and you are disappointed or angry if things turn out differently, then your passion is absorbed in the ego; if you are passionately excited about any experience that comes your way –literally any, up to and including your own death—then you are opening up to God’s passionate presence in the created universe.The former is not wrong or inherently evil. It won’t kill you to be attached to your ego…but why settle for it indefinitely? Why live in a “fallen” world when you can have Heaven here and now? (Note: the trip I ended up gettting yesterday brought me to Eden.)
Yesterday showed me that I have a long way to go to be liberated from all of the limited passions of my ego. But even that liberation has to come in God’s time, not mine, so detachment is essential here too. And the most oppressive ego-bound passion that I’ve struggled with and stumbled over for years –what in more informal correspondence I’ve been calling my “addiction to the orgasm”—is gone. Why now and not before? You could say it was all the exploration I’ve made into this part of my psyche by writing about it for the first time; you could say it was an exquisitely appropriate response in an email from my friend Jeff, quoting W.B. Yeats; you could say it was another very liberating experience that happened recently that is outside the Chronicular scope.
I say it was all three, blended with cosmic fairy dust of the Spirit, wrapped up and presented as a free, unwarranted gift of Providence.
Thank you Jesus! Praise Allah! OM shanti shanti shanti……
