Labor Day Boredom

Here’s how my night went…
I talked to Jesus.
I sinned.
I went to bed. It was 9 PM.
I woke up at a quarter to 11.
I woke up at 2am.
I woke up at 3am.
I woke up at 3:27am.
I talked with Jesus, mainly about my sin. He reassured me that he did not hate me, and we talked about how to avoid that particular sin.
I cleaned up the house because he told me that if I wanted to learn to love like him-I do especially learn to love a Godly woman-I would need to keep a clean household.
I played some Mass Effect. A surprisingly boring game.
I had another cigarette, decided not to listen to whatever Jesus was trying to tell me and sinned again.
I went back to sleep.
I got up and played some Prototype. Good graphics, easy controls, and heck its fun to pretend you can run up walls, jump super high and glide to the ground…
I tried to watch some Lone Wolf and Cub. It is a good flick but I wasn’t feeling it. Had another smoke, sinned again, and went back to sleep.
What’s wrong with me?
JESUS: Nothing. You’re human like everyone else, I love you and we’re dealing with this sin. Does writing all this make you feel better?
ME: Yes, no, I don’t @(#$&* know.
JESUS: Yes you do.
ME: Writing makes me feel better, no matter what the words are. Walking over to this office made me feel better.
JESUS: So walk back. Have a bite to eat, chill out.
ME: Can I smoke?
JESUS: You’re just going to keep going round and round about that aren’t you? That bronchitis really sucked didn’t it?
ME: You keep bringing that up?
JESUS: Autumn and then winter. The cold will get into those lungs, attack them, and since yours are weakened by smoke…
ME: I understand. I’m just not ready. It has me. Isn’t a couple weeks of sobriety…
JESUS: Best we don’t go there right now. Go on back to the house and chill out. Joe said he’d be over around noon didn’t he?
ME: Yeah.
JESUS: Go chill then.

Literary Intersections-beware some spoliers

Flannery O’Connor is to my adult life of reading what Roald Dahl was to my childhood; catalyst, intersection, a fellow sojourner at a crossroads pointing out a hidden path, the road less traveled.

Functional atheist, a term oft employed by the sound bite theologians to describe “non-believing believers” is not strong enough for O’Connor’s works.  She creates, almost incarnates, moral atheists and christian nihilists.  She bludgeon’s me with my hypocrisy and holds a mirror up to my own obsession with oblivion and mayhem.

These words haunt me.; “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children !”   Speaks the grandmother in O’Connor’s short story A Good Man is Hard to Find, to the Misfit, who proceeds to shoot her in the chest three times.  Bang!  Bang!  Bang!  I feel I have escaped a love of meanness by only a thin margin.

Flannery O’Connor understood her unique context-the American south in the mid-twentieth century-so well that she transcends those historical and geographical boundaries.  Why is she not more popular in Christian circles?  Maybe for those reasons I mention above?

Imagine a Baptist,or Lutheran, or mega seeker friendly parishioner.  Southern or mid-western, California beach believer or damn Yankee is of no import.  The modern American Evangelical is really who I’m speaking to.

They are all me least I be accused of unfair judgement.  I grew up in the city or the country.  My Christianity is self proclaimed.

I’m saved because I say I’m saved.  I know Jesus because I say I know Jesus.  God’s way is good because my way is God’s way.  We are not merely a litigious society, but rather we are all lawyers who loop and flash our way out of poor ethical decisions and vile affronts to both God and our fellow men.

O’Connor exposes this madness, this grotesque circus, for what it is .  I hold up my shiny clean vessel, the one I spent hours polishing.  Ms. O’Connor as polite as you like, comes along, sniffs the air.  “What’s that smell?”  She looks in my shiny cup.  “Why someone has defecated in this cup.”

But I keep saying “Pay no attention to the shit in the cup.  Look how shiny it is.  I polished it for hours.”

Growing up with knowledge of Christ and yet sliding down from maturity.  I have reached a point in my journey, thanks largely to Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, Moses, David, et. al. and Flannery O’Connor-I tremble to approach Doystoevsky-where I can no longer claim innocence of trespasses.  Most of my sin is now committed with full awareness of how terrible it is.  Isn’t it curious how much of the Bible’s talk on hell seems to refer to those who are believers?

Can I continue to claim Christ and live this way?  No.

Can I keep saying I’m saved and sin like this?  No.

I beg you Lord have mercy on me a sinner.

Would wearing a girdle of barred wire please you?  I’ll do it!  It’s nothing compared to this weight of sin.

Would giving up this turkey to any would be thief be enough to make you smile?  I don’t really care because even if I give up the turkey to the proletariat I’m still a turkey, this foolishness refusing to come unstuck from me.

O’Connor’s works make me wish my parents had christened me into the Catholic faith.  That sprinkling  a symbol more peaceful than what I remember.  I was nineteen when I was Baptized and I wonder now if the pastor shouldn’t have just held me down longer, kept me under until I started to thrash,  my lungs screaming out for oxygen, mouth opening involuntarily to let that scream out, his hand over my my hand over my nose, and water rushes into that scream, can’t drink it fast enough, first you pass out then you die.  Not sure he would have been strong enough, not to mention the horror of those in the pews.  How long would it take before they rushed up there to save me?  I can see my Dad jumping right into it that water to save me.

Come on and be saved.  O’Connor makes me wonder if that’s not just such small part of what God is doing here.  Salvation, what I thought was a major city turns out to be just a way station.  A place to die in sleep, fill my jug with fresh water, and have a quick bite before I take off down the road again.

Yes I mean this as a slap in the face.

Sometimes grace scares me.  Sometimes I am terrified of mercy.   But I will not, I cannot let them go.

I come to the intersection and I just wait and wait until suddenly it dawns on me.  Ms. O’Connor, who died too young, has been pointing the way for sometime now.  Guess I best be moving along.