Books, Sin, and the Mountain I Can’t Climb

We had a really good time away. We payed our usual homage to the Alamo. We went to the beach in Corpus a couple of times. We swam every day in a serene and beautiful pool. I read an entire novel and looked fondly at the enormous pile of improving books I lugged all the way down there, hoping to read them, being really afraid that I wouldn't have enough to read, knowing in my heart that if I read anything it would be a miracle. So, well, you know how it is, one book is better than none at all.

I would really like to go through the house and gather and then neatly stack all the books I've actually read. Most of the books around here are Matt's, and I know that he's read them all. Whereas I have a few book shelves of books that I have read, and then an ever growing pile of books I mean to read. My impression is that the pile of unread books vastly exceeds the pile of read books, just like the pile of undone laundry is always much greater than the small number of clean clothes in everyone's jumbled drawers. I am always climbing up some mountain or another, hoping to arrive, hoping to finish something, but when I reach a long distant goal, thinking it is the top, it turns out it was just a landing stage and there is farther to go.

If I was a better sort of more cheerful person, I would reach the landing and say something like, “oh, awesome, we get to climb some more, it's so beautiful up here, how great that we don't have to turn around and go home but get more time to climb all the way to the top.” That's what I hear other people saying, whether they are really saying it or not. Whereas I get to the landing stage and lose my temper and sit down in rage and sorrow over my ruined expectations. I only had a certain amount of time to climb the wretched thing, it is now taking longer and using up more energy than I budgeted. I do not rejoice at a new adventure, I throw laundry around the room because I just wanted to be finished with it, forever. Someone once gave me, in a fit of true brilliance, a funny glass half full trick glass so that it could only ever be half full, you could never fill the glass ever, but I broke it, the way I break everything that's not made of sheet iron.

Not to identify my feelings with God, but I've fallen asleep in the end of Daniel and woken up in the middle of Hosea for the last three mornings. Every morning I remember that I fell asleep and set myself back so as to really hear whatever the reading really is. It's unfolded as a little Groundhog Day exercise since I've fallen asleep and woken up in precisely the same chapters every time. Talk about futility. There God is, saying exactly the same thing, over and over, and me falling asleep again and again. Now, on the third morning, I see that this idea of progressing up a mountain needs to die off in my mind. I'm not really going anywhere. I'm not really climbing up anything. I am walking around in a tight circle, doing a certain number of tasks however well or badly. They are tasks I'm supposed to be doing. They are necessary, they are essential for the happiness and health of others around me.

But it's bewitching, the idea of finished progress. I think I must have gotten seduced by the charming idea of progressing towards something glorious both from the culture and from the church. We must be going somewhere, doing something important and amazing. We must be climbing up a great hill, at the top of which we will find God and he will congratulate us for having achieved something. When really, whatever we set out to do, it doesn't take us up further towards him. Most things take us back down, or even away from the foot of the mountain altogether. Every time the church thinks it's made progress, you can wake up the next morning and see plainly that it hasn't. The hope of progress should be abandoned, cast away with shame. The church, we Christians, should embrace some kind of clinging to doing the same exact things over and over. Reading the same texts, breaking the same bread, drinking the same wine, preaching the same gospel, comforting and consoling the same griefs, moving the same wooden sheep, singing the same songs, over and over and over and over.

Because really, the only true hill is the one outside the city, dark against the sky, with a single man who did complete a work, who summited carrying a terrible burden. It's ok for me to walk in a tight circle around the bottom of that mountain. What am I going to do? March on up and take some of the burden down on to myself, as if I were able to save myself, and maybe one other person? What a foolish thing that would be. No, I need to be down here to grieve with those who walk up to the hill and for the first time see that there isn't progress, that we cannot make a name for ourselves that way, that repentance and grief over sin is the only thing that remains worth doing, and that it needs to be done over and over and over again until God himself, and not me, decides it is time to do something new and better.