7 Takes to Reality

Friday. Therefore Takes.

One
It’s snowing! And it looks like we bombed Syria during the night! Fun!
Ok, so this is why I’m developing an allergy to the word ‘we’. As social discourse fractures and we have to every day choke down the ever ripening fruit of the philosophical presuppositions of secular humanism, progressivism, man’s ever upward journey to utopia, and the glorious idol of the last century, ‘the individual’, the word ‘we’ is tripping me up every. single. time. Even when I use it myself.

It’s meant to be inclusive, of course. It’s meant to bridge the distance between two individual selves over the ghastly turgid waters of Otherness. ‘We’ joined by this single inoffensive word can be united together around something–an idea, a hope, a group of letters in a sentence.

But, because language was busily fractured au meme temps as all the rest of everything, words like ‘we’ aren’t really strong enough to bear the weight of all our collective brokenness. ‘We’ isn’t robust enough to bear the burdens we keep piling on it. It collapses under scrutiny. Like ‘we bombed Syria.’ Who is the we? I mean, I really hope I’m not somehow morally implicated in the choices of the government. Except that, I know I must be because God never bought into our modern philosophical presuppositions, which is a deep pity.

Still, some linguistic distance is becoming a lot more comfortable for me a lot of the time. ‘The Trump Administration bombed Syria during the night.’ ‘God is making it snow.’ I am lying in bed and have nothing to do with any of that.

Two
So Sunday is Palm Sunday…which signals the beginning of Holy Week.

I really don’t know how to wrap my mind around this terrible reality. Lent seriously passed over me this year in a cloud of unknowing. My Favorite Season of the year just poof, gone while I wandered around trying to figure out who I am and how healthy I was going to be from day to day.

And now Holy Week, which is even more my favorite. And I don’t even know where to put my hand to find a list, a list that doesn’t even really exist.

Three
Yesterday I posted at 6am and today it’s going to be sometime after 9. That’s because yesterday I had to go spend the morning in the hospital for one of those unpleasant times where you both bless and curse modern medicine. As I said to Matt, ‘if we didn’t have all these great pain management things (that’s a technical medical word), and all the knowledge about germs and stuff, I would just be dying of hysteria in the comfort of my own bed, sucking down whiskey in my teacup, or in some sanitarium somewhere. They wouldn’t Know why my insides look like. Whoever they are.’ He looked up from his cell phone and asked if I’d said something, to which I replied, ‘no never mind.’

The thing I had going on yesterday is not officially related to my thyroid, although, of course, I wonder quietly to myself if all the various unrelated issues don’t share some common unknown cause, if they haven’t all joined hands across the daisy fields of my insides to sing kumbaya and drink Coke, or is it Pepsi (that’s just a little joke).

Anyway, I don’t wanna talk about it. I’m all puffy and sore and I might not be getting out of bed today. So sue me. I’m not a young spring chicken. I can’t just go waltzing in for a ‘procedure’ one day and then get up and dance around the living room the next. I have to lie back and read more of the Internet.

Four
Although, I will be quietly freaking out on the Inside (because of Holy Week) which will manifest itself in irritation with the children for being slobs. Speaking of which, I had a revelation this week.

When I’m, how shall I say it, ‘yelling’ at the children to clean up, it’s not because I’m really mad at them…well, most of the time. It’s because I’m mad at myself. In my mind we are all living in a Mrs. Piggle Wiggle golden dream where the children happily go to school, Mr. Kennedy goes cheerfully off to work, I smile happily at the spring weather, sit down, pour myself another cup of coffee and consider what I will do with the day. Tidy up, perhaps? Bake gingerbread for the children to munch when they come home from school?

Never mind that literally Nothing of Mrs. Piggle Wiggle really exists in my life. First of all, the children don’t leave. Second of all, neither does Mr. Kennedy. Not from 9-5. He has the freedom to organize his own hours which actually means he probably works twice as much as in my golden dream. Third, I don’t drink coffee. Fourth, I don’t have the time or energy to ‘make gingerbread.’ And there is no Mrs. Piggle Wiggle to call when the children develop monstrously annoying habits.

Although, for the first time in years, I do have a land line telephone, so if I wanted to I could put on a skirt and heels and stand by the phone, talking to someone. Someone who would yell at me for not texting first to say I was calling.

Five
It really all comes down to expectation. What do you really think is going to happen? So much disappointment in life can be distilled down to this simple problem, and, indeed, the gospel itself. If you think you’re living in Mrs. Piggle Wiggle, but you’re really living in Syria, you’re not going to enjoy yourself. If you think the problem with the world is Other People, but it’s actually the sinful inclinations of every single human heart, you’re not going to be impressed with Jesus.

Holy Week, if it is anything at all, is an awfully good time to align the inside imaginations of your heart and mind with reality, to accept, for a few moments, the Way Things Are. How are things really? Who are you really? Who is God? Is there anywhere a true We? Us?

In the face of a fractured, broken, atomized, individualized world, to look at the single One, the Other who would be strong enough to bear the weight of each and every single particular individualized sin, to take it and carry it away as far as the east is from the west, so that there might really be a We, an Us–I and Thou–is so extraordinary. Human words fail me every time I try to look at it and express what a great, what a true, what a Real Thing this is. (That’s a technical theological word.)

Six
Two little girls come in screaming.
Marigold, screeching: I SAY ITS RAINING. BUT EGGLANTINE SAYS ITS SNOWING.
Me: It’s doing both.
Marigold: Oh.

Seven
And now go check out more and better takes. And may God do something about Syria, but also all the troubles here too.