Jesus wrecked my life. If not for Him I could be safely tucked away in the tender arms of apathy. But He came in, He crushed all my expectation and filled it with something far beyond my comprehension. And in beautiful and agonizing ways He continues to do so. I still feel the product of this initial destruction. I feel it every day in his further demolition of my life, and in the rebuilding. It gives me sorrow and fills me with joy.
If I were to list the things that have gone immensely wrong in my world over the past few months we would be able to tally them alongside the things that have gone wondrously right and perhaps conclude, with Herald Crick, that my life is in a dead heat between tragedy and comedy. But life, you know, is Stranger Than Fiction.
Love often destroys. Like Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Helen and Achilles. The more arduous the love the more potential it has to destroy you. But lovers immersed in such passion never regret the destruction. There is a certain sweetness to the bitterness. Something about being embroiled in the saga awakens you in a way you have never been awakened. Excruciating pain ensures that the senses are not dulled, not lulled to sleep by apathy. And if you can endure intense pain without accepting a drug to numb it, you are capable of experiencing its antithesis, immense, overpowering and almost unbearable joy.
There's a reason artists, poets and musicians often live such schizophrenic lives of high highs and low lows. Because to create art that makes people feel something, you must live that emotion more intensely than you are capable of communicating through your art. The best art is but a failed attempt to express the inexpressible. And the inability to ever fully express, coupled with the insatiable need to experience more, so perhaps to find the key to expression, can make you crazy.
But there is powerful truth to be discovered in that which can never fully be communicated. Maybe here in our mortal world those things which are most true are those which are least explainable. Those things which overwhelm us, which overpower us, which annihilate us and yet leave us begging for more are the very things which are MOST true. They beg to be experienced, to be contrasted with each other and to find a voice to quantify and qualify them. But it is "like trying to catch a wave upon the sand." You simply cannot. Even science proves this to us. How many times have you found a "verifiable fact" for each side of the case? Does this mean that one or the other is false? Perhaps. Perhaps one method is flawed. Or perhaps you simply don't have all the information you need to understand the facts and see fully how they fit together.
We are, as Stuart in Kate and Leopold so vividly puts it, like a dog who sees a rainbow, but none of the other dogs believe him, because none of the other dogs can see in color. The color exists, the potential of expression exists, but the comprehension never fully does. If we ourselves could perfectly comprehend it we could no doubt adequately express it so that others could also fully comprehend. But full comprehension of something so outside ourselves is impossible. But we try. And we try to comprehend through further experience and we destroy ourselves in the trying. And this is what we call living life to the fullest.
The point I am making, I suppose, is that humanity has a history of embracing that which destroys us because what destroys us redefines us and constant redefinition is essential to rational life. [Here I might insert that by merely thinking we are taking in information, synthesizing it and rationally redefining ourselves, so to cognizantly live and not merely biologically live perhaps there must indeed be an equation between "thinking" and "being"] We give ourselves for a love or a cause. We surrender ourselves to the flames so to rise from the ashes like a Phoenix. And so we must. If ever we are to become a Phoenix, we must first be reduced to ashes.
I choose the flames of faith in Jesus Christ. I choose it because out of rational thought and emotional experience I think it is the best and right option. And I continue to verify that decision through the experiences of my life. I continue to try to communicate it as I have attempted (and most certainly failed) to here. It is destroying me and rebuilding me, but looking back it has always done so in a way consistent with that which it has claimed.
And that, my friends, is the great irony of life. It is unexplainable, and so we must try to explain, and with each explanation we get closer to a more full understanding of the truth we can never fully understand, for to fully understand, to ever fully judge the rightness of, we must know all and that (thank you Renaissance, Age of Enlightenment, and Age of Technology for reminding us) is simply an impossibility.
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