Joan Of Arcadia

Or maybe it’s more like the character Joan says on the TV show, Joan of Arcadia. Or said. Or Jane. I think they alternate between Joan and Jane. The girl who talks with God. Chats. Chats up a little pop theology. A little Joan Pop. Who discovers that God might be a cleaning woman or a janitor or a kid with lips and ears and nose pierced or an admiral or a grandmother or. Well, who knows. God is supposed to be always here, isn’t he? I mean. He could choose to be anywhere he likes. He’s God after all. Before all and after all and during all.

Maybe like she says in the show aired April 15, 2005. There is this web of connections. Bonds that may be strong or weak but that never go away. No matter how weak they may get. A little like gravity, I think. One of the four fundamental forces of nature, one finds in books. Powerful enough to bend light. Operating at great distances. Shaping the universe itself, the one verse.

And it’s funny because there’s a kid on that show that my daughter Katharine is friends with. The funny looking bushy haired kid who thinks he’s really smart and who banters an intellectual or pseudo-intellectual banter with Joan’s brother, who is also super smart. Or who’s supposed to be.

A kid who I call The Little Short Guy, because he was, when Katharine and he first met years and years ago now. In Chicago. And then it was a year ago last summer, I think, when Katharine visited him on the set of the show and got to meet everybody. And everybody, she said, was quite friendly and quite easy to talk with, just as if they weren’t really so important after all. So famous. So much like characters showing us how to live with God. So much like beings elevated, almost as offerings, in a way, toward heaven.

But what I want to say is that maybe God’s mind is made up of all these connections. All these strong and weak forces that never break or go away. These relations among us. These love-hate relations among us. Like gravity pulling us all together some way, but then bodies colliding and smashing one another to smithereens.

Kind of like the way our brains are all wired up together. How bits on one side of the brain communicate with other bits on the other side of the brain. And what emerges is. Oh, let’s say. The color purple. The perceived color purple.

Or in synethetes—people who hear colors and see sound—the heard color purple. The color purple heard as a specific chord somewhere in Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, for example.

And so God’s mind is the emergent heart-spirit-soul-mind that arises from these relations. Or that more correctly creates these relations, because there seems to be directionality, doesn’t there. I mean. We have these terrible evil vortices we get caught in from time to time in the history of the world and in our personal histories. But like the mother says to her child when the child has a bad dream and goes running to her in the night, it’s okay. It will be okay. All will be well. All manner of thing will be well. A little like Julian of Norwich. Julian of Norwich’s sentiment repeated in home after home, family after family, all over the world.

There is this hope. Which seems like directionality to time’s arrow. Time’s arrow isn’t going off in an arbitrary direction. It’s going off in some direction, and our intuition is that it is somewhere finally good. Somewhere that makes the journey, no matter how difficult, worth the slog.

And so what I’m thinking is this longing we have for God. This hope. This hope of seeing him and hearing him and brushing up against him. All of this forms a connection between us and him. Forms a connection that allows us sometimes to hear him. To see him. That is, sometimes the connection is strong and sometimes it’s weak. Sometimes he’s real and present to us, and sometimes he’s merely a fly on the wall. Is part of the woodwork. Is out there on the moon. Watching. Attending. Listening. Waiting.

Waiting basically for us to give him a call. Waiting for that reaching out sense we have. That hopeful gesture of the spirit-mind-heart-soul thing we have in us that looks for completion to him. Elsewhere. Elsewho. Elsewhat.

That reaches out sometimes desperate, sometimes hopeful, sometimes welcoming, sometimes thrilled, sometimes running, sometimes quiet as grass in a slight breeze.

And to others. To him and to others. To him through others. Or to him directly through him. Directly through the ether, where he lives. Creating or completing or refashioning or opening these connections. And then maintaining them. Actively in our lives. In our dreams. In how our lives take their shapes from them as we move forward. In what we make of ourselves and the new connections as they come up. As they fall into place. As we move into this intricate connectedness. This elastic fantastic infinite definite invisible actual factual imaginary indestructible ineluctable practical impossible freighted fraught immediate and intermediate business of being alive.

Maybe this is the real information. This is where the real God information is coded. How it is coded. Maybe there really is a law of the conservation of information. And maybe no matter what happens, these relations remain. Come death or taxes, come volcanoes and tidal waves, pestilence and war, these continue their work. No matter how distant or time-bound or apparently inconsequential.

You know. Chaos. The whole business of chaos theory. How even in chaos there is structure. And the commonplace importance of the butterfly’s wings.

But back to Joan. I don’t know. These writers. They’re pressing into something, aren’t they. Or weren't they, now that the series has been cancelled. I don’t know what to call it. But whatever it is. I like it. Keep going, I want to say to them. Keep going. No matter the corruption of the medium. No matter the dilution and distortion. Hey, I’m with you. And little short guy. I like your work.