Something Happens

Something always happens. (It’s always something, as Gilda used to say.) Sooner or later. In most cases. If one is patient. If one is faithful. Especially if one is wanting. Especially if one is expecting. Is looking. Is feeling around the place. The infinite metal place. For the door. The beads. The blinds. Fiddling around, one’s hands in the air. Sensing around for where the air parts to allow true entrance.

Oh, you know. Not the pretend kind. Not the play-acting kind. Not the mime-silly kind that the mime finds and pretends to step into. Through and into. No. Not that. That is a lie. A white-faced lie that one must always reject. It is always silly. Hollow. Pathetic, really, because there’s nothing there. Nothing at all. And so it’s a kind of sad, sad business. Because the point is the other place is real. Real as this computer I’m typing on is real. Real as these hands and mind and eyes are real through which these words come. And to pretend you are entering a pretend place is purely. Is completely and utterly hopeless and faithless and wrong and a lie. So please don’t do that. Don’t do that to God and yourself. Your soul and God’s soul. It creates real damage. It creates real havoc. So please. Please. Don’t act like you have found the room and entered the room and are wandering around in God’s room when you haven’t. When you aren’t.

It’s an example of the mimetic fallacy. A false mimesis. A mimesis that is always false. So let’s leave mimesis out of this. Let’s not pretend anything. Let’s get holiness and Christlikeness out of our vocabularies forever. Let’s just be ourselves. Let’s not try to be like holy people at all, because what do we know about holiness. We’re just human beings, after all. We’re not God. We’re not angels. We’re just people. And let’s leave it at that. Well. People who God chooses. People whom God takes into his presence and fills with light from time to time. But people nevertheless.

And so. Where was I. Where am I. And so. People nevertheless. Given to forgetting. Given to faithlessness. Given to mistakes. Given to falling out of bed. Given to falling off the mountain. Rolling and rolling down the mountain. Or jumping. Just jumping for the thrill of it. The dramatic what-the-hell cavalierness of it. Or whatever. Whatever it is that we’re doing when we forget ourselves. Forget where we are and what we’re doing. Forget God and God’s room and where God’s room might be. Forget how lovely. Forget how light-filled and song-filled. Forget the life that is in the sound and sight, the song and shape of the songs one discovers there. And cast ourselves out. Cast ourselves down. Cast ourselves away. So that we are castaways floating on the ocean of ourselves. Floating among the sharks of ourselves in the blistering sun without a drop to drink.

And we’re all wondering what happened. Who did what here. Who arranged this flotilla of humans in rags with raging thirst, drifting toward death. Drifting toward a windless death, mouths blackened and skins full of sores. The currents taking us wherever they will. Without sail or motor. Totally at the mercy of the elements. And as we contemplate this circumstance, we begin our looking again, because we are desperate, you see. We are at the end of our ropes. Our water’s been shut off, and we’re utterly without moisture. And we’re completely hopeless, you see. Pathetic and wondering. And in this blessed state. And often not before. We begin looking again. Scanning the horizon, you see. Listening and looking. Peering into the water to whatever depth we may believe we might see something. Regarding the sky with an expectancy. Regarding the wooden surface of the raft. The log-humped surface of the raft. Looking for what we do not know. And then we turn. Then we turn our heads slightly away from the sun and looking into our own shadow in the water here by the side of the raft and here. Here. Is a fish we haven’t seen before. An impossible fish, as far as we can tell. A rainbow fish. A fish that has all the colors of the rainbow. A fish that swims up and up and up, until it breaks the surface. We believe we watch it as it swims up to us for hundreds of feet, from way down in the dark. Way down in the waters of the earth. Getting larger and larger and larger. Until its dorsal fin breaks the surface. A fish we’ve never seen in nature or in the fish books we’ve read. A fish that looks right at us. That eyeballs us carefully. A fish that’s several times the length of our raft. A fish that could swallow us for a snack. A fish the like of which the world has never seen. A fish to redefine the meaning of fish. A fish that is extravagant. That is fantastic. That is Technicolor. That could be in the movies. That is impossible. That is incredible. And that is here. It is blessedly here. It is providentially here. And now what do we do, we are thinking. Now what do we do.