Just a Bag of Meat

It is Wednesday morn and I stepped in to the boys’ room to see if they were ready to get up. They weren’t of course, but I needed to at least let them know I was up, that I had showered, and that we would be taking off in a couple of hours.

I’ve been up early again. Long before the sun rose I walked along the beach and managed to keep my feet dry this time.

I haven’t taken any Xanax to calm my nerves, just listened to that Estonian choral music I mentioned the other day.

I suspect that Brenda has not moved out her stuff like we had planned. Oh I’m sure she came by and picked up some clothes, a few small items, but I just feel it, that she has avoided taking real steps to complete the separation her actions started. Just as she has been trying to straddle the fence all along, she has not made the commitment to move out that her actions dictate she should.

I suppose she is keeping her options open.

After all, I have been forgiving and accommodating, and have sought to help her at my own expense for so long, why would she think that I need her to get out?

This isn’t only about her infidelity. Or about her attitude towards our children. There are many things that her actions shout out telling me, telling the world, that she is one very mixed up, hurting, damaged human being.

Her attitude toward God, the view that He is cruel or capricious, or at the very least, uncaring, is an obstacle in our marriage as well. We are in such different places in our faith that it isn’t easy for me to hear what she thinks or feels, and my actions which show how much my faith means to me must certainly create tension in her.

There is a large part of me that wants to rescue her. After all, I love her, I want her happy.

It was pretty chilly last night. Unusual weather for this time of year. With the wind chill it was barely above freezing. I heard the snow level was down to 500 feet.

Still, I walked the beach in the dark, praying and thinking.

When we return the difficult situation will be in our laps again. I wish I could help her, set things right, but she must want this marriage if it is to work. It doesn’t matter how I feel about it, if she does not want this, then it cannot be.

I’ve often thought there are some things about my beliefs, my faith, that are rather odd. I’m inherently a selfish being. I am born into this world expecting, demanding, all my needs be met, and I slowly, ever so slowly, learn to mature away from that paradigm to where love, altruism, caring, giving, become more important. My faith helps me along that path, but I know that by the time I reach the end of my days I will have grown very little in the larger scheme of things, the eternal view of things.

That is what is so strange about my faith.

I’m not sure what the afterlife will be like, but it seems to me that I will stumble into a realm of love and caring and joy and I will be amazed, mystified at how different that reality will be.

I will be with beings that have existed before there was time, older than the 14 billion years that have passed since the creation. I picture those august beings moving gently about, giants who take care that their robes of power and grace do not crush me as they pass towering by. I picture these mighty beings rumbling and singing something akin to the choral melodies of Arvo Part, Te Deum, and bowing low, almost to a level where I can perceive their faces of shining love revealing a glimpse of thoughts they have mulled over eons, in honor of the glowing center of all things, a trinity of beings. A trinity that in its existence demonstrates the central reality of love, grace, forgiveness, and sacrifice.

I imagine I will find comfort seeking out those who also managed to enter a side gate of that sacred place, a gate so small a camel would have to crawl to pass through, just as I will do. I will see my loved ones, my grandmother, my child, friends and spiritual celebrities, all sliding in that side gate, paying a borrowed bribe to be let in. And that would have been barred from us if the bribe wasn’t the blood which flowed from one of that trinity, that central glow of love and grace.

I suppose it would feel strange to know that I had lived less than a century, yet I could move about that great place, among those august presences.

Why should I be there?

There are a few basic rules God has given us to guide us in proper behavior, for creatures which have souls, though they ignore the implications. I have failed so many of those rules. I have envied. I have lusted, and stolen, and lied. I have made my desires more important than those of my Creator.

Yet, He has done all He could to allow me the chance to accept that payment, that bribe that permits the magistrates, the gate keepers of the side gate, to overlook the list of my crimes and let me in.

Why did He do that?

I am nearly an animal. I live upon the lives of other living things, plants, animals, the very minerals of earth, air, and sea, and despite this heritage of corporeal life I am welcome to eternity.

Why did He do that?

I am a strange mixture of base animal needs and desires, sprinkled with a longing for things of the spirit, testimony that I’ve a soul in addition to the mind that can plan things good and things evil.

Brenda just called. She is sounding... hurt, scared, sad... sorry. She says she will be at the house when we return. I think she wants to come back.

Hmmmm...

I notice I just wrote “house” not “home”. I have read that the word “home” is an English word that doesn’t have identical counterparts, the same conotations, in other languages. Home is more than a place to live. It is the center of our lives, of comfort. Home can also mean larger things, the town where we grew up, the nation we come from if we are abroad. The fact I wrote “house” rather than “home” is an indication of my feelings right now. When a home loses its heart, it becomes just a house.

Perhaps that is what is so wonderful about Heaven. We sense that it is home like no other place in this world can ever be. That it is literally the center, and that our souls instinctively know that when we slip in through that side gate, and Saint Peter (an amusing mythical concept) looks over the description of our lives, sacrificial blood will have blotted out our deeds, our weaknesses, our failings.

The reason for all those transgressions we do while our souls animate these blobs of flesh is because we are self-centered.

The hurts my wife has given me is because of her placement of her self above all other things. A little pleasure. A little escape from responsibility. A little sense of freedom, and the nasty streak of decay that she has tracked across our lives creates a stench that nearly overwhelms me and my children.

Much like the filthy stains of sinful slime every human being has left trailing through their lives sins Eve said “You know, I think I do want that.”

It must seem strange for those august beings to find themselves surrounded by infant spirits, just beginning to see a greater realm, a greater truth.

I suspect that is what was behind Satan’s anger, envy, pride. I suspect he simply believes we should never be allowed through the gate. He didn’t want to share those shining halls with the smelly, ephemeral creatures which sprung from soil and consuming other things so they may sweat, and grunt and defecate and reproduce and then sing alongside majesty to the same center that he had been created for.

But the Boss, the Creator, the Living Word is the ultimate authority, and He knew that if He paid the price with His perfection, that the Spirit would shower us with a cleansing baptism that would permit us to walk through that gate without trailing the muck from the swamp we had passed through.

I think it is too easy for us to believe that we somehow deserve that. After all, He has been forgiving and accommodating, and has sought to help us at His own expense for so long, why wouldn't such self-centered creatures as ourselves expect He won't let us come home?

Brenda thinks He has been cruel, making her barren, giving and taking a child, providing two children for adoption who ultimately demonstrate they will be something like children all of their lives.

She doesn't see that the majority of the hurts in our lives, in all the world's lives, flows from the freedom to do what we wish, our free will.

Despite the constant rejection of the love and sacrifice He repeatedly offers to us, we choose to run to the things which ultimately hurt us and those around us.

The hurts we create are because of we place of ourselves above all other things. A little pleasure. A little escape from responsibility. A little sense of freedom, and the nasty streak of decay we track across our lives creates a stench that nearly overwhelms the promise of true freedom, to true love, to home.

In a few hours I will be having a conversation with my wife. I believe she is seeking a path out of her mistakes, a way around the consequences of her sins of self-centeredness.

I’m not sure what I can, or should, do.

It is good to have the example of my Lord, but I am still a walking bag of meat that has as its initial motivation a sense of self preservation.