Perspective

Part of me sees God as distant... and He is. It's true. Criminy!

It's all so large. So very large. So large it cannot be constrained, not even by the speed of light.

If you ask a Christian about God, they will nearly always talk about a personal God.

That's only part of it, of Him.

It is difficult for many to imagine the scale of the universe.

It is at least 27 billion light years across. That means, at it's current size, it would take 27 billion years for light to travel that distance.

How fast is light? Pretty quick.

To travel from Portland, Oregon to Sydney, Australia at the speed of light would take less than 0.025 seconds.

Pretty quick.

The matter of the universe once went faster than that, and, in a way, will do so again.

Just after the Big Bang matter raced outward faster than light... a universe of matter too dense and too hot for the four laws of physics to exist, so, the laws, having not yet been created, weren't "enforced". Didn't last long, but still... that is how it all got to be so darn large.

Soon baby galaxies formed, globs of stars, mostly enormously large stars gobbled up their hydrogen fuel in only a few million years before collapsing and rebounding, seeding the universe with new elements, which in turn formed into new stars, which lived nearly as short lives, and repeated the cycle (our sun is about 4.5 billion years old because it is much more moderate in size and is eating its cosmic meal with more appropriate, sedate manners).

The early galaxies formed around enormous black holes jetting material at speeds so great they are still "seen" at enormous distances (therefore times) shouting with the power of a trillion stars.

Today things have become somewhat more settled... galaxies are clumping together, but... the universe continues to expand (at an ever increasing rate).

The distances between the galaxies grow further apart like dots on an expanding balloon.

Can you see how the dots have moved apart from each other?

And while nothing within the universe travels faster than light, not relative to anything near it, the accumulative speed of all of it together, from one side to the other, will eventually add up to a speed greater than light. Eventually the further edges will begin to disappear from our telescopes as they recede.

It is my conviction, without demonstrable proof, that God is within, through, and outside all of this, and indeed, holds it all together.

So, when one asks a Christian about God, and the answer is about a personal God, I feel that is only a small (pun intended) part of it.

I think God is interested in larger things as well.

I think God is not only closely following the spiritual growth and exploits of individuals, and of nations, but of civilizations and our species as a whole.

God is BIG.

God has held the universe close to Him, as it was born leaping instantly to a fullness faster than light, of how it toddled through its goofy globular galaxies with its infant cries of quasars...

Yet...

Yet on many occasions... many times... I have felt His eye on me.

I have felt His breath on the back of my neck.

It is terrifying.

Yet even in those moments when I have felt that intense gaze, I also felt warmed by a love as large as the universe.

So large.

So complete.

So free.

He is a personal God. ...A being of such enormous consciousness and love and power... yet with an awareness of things, beings, so minute, that such love in its enormity is so alien to my ability to love.

The universe isn't static. It has gone through many changes, stages, and has more change ahead of it. Time unfolds in the direction of ever increasing entropy, but I am certain He is outside it as well... and takes joy in the entire work of creativity.

Pretty cool.

Pretty big, and pretty cool.

I like the perspective.

Eternity

I am far from perfect. Quite far.

Monday I blew it. I went up to Isaac’s room. I was going to say good morning, after all, I hadn’t seen him since Tuesday.

His room was a bigger mess than I had ever seen it. I mentioned how unwashed dishes had brought the ants back. Then I said something about how his lowered savings account would now cost him a monthly fee. And it all came out... I began growling, and then yelling... about his being late for work, about responsibility... about... too many things. I was frustrated. I went too far.

I hurt him a great deal. Enough so I... well... he needed to see a counselor.

The counselor wasn’t any good (he fell asleep twice during the session), but it was a start.

A good start to a number of changes. He needs to learn better communication skills. I need better listening skills. And I think I need to rethink what he is capable of, what might be too much to ask of him.

Brenda came to see him While I was at work Wednesday. I didn’t know she was here, but, perhaps it is OK for Isaac to want his mother do what she did... fix him breakfast, make Jello for his dinner desert.

I didn’t like it.

She wants to help him more tomorrow. She wants to come over here...

I don’t like it.

Went to a movie tonight. Two trailers, back to back, hit me in the gut.

The first was about a woman traveling to Ireland to propose to her boyfriend. Apparently February 29th is a date that a woman can propose.

I met Brenda February 29th, 1980.

The second trailer hurt.

It was about an older woman finding the love of her youth with the help of a young stranger. It was a poignant moment, her seeing the many of her youth, a love carried through a lifetime.

I’ve spoken to Brenda several times this week. My heart has never been further from her than it is now. There is absolutely no echo of the adamantine resolve to make our marriage work. It is gone.

But something else remains.

I desire to love, be loved. I desire to have a love that carries me to the grave.

The ol’ metacognition thing, ever present, has me self analyzing. Why do I feel this way?

It isn’t simply a desire to be wanted.

I am obsessively loyal. To a point of self destructiveness.

For a moment, watching that trailer, I felt overwhelmed, frustrated.

I’m not the bachelor type. I am uninterested in dating a string of women.

I feel frustrated that I cannot live a life of that kind of loyalty. The one I chose to walk to the grave with turned down a different path.

I took my glasses off in the darkened theater, bent my head to pray.

Why am I like this? Why do I so strongly want to be loyal to someone?

In that prayer, with my eyes tearing, I felt the spread of eternity around me. I felt time sliding not only into a future so distant that the form of this universe is thinned to a cold smear, dark... I felt that eternity stretching sideways... an eternity that pauses in a conscious yet static moment that will always be, has always been.

This eternity isn’t a theological theory for me. It is a truth that is intrinsically woven into who I am.

I was surrounded by many in the theater... I wanted to wrap this prayer up quickly.

I know this eternity.

It knows me.

I cannot escape it.

Being a part of that larger expanse of time, the one that never ends, in any direction, future, past, even perpendicular to now, is as real to me as the whispered voices in the darkened theater.

It is how I am made.

And there was tonight’s small epiphany.

I am still grieving the loss of the destroyed loyalty I had, the steadiness I felt even when my spouse was tearing the foundation of our marriage apart.

I fear choosing again... There is someone I am serious about. But I fear making the choice a poor one.

I fear it because I see that I am a loyal person. I will stick with it through the end.

That sense I have that eternity stretches around me, is similar to the sense I have of being steady for those around me.

I want to get the special love that will walk with me to the grave, but more important than that, I see that in how I know I am eternal, is similar to how I feel about steadiness in my relationships.

Part of me wants to move quickly.

Part of me takes great joy in all of this.

I like being an eternal being.

I like that I was made this way... even if it sometimes led me to cling to waht should have been tossed.

Tonight They Burn Steady

The stars were so bright tonight.

The crisp autumn air, chilled by afternoon rains, is too still to permit them to twinkle. They seem like old friends... the constellations, a few stars I know by name.

I got quickly into the van... I knew I needed sleep... and drove home. Yet here I sit in bed, tapping away at this keyboard because there is too much in my head and heart to permit sleep.

Driving home I thought about my father, and the women in his life, about my son, and the panic I felt yesterday, about the woman and her children behind me getting ready for bed... a delightful evening... Sweet kisses... A large heart...

Contentment and confusion, those who need my help and those who help me, classical music and classic rock, a predawn walk in soaked shoes and chilly sheets warming slowly...

Parental frustration shook my son to his breaking point, my friends gathered around me, pressing their shoulders to he and me, pressing the cracks of our hearts closed so they could heal...

My father gasping for breath, slipping toward death, my father surrounded by women who give him their love for free, and for a price. My father stronger once again as the small jet lifted me away from Orange County, northern bound.

I am terrified and overjoyed at the size of the universe and the gaze of its creator fully upon me.

Life is wonderful and confusing and frightening and complex and simple...

I want to write about all that is happening, all that has happened, and of what I sense of the future, sliding toward me from the entropic direction of our universe, yet paradoxically already done, complete.

I am so grateful for the work I do, the charges in my care, the colleagues beside me, those who direct my labors.

I am grateful for my freedom, and I resent it too... I am free to love again, and choose again, and I resent the one who saw so little in herself she threw away what was good in her, and in me.

I wonder at the anorexic star, voracious at its final meal. I wonder at the brilliant immolation of stars and worlds and dust shining with the brilliance of a trillion stars, so far away they died long ago, long before their light reached here.

There is too much to write about... My successes and failures as a parent... my successes and failures as a person...

So... this disjointed prose will have to do... notes jotted down on a digital notepad...

The stars were so bright tonight.

The Prodigal Father

My dad is in Southern California, wrapping up his life there.

The business struggled the last few years while he was in Thailand. The economy, poor decisions by those he’d left in charge, a number of factors, and it is clear the business should fold. The biggest name in building demolition and earth moving in Orange County, California is folding.

So is his marriage, of course. He’s on his third Thai girlfriend now, she on her second Californian boyfriend.

This is all regretable, but simply a part of the way things are.

My father wasn’t a perfect father. There were many choices he made, many actions he took, which were far from ideal.

But in his heart he is a good, though flawed, man.

His divorce papers have been filed, his heavy equipment auctioned. A couple of houses, a zillion personal items, details of outstanding bills and obligations are all that separate him from flying back to southeast asia for good. That, and his heart, which is “in pretty bad shape.”

He doesn’t want to go into a hospital here in the states. He is hanging on to check into a hospital in Bangkok.

I’m flying to Southern California this afternoon.

I’m taking a couple of days personal days and I’ll run whatever errands makes this easier for him. Chauffeur him around, deliver personal items to family members, file papers, pay bills, whatever makes it easier for him.

Faith is a big part of my life. But, unless he wishes to talk about it, I have no plans to talk faith with him.

He knows all that stuff. He went to church every Sunday when I was first entering school, before he had his first affair.

He always lived a little larger than was probably wise. World speed records on motorcycles, adventures dreamt in alcohol-fueled daydreams, or machismatic bravado... he lived a little large.

Cracks me up to think of that ambulance pulling up to him on the Bonneville Salt Flats, expecting to find a corpse but finding my father sitting on his ruined 400 horse power motorcycle, non chalant about dropping it at 165 miles per hour. When they told him to get on the stretcher for the ride in the ambulance he just told them to F off and asked for a cigar though half his teeth were missing.

He never asks for help, never complains about his health. Until now.

Which tells me that this time he is serious, he is facing some serious health issues. He may not make it to Bangkok by the 22nd.

Growing up I wasn't exactly the macho son he wanted. I read too much, drew or painted too much, thought and talked too much.

None of that matters now. I’m 53 now. I’m grown up and the ghosts of parental misadventures no longer haunt me.

All I want now is to help him, and for him to know he is loved.

Of course I am concerned about what eternity he faces, but it isn’t as if he doesn’t know about the elements of my faith, what salvation is. I think he is a believer of sorts, though of recent years he dabbles in buddhism.

No... none of that matters. He knows it all, and I will share of that sort of thing only if he wishes it. I’ll be glad to talk of angels and miracles and wonders of this world, this universe, and the surmises I have about the universes beyond this one, and the mystic imaginings I have cobbled together from reading of faith and science...

But I am more interested in simply being a help, being a loving son, offering what I can. I can’t really tell him anything about faith he doesn’t know, but I can tell him that the way I live my life is well grounded, enough so I am glad to drop everything to come help.

Dad is 72. A well worn 72. When it comes to aging it isn’t the distance traveled that matters, it’s the terrain.

He’s climbed a number of mountains, dangled from tree roots over dusty canyons and swum choppy predator-infested seas.

His exploits are many. He lived a prodigious life.

And prodigal as he is, he is running out of steam... physically, financially. He’ll probably have a half million dollars when this is over... enough to get him whatever he wants for this dusky time.

He went on his adventures, lived that prodigious life, but now I see him reaching toward me (he sent me on that adventure to Asia last summer), and I know that despite his mistakes, despite the fears he instilled in me, I love him.

The Prodigal Father has returned to me, and if I can help him find the Father who is truly prodigious by offering him a little help... Well... that will be quite nice.