Tag: original sin

I have a suggestion for God

I’m not trying to tell God how to do his job, but I do have a few pointers.  

Let me back up. Yesterday, I spent a full 20 hours without even touching my phone. This magnificent feat of self control came about because I lost my phone.  

It’s a long story, and it involves a tragically stupid string of bad choices on my part, but where it ended was me ripping open a bag of wet dirt and bits of broken glass, and not finding my phone in there, and then hoisting that up and ripping open a second bag of wet dirt and bits of broken glass that was under the first one, and there, buried in the dirt, was my phone. It still turned on, and I was glad to have it back. Mostly.  

I do need my phone. I really do. But I need it for far less than I actually use it, and it was a nice 20 hours without it. I didn’t read a single headline about the president. I didn’t get in any fights with strangers over things I don’t know much about. I didn’t scroll miserably past hundreds of ads for things I couldn’t afford. I didn’t watch any videos of morbidly obese people getting yelled at or of hoarders weeping over their dirty junk. And it was easy to say my prayers, because I didn’t have my phone making the case that it, and not God, deserved my attention first. 

Without my phone, I sat outside in the morning sun and slowly drank my coffee. I listened to the birds and tried to figure out who they were without the aid of an app. I went down to the stream and collected some pretty bits of porcelain that had washed up and lodged in the banks. I fed the ducks and collected their eggs; I washed my hands; I prepped dinner in peace. And then I went back outside and made one last-ditch effort to find my phone. And then I found it.  

This is a long way of telling you that I know very well, and have known all along, that I use my phone too much. I know what it’s doing to me (making me dumb and mean and boring and sad) and to my life (making it hard to get anything done). But it’s also doing enough good things, and desirable things, and habit-forming things, that it’s super, super hard to put it down.  

So yesterday, God yoinked it right out of my pocket and buried it in trash where it belongs, and then he left me to draw my own conclusions.  

This is a good start! But I think He could take this approach further, because I have a lot of other bad habits I could use some help getting ahead of. I think he may not realize how dumb I am and how devoted to ruining my life. He gives me too much credit, and believes I have free will, and that it would be more valuable for me to decide to build virtue, rather than being forced into it like a rabid raccoon into a cage.

I’m not telling God how to do His job. But I do have a few pointers.  . . . Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

Image: Adam and Eve by Jacob Jordaens via Wikipedia Commons

Maria Obscura

Do you know how pinhole cameras work? I don’t, really, although I have seen what they can do. You block out the light in a closed-off area, except for one small hole, and direct light through that hole onto the opposite wall of the box. Then you will see a projected image of what’s outside, on the bright side — except the image will be upside-down.

People build pinhole cameras intentionally, but sometimes they happen spontaneously. I recently saw photos from an Australian man whose whole garage became a camera obscura. The door faced the setting sun, and the insulating material that lines the top edge had a tiny gap; so when the man stepped into the dim interior, he could see clearly his driveway projected on the ceiling. The colored recycling bins, the front of his car, and even the pavement were all clearly there, upside down.

It was such a compelling image: The workaday car bumper and plastic bins projecting themselves up above, turning jewel-toned in the darkness. They had something important to say, and the thing was just: “I exist.”

Worth saying, and weirdly beautiful, and obscurely sad.

That was the work of a camera obscura. But did you know that everything is always projecting an image of itself on everything, all the time? We can’t see these images, because they all mix together and make white light. When a camera obscura gets involved, the pinhole blocks out all the images but one, and that’s why we can see it.

Maybe I’ve garbled the science, it makes sense to me as far as I understand it. Sometimes I become aware of this ceaseless projecting happening around me. I briefly know that every created thing – not only living things but everything that is made – proclaims its presence out of the sheer insistent, witless joy of being here. Everything that exists comes from God, and it can’t help sending something of itself out into the world, just because it is good. It’s a very simple message: “God made me, and now here I am!”

Sometimes I feel it, when I encounter the goodness of creation hidden in the hearts of wet grasses, buried under layers of loam, sparkling remotely in stars we rarely see, or in other dear artifacts of creation: In human love, in innocence, in beauty, in truth. Sometimes I see it, and I know deeply that creation is good. Most of the time, I don’t. It’s just too dark.

As I write, where I write from, we are counting down to the darkest day of the year. The calendar is like a box that gets a little smaller every day, with less and less light, less and less warmth, at a sharper and more narrow angle away from the sun.

That has, in fact, been the history of mankind. When God made the world, he made it so bright, so vital, so very fresh and alive. The water didn’t just sit, it teemed with life. God made it, and it was good; and then he gave it to us, and told us to multiply. The created world was so good that it shouted itself, projecting itself everywhere all the time, out of the simple joy of being something rather than nothing. It was a garden: Something that makes more of itself; and God and man walked together through it, beholding it, enjoying it.

Then came the box. Mankind sinned, and fabricated walls, a boundary between us and the Lord, and in the shadows we strained to see any goodness.

We began to be people living in darkness, and the history of mankind became the story of that box getting smaller and smaller.

But the box was not impermeable. It could be pierced . . . 

Read the rest of my Christmas column for The Pillar, which includes a recipe for stained glass cookies. 

And a blessed Christmas Eve to all of you wonderful readers. I love yez all, but Jesus loves you more. 

Image: The Virgin and Child, Master of the Saints Cosmos and Damian Madonna, Italy, 1265-1285, tempera on panel – Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University 

 

 

At the Register: Jesus Isn’t Fair

Thanks be to God for that.