Eat the scroll

 Much of what you hold to be true you can’t really grasp and your hold on the truth is not strong and you eventually drop it. You don’t have a tight hold on your truths. Sometimes the truth slips out of your grasp because you were careless, clumsy, or weak. Maybe the truth was too heavy to bear and you dropped it, or maybe it was too light, like air, and slipped through your fingers and dissipated in the atmosphere.

The truth, that particular truth, is On Hold, like a phone call you just can’t deal with now and could easily postpone until forgotten and its left on hold until the truth itself hangs up or is accidentally disconnected when the wrong button is pushed.

Don’t Forget! you were told.

Remember this truth, even if you forget all others. 

This is true and you mustn’t let go of it.

But you have to let go of the truths you grasp, as you have to exhale after you inhale in order to breathe. You have to let go of the truths you grasp in order to think.

How does a crucified god become a symbol of empire and Sol Invictus? The story of crucifixion and resurrection and victory is just another story about a god and this god becomes the most popular and then official and the only authorized god cult, inseparable from the state power structure.

Symbols are born and die, Tillich said, even symbols of ultimate concern. When I read that it was like getting a terrible phone call.

We were headed to the land we promised ourselves and we kept getting lost, taking the wrong exits, or not being in the right lane at the right time and missing a turn. We are guided by satellites and we still get lost.

The deconstruction workers arrive in their helmets and start banging on the scaffolds (“deconstruction” is a word that was used and misused long ago for the study of how a text is put together, how it works, how it doesn’t work, how it plays, and how it falls apart).

I read the cosmic news on my phone. The news tells of the ultimate fate of planetary material. It tells of planetary engulfment — when a star eats a planet in its system. Scientists are constructing models of engulfment events. Stars eating their planets is the natural life cycle of a solar system. Our own sun, Sol Invictus, is a cannibal star.

“To be reborn our whole structure must change,” says a ghost. 

How reliable are the pronouncements of a ghost?

Meaning systems are born and die. Meaning systems change.

I heard the words of the prophets every day as I was growing up, often from my father’s mouth as he spoke behind the pulpit or at the dinner table or while driving the car or wherever and I heard that the Day of the Lord will come some day, any day, and God will judge the world and I had to be ready for that by staying in touch with God and not doing anything unless I stay aware I am in God’s presence because I am always in God’s presence and can never hide from that light.

I can’t hide from God but I play hide and seek with God until I can no longer hide from where God finds me hidden in myself.

I heard the Bible read or quoted every day. Before each meal at home we would listen as one of us read a promise selected from the ceramic bread loaf purchased at a Christian gift shop. The promises were Bible verses printed on either side of a colored strip of cardstock a little bigger than a stick of gum. They were selected at random, not as divination, like reading the newspaper horoscope, but sometimes having a similar effect of seeming relevant to the current situation by stating a truism or something poetic and cryptic like — “the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings” — and I could never remember where that verse is from (it’s Malachi) but one day when I was twenty I drew it from the ceramic bread loaf and considered the meaning of “sun of righteousness” as the dawn of conscience and consciousness, worldwide theophany, universal liberation, utopia, not a cannibal sun but the light of reality.

I’m just talking to myself god to god when a disembodied voice startles me.

Who or what is God? — asks the god who is God — a who or a what?

Is God a Who or a Whom? A what or a why is a god asking why and what in these questions?

Is God a there and a now, a where and a then, a nowhere and never?

God is a literary device. 

Is God a literary device? 

God is a name given to the unknown explanation for our existence.

God is a name for the unimaginable satisfaction of our infinite need.

God is the central character in a collective literary work held sacred by many who don’t read it and who call it the Word of God.

“God,” the main character, stands for the logos of the story, the meaning of the story, that which drives the story and knows where the story is going, and that which explains the story. This character withholds the meaning, end, and explanation of the story from the readers and the writers, but at the same time the character stands for these elusive treasures desired by the writers and readers of the story or stories. The Word of God and the words of the gods constantly revise themselves on an infinite scroll.

The logos of the gods is always revised and every reading is a misreading.

It is sacred work because it is human work.

The vision is always a revision and the seeing is the vanishing point of reference for the disappearing viewer.

This vanishing point is the gaping mouth of your infinite hunger.

Eat this scroll.