fictional reality...

June 25, 2020

fictional reality...

Pulling big jumper over my head, I stick my headphones in my ears and I jog, slow, along the coastline, this iron-deficient body plugging each step like the end of a marathon. Fresh from Panem and the peacekeepers of District 12, I am terrified, the death and pain of power and deceit stemming from the pages into my thinking and the way I see the world.

And I run, and I keep running, each step fear-induced, unable to shake the discomfort of Coriolanus Snow's story, the way I know it ends, the way I wish it didn't. The way I know it doesn't, didn't, have to. The way the Covey believe that is is better to bring good into the devastation than try beat it into submission through deathly control.

I keep running, and I'm closer to home, and the song I'd chosen to hear, the warmth of cord and familiarity, the old truths I'd clung to, now they feel like home, and the line echoes, it repeats, over and over: it says, love remains. Love remains. As I run, sun has been setting, and the deep yellow pulls into one ball of roaring sun, soft from here, soft enough to touch, and I yearn for it, I learn toward it, and the song repeats: love remains.

I breathe that in, I inhale it in all the destruction of District 12 and every distract, because what I've realised on this run is that even though I'm immersed and affected by a work of fiction, it's not made up at all, the wars run rampant and the characters are invisible to us, yet it's all happening, it's all warring, and as I round the street, the road my house lies on, the place I call home wherein I lie on my pillow and make breakfast and watch The Office and type words on keyboard and pull books from the shelf, bake banana bread and write morning pages and keep daily lists and write out gratitude and say hello and goodbye, good morning and goodnight -- this house -- as I near toward it, to my left the sun splays, wide, and in the light I see the factory, the smoke filling forth, the pollution bleeding into our earth, and I stop, I cease moving, this moment, and I pull up the camera on my phone and I take one photo. It's always like this -- always, one photo when it's something important, something I want to remember. Every other photo I'll snap, snap, snap: but when it matters, it's always only one. One to remember. That's all.

Love remains, and what I've realised is that our theologies change and our hearts break and amidst dark nights of the soul our order breaks into disorder stemming into this gracious re-order. And the stories are all different. Every, single, one. We've knighted ourselves word-warriors and truth-speakers and industry leaders and religious kings.

We try and listen and understand as a way of unearthing an empathy. But the truth is? Well, Paul wrote it a few thousand years ago, and the English translation reads, from Eugene Peterson's mouth:

"So no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I'm bankrupt without love." (1 Corinthians 13, MSG)

Love remains.

My own journey from order to disorder to reorder and over again, and again, and again, is a map I'm walking over and across and through, and we meet each other on the paths, the bridges, the roadside stops and the picnic areas. We walk awhile, we hold hands, we break ways. The stories aren't all the same. What'd Paul write?

"You were all called to travel on the same road and in the same direction, so stay together, both outwardly and inwardly. You have one Master, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who rules over all, works through all, and is present in all. Everything you are and think and do is permeated with Oneness. But that doesn't mean you should all look and speak and act the same.

...God wants us to grow up, to know the whole true and tell it in love -- like Christ in every thing. We take our lead from Christ, who is the source of every thing we do. He keeps us in step with each other. His very breath and blood flow through us, nourishing us so that we will grow up healthy in God, robust in love." (Ephesians 4, MSG)

Our stories and our theologies change and we're seeking frameworks for security or sanity, as a means of moving toward God, a way of moving toward reality -- and I hear it and I feel it, not listening for understanding or empathy but recognising that love remains and, in fact, only love remains, and no matter what we say or do or believe, it is love that remains.

It is love that moves. It isn't my theology and it isn't yours, it isn't our words or our ideas and our state of order or the chaos of disorder, the questions and the certainty.

Some call it the Third Way. Jesus called it Love.

Sometimes, I think that my theology is who God is. Sometimes, I think that the state of my theology iterates the state of me.

A little humbled, I sit here after my run, no longer sweaty.

No matter what I say, what I believe, what I do -- I am bankrupt without love. Love remains.

The creative, transformative dance between attachment and detachment is sometimes called the Third Way. It is the middle way between fight and flight, as Walter Wink describes it. Some prefer to take on the world: to fight it, change it, fix it, and rearrange it. Others deny there is a problem at all. “Everything is beautiful,” they say and look the other way. Both instincts avoid holding the tension, the pain, and the essentially tragic nature of human existence.
The contemplative stance is the Third Way. We stand in the middle, neither taking the world on from another power position nor denying it for fear of the pain it will bring. We hold the hardness of reality and the suffering of the world until it transforms us, knowing that we are both complicit in evil and can participate in wholeness and holiness. Once we can stand in that third spacious way, neither directly fighting or fleeing, we are in the place of grace out of which genuine newness can come. This is where creativity and new forms of life and healing emerge. (Richard Rohr, https://cac.org/the-third-way-2018-06-04/)