Doghouse

Questions?

There is a funny and bizarre scene in an old Woody Allen film called Stardust Memories. Yes, I know he’s a pervert, but he’s also bold in both asking real questions and he was damned funny for a time.

In the scene he is faced with space aliens and he starts to ask all the real core existential questions about life, meaning and God.

The aliens reply “You’re asking the wrong questions!”

I sometimes think we are asking the wrong questions.

“God’s ways are not our ways, neither are his thoughts our thoughts.” Well thank God for that because God would be obsessing on dark-haired beauties like Jennifer Connelly and wishing eternally to have a really fast car with a vertical gate shifter and ladder bars.

Apparently God has better things to think about.

So the real issue is death. Well, death and suffering. Both of which are pretty unavoidable sooner or later being human.

I was thinking about Lazarus the other day. He got sick, it got worse. It was painful…everyone was weeping…the end is coming and then it comes. He’s dead. He’s dead like every one of us will be in 10-70 years. I have a picture in my bathroom that I look at everytime I, er…sit down. It’s of the San Francisco Playland by the Sea in 1920. There are throngs of people.

They are all dead now. Okay, not all, but Bessie will pass on soon enough.

It’s not pleasant. It’s frightening because we have no real idea what comes next…just faith and guesses.

So Lazarus dies and they wrap him up and take care of the body and then Jesus trots in…late I might add…and tells him to get up and he does.

Weird.

But nobody ever thinks about how Lazarus feels. I mean now he has to go through all of it again? It’s like déjà-vu-death all over again.

I don’t think he’s too happy with this. In fact, later he gets in a big argument with his sisters about it because they complain he’s behind on his chores.

Shifting gears violently here (I have a friend who had a vertical gate shifter..it was damned cool) I turn to Peter Berger and his notion of resurrection. He asserts, and it is quite possible, that nothing we face is ultimately tragic in the light of resurrection. He asserts that our lives are far more like comedy than tragedy…and we all know the two are irrevocably joined together..I mean just look at the masks thing…

This life, even for the most privileged of us, is a veil of tears and ultimately loss. We wait, in faith, hope and love, for resurrection by the One in Whom, through Whom and for Whom we were created. Unlike Lazarus, He promises a more complete job and to wipe away every tear and make us other than we are, which is what we all want (are you really satisfied with who you are?) This is decidedly good news if it is true, and I personally believe it is.

We see in a mirror dimly not only what we shall become but what is now. We mistake the cocoon…the shroud of death for the end when it is only the beginning.

So in answer to many questions I suggest panning back and taking the larger view. Of course, this can only be done by faith, but faith is a spiritual optic. As an Old spiritual writer once said “where reason may wade their faith may swim”.

Well, that is the possibility and the hope.

posted by Obi-Mac BakDon @ 12:04 PM