Disturbed Again

Bird calls crackle the moist air. The dull roar of distant traffic seeps through the shelter of dark trees. The damp morning twilight is unbothered. I, however, am disturbed once again. Is it all louder in the morning or are my ears just more sensitive? These irresolvable quandaries of life. One poet says God disturbs us toward our destiny.

I can’t help myself from looking for the cracks in things—for those places where I can glimpse past the glossy surface—where I can get lost somewhere I have never been. The snotty nosed neighborhood of my mind gets too confining. The same opinions are repeated again and again—each time with full sincerity and accompanied with an imperceptible wink which indicates a willingness to collude. In this neighborhood we agree not to ask hard questions like: How does racial injustice help benefit me? Where does my coffee come from? What happens to the RoundUp after it kills the irksome weeds in my lovely brick walkway?  In this neighborhood we don’t look too far over the fence under shared agreement to pretend. Don’t look too closely.

In The Truman Show movie, Truman (True-man/Jim Carrey) slowly realizes that his life is actually a TV show where everyone else is in on the joke but him. Truman lived a charmed life with everything anyone could want, but it wasn’t enough. Just like us, whatever the surrounding luxury and good fortune, it’s never enough. The only way out for Carey was to sail into what he feared most and be willing to die for that ungraspable and life-giving truth beneath the surface.

So too for all of us. In this time of racial reckoning, evolving environmental disaster and an increasingly desperate authoritarian President, we have to look beyond our inherited beliefs and opinions. We have to look beyond our cozy lives of denial and fear. Into the heart of things.

We must. We must. Not out of kind-heartedness, though that may be part of it. But because there is no true freedom without leaving everything. There is no true rest until we have given everything away and head out beyond the familiar.

And there/here, waiting for us, is a life beyond measure. An authentic life is not for the faint of heart, but is available to everyone willing to set out. The necessity must be uncovered again and again. And then, only one step is required. Again and again.