Alive Again

I went to breakfast yesterday with my extended family here, bb, his wife (Mrs. A), and my two nieces. There's always a genteel fight of 'sit next to me!' to be sorted out, so this time, this turn, I sat next to the little one. The older one was fine, I guess, being immediately buried in her book.

You have to navigate the mommy van in my family: there are boxes of books. And EM consumes, at least, one or two books every trip.

We went to a Swiss bakery for breakfast, so meusili, croissants, and Bavarian sausages. It was a little death for me to see all these Alpine reminders.

Why is it that everywhere I go, I'm reminded of Saga? It's like impregnated
into the very air I breath.

On the way to the bakery, Mrs. A played a CD of Matt Maher, a Catholic singer, she was sure to emphasize to me. And when the first song, rock ballad, actually, came on, a transformation occurred in the van.

EM kept reading, eyebrows creased intensely, as always.

But Li'l Iz ...

Her whole face shone, shone like the sun, with delight, and this little cubby cherub starting piping away in her sweet descant voice:

"I woke up in darkness,
Surrounded by silence
Oh, where?
Where have I gone?"

Then the chorus came, and Li'l Iz almost screamed the refrain:

"You called and you shouted.
Broke through my deafness
Now I'm breathing in
And breathing out:
I'm alive again!"

It was amazing. Compelling.

So the next chorus, I joined in:

"You shattered my darkness
Washed away my blindness
Now I'm breathing in
And breathing out:
I'm alive again!"

As I sang, I bobbed and weaved my head, 1-2 left, 1-2 right, and my hair, a black wave on the ocean, flying, windswept, careless as I sang and shouted the lyrics joyfully with my little niece a piercing voice from the heavens.

I'm asked: how can I be Christian, Catholic, even, being what I choose to be, and how can I, or how do I ... tolerate others, where I work, whom I talk to, who hold no such similar beliefs, because group? 'Polytheistic' is the closest approximation to what my workplace is like.

Well, I just do, but that's not the real answer. Not the examined one.

And examining it, I'm suddenly put into Saga's shoes, because she left me because of Christain scruples. Guilt, I'm sure, had a large part of it, but singing that song, being transformed by it, lifted up, lifted up to the Cross and the Glory, ...

Ladies and Gentlemen, everything was let go: my guilt, my fears, my pettiness, my hopes, my very self!

It all went away, and I was one in Christ.

Just for that moment, and then the next song came on, even better!

And the next, ...

And then we had breakfast, and I ...

Well, I settled back into myself, into being me, with my doubts, being in my skin again.

And the other side of that equation is this:

Evil, of course.

Because the other side is, I can look down my nose at everybody else, and say, well, at least I'm a Christian. I can stand before God and know I've got the whole package deal, the entirety of the Revealed Truth.

You see how dispicable I am? I'm shown the Glory of God in a very personal way in bits and pieces, and what do I do with it? I hoard it. Or run from it. Or write my confessions as an excuse to get attention and pity for what a fucked up little thing I am.

What did Saga do?

As always, she led. She said: this isn't right.

And she stopped walking down the road to destruction, and she started climbing uphill, toward her own Passion, her own cross, ...

her own glory.

And look at who's she affecting. Who, you ask. You. Because she's touching people, all the time, even people she doesn't know, not by drawing attention to herself, but she writes 1 review in Swedish, and she gets 5,000 hits on her profile page.

She's touching people she doesn't even know.

In alter Christus?

Saga is my little Christ, so I must be her prophet, a voice crying out in the desert, crying, 'Prepare ye the way of the LORD!'

I can't wait to meet King Herod, and be served for supper, my head on a platter.

But the question to me is how can I be a Christian, being what I am, and how can I be with people who aren't ... that is: aren't exemplar Christians or who aren't Christians, or even believers at all.

Well, the short answer is: easy! Very, very badly.

Because it comes down to this: sheep and goats.

In the end, God will ask me, what did you do?

And I will then have nowhere to run, nor nowhere to hide ... and nothing to show for the wretched life I lead.

But I will see God ask Saga the same question, and Saga, brave Saga, humble Saga, will say: 'Nothing, LORD, and that is the fate I deserve.'

And God will say, 'No, you are wrong. What you did was turn away from sin,'

And I'll watch God lift her up, because she did the hard thing, the impossible thing, the 'cruel' and unpopular thing.

Saga picked up her cross and followed Him, and she'll follow Him right into Heaven.

Me? I sang a song with my niece, wrote a blog entry, and sat in the squallor of my sins.

How do I feel about you not being a Christian?

Obviously, I don't feel enough. Because I have the gift: I've been given it more than once in my life, of the vision of seeing the Revealed Truth, and if I were anything other than one of the damned, I would've moved heaven and earth, mountain and stream, to get you baptized and walking in Grace.

Even the demons, on seeing the Christ Jesus, screamed 'You are the Son of God!' [Luke 4:41]

At the name of Jesus, every knee will bow. [Philippians 2:10]

But Jesus rebuked them, as He will rebuke me, and commanded, 'Be quiet!'

So that is how I feel about you not being a Christian and walking in the Light: it is just another nail in my coffin, another example God has of my iniquity, of a sin of omission: what I could have done, a soul I could have saved ... and I didn't.

What would Jesus do?

We have the whole New Testament what He did: always took the hard way, always went out of His way to save one more soul.

What did `phfina do?

Too much, and not enough.

Too much, and not enough.