Last night was a rough night for me. No particular reason. Rough nights happen, and you learn to deal with them. I'm usually remarkably creative during my rough nights, trying to channel that energy into something more positive than most "coping" methods. When it's particularly rough, I paint on myself, as I did last night. (Strange, yes, but more positive than some other things that people do to their skin on rough nights.) This particular night was rough out of loneliness, which is a particularly disconcerting emotion for me because I don't experience it very often. I'm pretty solitary, so when loneliness hits it's particularly strange and I don't really know what to do with it.
This morning, waking up after dreams that multiplied my lonely confusion, I walked down from the lodge and I looked at the mountains and thought about the belief I am nuturing in myself that God is in everything. It is easy to see God in those mountains, rising up gloriously. It is somehow easier to connect to the God in those mountains than to recognize and connect to the God in loneliness.
Some say that there are some places, some events, some tragedies that don't contain God. I don't believe that, based on Christ descending into Hell. Based on the psalmist's proclamation that if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. There is God in every person, in every thing. God is in all life.
And where God is, there a resurrection awaits. One of the theologians here last week said that God having to do with everything means that we stand up and insist that death is not the end of the story. Despair will not win.
It seems foolish. It seems absolutely idiotic to insist on this even though everything we see makes us want to give up. But there is life in hope and power in choice. If we choose hope, no one can take it away from us. In his short play The Municipal Abattoir, Tennessee Williams says, "A choice is something you have invent for yourself." When it seems like there is no choice, we must make the choice anyway. It is always there.
In the second act of the musical In the Heights, the neighborhood is falling apart, and yet they are celebrating. When one of the characters asks why they're partying in the midst of despair, another responds,
"Maybe they're right, Sonny,
Call in the coroners
Maybe we're powerless,
A corner full of foreigners
Maybe this neighborhood's changing forever
Maybe tonight is our last night together,
However--
How do you want to face it?
Do you want to waste it
When the end is so close you can taste it?
You can cry with your head in the sand,
I'mma fly this flag that I've got in my hand."
Shortly after, he challenges the neighborhood to; "In fact, can we sing so loud and raucus they can hear us across the bridge in East Secaucus?"
And they do.
We are the radicals who are dancing and singing when it seems downright profane to do so. We are the revolutionaries who dare to believe that things will get better. We are the fools who refuse to let despair take its hold.
I'm very much about getting up, doing it, making it better, creating your own world. But truth be told, there are times when all I can do is cling to the knowledge that God must be there, even if I cannot see him, listening to "I Know That My Redeemer Liveth" on repeat and try not to let despair destroy me, by singing "Hallelujah," even when the word seems forbidden.
When my days grow tedious and my nights grow cold
I will sing "Hallelujah"
I will sing
My mind grows wary and my body grows old
I will sing "Hallelujah"
I will sing.
I will sing, I will sing
Until death has lost its sting
And I will keep on singing
Through the darkness and the gloom
I will sing "Hallelujah"
I will sing.
-"A Little Child Will Lead Them", by Ken Medema
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