Franken-bride

There are so few things on my mind. Too few for comfort, or more accurately, any semblance of Life. Life, as I have learned to understand it, has more to do with the pains of growth than the comforts of stasis. Stasis is always nice. We've learned to love stasis, to rely upon it, to find joy in mastering it, and security in submission to it.

Why do I love stasis so much? We have bought into the lie that stasis is trustworthy. We have somehow understood that unchanging is good, which it is, for far fewer things that we think.

Stepping back and taking in the larger picture changes a few things around. For example, the human body is ever changing. The walk is a constant state of imbalance. Something is always shifting. So changes the sand dune, the wind and the forest. Never static, never the same, ever.

If all of creation that is alive shifts and steps through time like a dance, whatever gave us the permission to sit out and watch as beauty passes us by? Whatever banished us to sit at the edges of the ballroom, mark the 1 to 10, and bicker among ourselves, when the Creator Himself waltzes across the floor, searching and beckoning for His bride.

What would community mean in the context of such a dance? What of my relationships? What of my life? So much seems to have been dismantled and deconstructed. The scaffolding that once stood tall and strong has been taken away and there is no more to hide behind. No longer "there's more to it that meets the eye". More like, what you see is what you get.

Where do I belong, father, and who is my community? The only thing that I've been able to distill of love so far is belonging and identity. When the niceties and the functions of a relationship are stripped away, along with the obligations, the affirmations, the disgruntlements, and the iron-sharpens-iron bits, all that's left has been a nominal sense of belonging, and identity, which of course, looks devastatingly pathetic in our power hungry Romanic civilization.

Who do I call my family? Except those who belong to me, and those whom I belong to. Those whom I identify with. Those who would die for me, whom I would I die for.

What would it mean for us to cultivate a sense of belonging among us, where we no longer reach across with our strengths, but huddle together in our weaknesses? What of dying to oneself and yoking oneself to a greater body, a plurality? How far off have we drifted? How wicked twisted perverse do you have to be to start driving in screws between the fingers and the palm, independence between the eyes and the nose, inorganic separations between the stomach and the groin? Perhaps thick sheets of cold hard steel, gritty slabs of machined concrete, or total dismemberment - nice clean cuts, neatened with a searing torch - final death, never to be joined again.

I'm sure the Husband would be delighted with his Franken-bride - yet this is what we have become. No longer drawing blood from the same heart. No longer paining with the rest of the nervous system. No longer taking instructions from the one head. Democracy, they call it. Freedom she writes.

When will we realize that the freedom of the hand is found in complete synchronization with the forearm and the triceps; in dire dependence to the heart and the other systems of the body; in absolute submission to the head? No wiggle room for rouge cells with a mind of their own - cancerous, they're so endearingly termed.

What is real? Identity is real. Belonging is real. Knowing and living in a reality of a self that is larger than oneself. That is real.

So may we learn to love one another.