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Surrender. We don’t like that word. I don’t like that word. I really don’t like it applied to me. I’m a very independent person. I do things on my own. I like to be self-sufficient. And the word “surrender” says to me things that I don’t want. It is human nature to try to turn every situation to our own advantage, and to find the easiest way through it. This is not a bad thing. It’s why we have engineers and explorers and artists. They are the ones who see the world a little differently from everyone else, who try to use the laws of nature (or perception) to make things easier. They are why we have washing machines and Internet and musical instruments. Because while we don’t have the power to alter the laws of nature (yet), we can always find better ways to live by them. But that’s not the only way we use our ingenuity. We also like to cheat. Yesterday, a friend of mine (she knows who she is) told me that she and her husband are officially “old” because they got a humidifier for Christmas. (And were happy about it.) And I said, “Oh, come on. You know how excited I was about my flannel sheets, right?” It’s like we’ve got this thing going that if an item is not sufficiently flashy and/or fancy, we are silly for being excited about it. To which I say, “PPBBTH!” We have expectations about things. It’s kinda part of being human. Not that animals don’t have expectations. They learn, as well as they can, and understand cause and effect. But our grasp of expectations is rather more complex than what goes through my parents’ cat’s head when Mom claps her hands and says sharply, “Pixie!” We’re not diving under the furniture in simple fear of being punished, or racing someone to the food bowl because circumstances just happen to look like those where food is involved. Yet sometimes it feels a bit that way, when something triggers a deep response that we can’t quite quell: an expectation that roars up and takes over our thoughts, our emotions, any semblance of human reasoning. “Is a slave a slave if he doesn’t know he’s been enslaved?” The worst trap is the one you don’t realize you’re in. It’s a strange truth of my psyche that I realize I’ve fallen in a rut because everything starts getting on my nerves. It’s like a detector for ruts. And I don’t mean ruts of routine (those actually help keep me sane), but ruts of thinking. It’s like I stop looking out the windows. I stop exploring the world. I keep running along the same old thought processes, and then I find that they’re too deep, they’re too narrow, the sides are mounting up and now I can’t get out. Or rather, I have to stop and do some digging. And lifting. And I have to find another road. Emmanuel: God with us. It’s a name that’s gotten into our language, and a concept that has gotten into our heads. It’s in our culture and history. Things and people are named Immanuel/Emmanuel all the time. And by some quirk of the human psyche, we have got used to it’s meaning: God with us. We think, of course, God was/is with us. We forget how huge that is. I like baking. I like the food that I bake, and I like the way my house smells when I’ve baked. But given that there are only two of us living here, we have a dilemma: what do I do with my baked goods? Give them away, of course. Those who know me know that my favorite book in the world is The Lord of the Rings. The odd thing, though, is that every time I read it, I notice something different. Yesterday I was reading the chapter “Mount Doom”, and half a paragraph struck me like never before. Those who’ve seen the movies or read the books know the part where Frodo and Sam are trekking through Mordor, getting close to Mount Doom. It’s a very dark part. They’re nearly to the end of their strength. Sam is sacrificing everything for Frodo, starving himself and refusing water because he knows Frodo needs it. He himself is wrestling with doubts and fears. Despair is creeping in on him as he hallucinates from weariness and dehydration and watches Frodo go slowly mad from the Ring. The movies don’t deal with what’s going on in Sam’s head, not really, but in the book, there’s a part that goes like this: With a gasp, Frodo cast himself on the ground. Sam sat by him. To his surprise he felt tired but lighter, and his head seemed clear again. No more debates disturbed his mind. He knew all the arguments of despair and would not listen to them. His will was set, and only death would break it. Prophecy is an interesting thing. It likes to show up in a lot of scripture and a lot of fiction. It catches our fancy. The idea that the future can be known tugs at our imagination, as we are caught in a life where only the past can be seen and understood – even the present is strange and confusing. That we could count the days between milestones, or know when the changes are coming, with some map that went through time as well as space, is deeply attractive. When things come out of the blue and hit me, I know that it takes time before I can grasp what just happened. I wish I could have known beforehand. I wish the shock could have been done away with already, so that I would not miss what is happening here and now. Back when I was a kid, I had a paper route. It wasn’t very large: seventy-some houses, fifty-five of which got the newspaper daily, all in our immediate neighborhood. Unusually for many jobs, there were no days off. Though the route took less than two hours on a bad day to get done, I worked seven days a week, and especially holidays. Weekdays were done in the evening, but on weekends and holidays the paper had to be delivered by 7AM. Thanksgiving was the worst. The ads were stinkin’ huge, and holiday papers had to be delivered to everyone. And when I hear the famous postal worker’s creed about “neither rain nor sleet nor gloom of night,” I kinda want to laugh. The mail got called off before we did. |
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