Waking Up From History

Right here, right now

There is no other place I’d rather be

Watching the world wake up from history – Jesus Jones

 

For all the terrible wreckage our world may seem at times, whether it’s our deep identity crisis as a species as we brutalize our fellow creatures and world or our cultural vacancies and familial breakdowns as our ideologies shift and sputter and breakdown in the middle of our lives, one thing heartens and excites me about this time of being alive. I feel like a lot of people are really asking the right questions, and that, in some ways, the hairy singers in Hair were right – this is the dawning of the age of Aquarius. Sure, it’s not an instant revolution of flower-sniffing, but there’s a general turning over of the consciousness topsoil.

I just finished Run by Ann Patchett. The whole novel is a great read – she manages to tell a good, emotionally engaging story without jabbing at you to make you cry – but there’s this really well-done passage that serves as evidence of how the general ideas about things are shifting, little by little.

The character of the priest describes his changing vision of the afterlife:

… he had started to wonder if there was in fact no afterlife at all. Look at all these true believers who wanted only to live… In suggesting that there may be nothing ahead of them, he in no way meant to diminish the future; instead, Father Sullivan hoped to elevate the present to a state of the divine. It seemed … that God may well have been life itself. God may have been the baseball games, the beautiful cigarette he smoked alone…. How wrongheaded it seemed now to think that the thrill of heartbeat and breath were just a stepping stone to something greater. What could be greater than the armchair, the window, the snow? Life itself had been holy… this was not the workings of disbelief. It was instead a final, joyful realization of all he had been given.

Completely set within the context of a Catholic priest’s theology comes this vision of the sacredness of life that is usually find in Eastern thought, and it rings true. I love that.

And I feel like I find a lot of novels, music, art, thinkers, coming to this same conclusion. Whether or not they feel a conviction about next steps after death, people are embracing the present more and more.

It’s an exciting turn of events. If we can spread the notion of opening our eyes to each moment’s gifts, whatever they offer, a lot of changes will happen. To feel that you are witnessing, indeed, surrounded by God, changes how you treat other people, other creatures, yourself. In some ways, believing starts the seeing. As the passage concludes:

It would be possible to overlook just about anything if you were trained to constantly strain forward to see the power and the glory that was waiting up ahead. What a shame it would have been to miss God while waiting for Him.