Nov 23, 2006

Irreducible?

This is a bit overdue but perhaps this thought is all the better for its percolation in my heart.
I read this book called I Saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti. He is Pakistani writing during Israeli occupation. He spends most of his life fleeing - a wanderer and perpetual immigrant. Because of Israel's destruction of his homeland he finds he really has nowhere to land. He marries an Egyptian woman, has a child (whose ethnicity is... what? he wonders) but is always moving away from them due to deportation issues, etc.
The unifying thread of this work, in my mind, is one statement he repeats over and over as he encounters the many threatening, challenging, discouraging, joyous realities of life.

"Life will not be simplified."

I often wish it would be. I wish there were a finite number of elements I could master understanding of and then be done with novelties. It would be so much... easier... and so much less breathtaking... if life could be simplified. It not only cannot, but, as Barghouti says, it will not be simplified. It will not be less than what it is. Lamentably, what it is includes the mountains, the valleys, the joys and the sorrows, the pain, the horror, the ecstacy...

It is the journey of life created by a God who sometimes seems cruel for engineering this version of reality, this set of unending circumstances; a journey created by a God who also seems wonderful for this version of perpetual discovery, unquenched precociousness...

Unanswered questions.
Unsatisfied desires.
Unsimplified.
(Does that require infinitude?)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I would say that

ever answered questions

and

ever satisfied desires

are only, ever, and always ours in Christ.

The Romantic is never simple - precisely because it expresses that which is inexhaustibly certain (or so true). God is simply and certainly that in His infinitude.

Anonymous said...

I can hear you saying that... with those italics being that funny way you draw the word out.
I suppose I agree.