The Muslim thing is actually a coincidence
Sometimes on the bus or bus stops I’ll see people’s double. People that look like other people from my life, if perhaps their life had turned out differently. And it’s usually my pastors, which is odd, but mostly funny. Like the other day I met alternate universe Pastor Rice. His name was Big Jim. And he was chatty. The kind of chatty that doesn’t really require a response from you at all. He was telling me about his recent arrest and I didn’t really catch it all except for the overall sense that he was contrite and feeling that he’d really messed things up. Because apparently his family was over it and didn’t really believe he was sorry even though he was. Across from my bus stop is a daycare. He made the observation of how kids don’t care how messed up you are, and that he could go over to that daycare and stand in the middle of all those kids and they’d just crowd around him and try to climb him and stuff. He said he really wanted that. He said it would make him cry. He said the thought of it was making him want to cry. A short while after that we got on the bus and he struck up another conversation with someone else about getting old and how you can’t do the things you used to, trying to play basketball and work out when you’re an old man. I saw alternate universe Pastor Dave one day. He was wearing clothes from the 90′s including what had to be BluBlockers, and he had a buncha stuff in plastic bags and a woman with him that was glued to his side. He had his arm around her and he stared straight ahead at the direction the bus was going, every once and awhile turning to kiss the woman on the forehead, whenever he became aware of her again.
At the library there’s this shoddy display case of CD’s. It’s a little dated and has little plastic indentations where CD cases are supposed to go, but not every CD case is designed to fit and they often fall out of place or don’t lay right. A lot of patrons get frustrated with it and rarely bother trying to put them in the right place, let alone the right order of the right section. Consequently it is a complete hassle beyond all patience to try and arrange the CD’s. Fortunately for the library there is an OCD worker willing to take the time to keep them straight, but even so, she doesn’t do it every day, or even every other day. No, to do a thing like that would be such a colossal waste of time, because it would just get messed up again at a despair-inducing speed. Instead she waits until the CD’s that get returned pile up to an un-ignorable amount in the back room that she has to put them back out, and she takes that time to also rearrange the CD’s that are out there. One day I was contemplating this and I thought, this is probably what God is doing, what he means about sin reaching its full measure. It’s probably not some super spiritual concept. He’s probably just being practical. They’ve been training me to work the reference desk and so far I’ve done a credible job having answers when people ask for help, mostly because they usually only ask for the same three or four things. On Wednesday though, a little girl effortlessly stumped me: “Have you seen my mama?” Haha! I have no idea, kid. You got me there.
My two latest theological finds, Blue Like Jazz and Everything Belongs have made a curious cocktail of spirituality and has left me out of sorts, like chasing alcohol with medication. I’m flat out gone from my body at this point. Don’t know how long it will last or whether I will be able to build upon it, though it seems that’s already happening. Am I on my way to be the next Saint Martin Luther Mother Theresa Ghandi? What is the point of all this literature? I know I’m choosing to read it but why? And why is it reaching me now? Soon I will be philosophically unrecognizable to the lot of you. A Muslim that frequents the same bus as me urged me to pick up the Qur’an so I did. I’d read a little of it before from a translation I found online but was confused and put off by it, frankly. But I’ve got these new eyes…I am really astonished with what’s happening here. First of all I’m reading it and I’m not mad. At all. At anybody. I’m reading it with both spiritual eyes open instead of one, I have no defense ready, no guns cocked. Actually I’m quite enthusiastic and finding a buttload of similarities, and perhaps new information. Gasp! Can we learn anything from these people? That’s actually an issue brought up in the book. God hasn’t much to say. Except “see.” See? He says. See? Like, this is what some of my others read. See? See? It’s kind of like that. Like God taking you on a tour of His house. What, am I suppose to judge that? That Judaism and Christianity and Islam is like one big jello mold, except ones got fruit bits in it and we think fruit bits are of the devil, or at least unpleasant enough not to try, that I’m a gentile, not even a descendent of this genetic family and shouldn’t even be part of this friggin conversation if we’re gonna be literal about this, that we’re all doing the exact same things to each other—I’m the best, no I am!—and if we all concede that none of us are anything, or that all of us are everything, we’d have the opposite of what we have now, which is peace?
I simply can’t see these things any other way than I see them now, though I know as a certainty there’s no way a few months ago I would be able to pick up a Qur’an and read it. No way. I just couldn’t. I could fool myself into thinking that I could. That my open mind could fit this in. No way. My mind was closed. Or rather, it had door that I controlled somehow. And this is like, not a forced seeing. There are people that are open minded and want your congratulations for it. But it’s probably because they are under exertion. When I showed him the Qur’an that I got from the library he was so excited! He was flipping the pages and guiding me through it. I don’t really understand what he says to me half the time. He did say some interesting things about Jesus, or at least I think he did. Something like, Mohammed and Jesus are both prophets, but Jesus is the only one that can come and go from Earth still because he was before all the other prophets? I don’t know, something like that. I think the point is, of all this, of everything, is God is perfectly capable of speaking for Himself, and will—does– when He wants to. We of his self-promoted mouthpieces will have to find a new job. I hear He’s looking for arms and legs, which interestingly enough don’t talk. I really think some of us should really try to reconcile this idea before we try to move on.
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