Revisited: Front Porch Immortality

Meditations

I used to think I had to write these songs just so;
For heavens sake and for my own I put myself through hell
But I quit striving for perfection; surrendered up to it instead
And now the songs keep pouring out and I cannot contain myself
I've been thinking of how You wept for Lazarus
Tears on Your cheeks, resurrection on Your lips
Sometimes mercy feels just like abandonment
You let my heart die, but left Yours beating in my chest 
~ My Epic, "Lazarus"

Photo by Kate Darmody on Unsplash

If you sit on the porch long enough, you can almost see the spring exploding into life around you. Greens so bright they almost pulse in the morning, birds and bugs screaming as they go about their professions. You can watch the steam smoldering off your coffee, vanishing traceless like a morning incense offering. Sit long enough and you almost forget that you're dying. Not now, not for sure. Not that you know of, any way. But imperceptibly, the seeds of your murder are gestating. What will it be, do you ever wonder? Mr. Drunk Driver on the avenue with a four-door? Mr. Uncontrolled Cellular Reproduction in the hospital with metastatic Stage 4 inoperable? We'll all know soon enough. Rushing headlong at sixty seconds to the minute. Barreling through the known universe and frantically hoping to cram every last shred of helpless hopes and stupid dreams into your suitcase before you leave it on the platform at the station to the beyond. Why aren't we all and always hysterical?

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If you really are a product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don't feel at home there? Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or if they did, would not that fact itself strongly suggest that they had not always been, or wd. not always be, purely aquatic creatures. Notice how we are perpetually surprised at Time. ('How time flies! Fancy John being grown-up & married? I can hardly believe it!') In heaven's name, why? Unless, indeed, there is something in us which is not temporal. ~ C.S. Lewis, letter to Sheldon Vanauken, 1950

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Death, the central fact of our visible universe, is a strange nacreous intrusion, stuffed away in the corners of our mind. Humans are simultaneously avoiding all confrontation with the terror while obsessed with managing the consequences. Elon Musk and Ray Kurzweil and Vitalik Buterin are our modern prophets crying "Peace, peace" with promises of vat-grown and antiseptic solutions, medicalized transcendence tortured out of Nature with profane hands then dripped into our tired veins. Aren't we ashamed? Our legends remind us that all our great heroes die, manfully and with a song in their heart. And yet not a single one of us can forget the first time we saw a human form laying on a table or in a box or in the ground, a stretched and folded old sweater of flesh that used to hold a soul. Remember what you felt? Something was cosmically wrong, like a singularity had been stuffed into the funeral parlor. How do we bear that kind of duality within ourselves?

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I fight in vain, try to deny, to push back the years, and the weight, and the gray
But it’s in my face, the edge of the infinite, and we’re all just inches and seconds away
My eyes are wide and I feel the weight
Sit down, breathe out, and try not to faint
Or be crushed by the scale of everything
What is man in the scope of existence?
Just a blink on a dot in the dark
But the patterns that weave through the distance
Bear a voice that proclaims who we are  
~ My Epic, "Lament" 

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Yesterday was Easter but today is Monday. And the observable universe gains focus when I accept the fact that death is a present reality but an unintended one. Death is the cancerous results of a failed human experiment in promethean transcendence. Over and over we've attempted to scale the heights and rip God free, to install ourselves at the summit of existence. I do it in my petty kingdom, as I snap pictures and stack sats and lift iron to deny the progress of time. But like every soul in existence, something's chewing at my mind and telling me it isn't enough. The reason I devote myself to Christian life is the realization that my only hope for immortality is Christ Revenant, the Daybreak and the Deathbreaker. I've lost hope in everything else, you see. But I can't let go of the most human of spiritual drives, the clanging echo of paradise still awake in my bones.

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"I want more life, father." ~ Roy Batty, Blade Runner

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Of course I understand the irony of the quote. But Prometheus wasn't wrong for desiring the fire of the gods, just for stealing it. And Christianity doesn't teach renunciation of desire. It teaches you to look along the path of your desire like a spotlight in the dark until you find what you were meant to want. You probably don't desire fiercely enough. When you've glimpsed into the infinite your desire sharpens with each passing minute. Eternal Good and Infinite Love are drugs which demand lifestyle change to support the habit. The wildest fever dreams of the transhumanists aren't strange enough for you anymore. You have to hunger and thirst to be satisfied. You have to realize that each material possession and experience is a beautiful signpost but a terrible goal. You have to die. But staying dead would be very improper, for a human. Against the manufacturer's specifications.

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And behold
You whom no eye could yet bear
Nor any mind yet conceive
And I’ll take hold of You there
And then let go of belief
Somehow, made new
I'll be like You
A song begins
Without an end
Beloved, behold
Forever 
~My Epic, "Arrive"