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How To Be Happy
"Not really knowing from one moment to the next about what is going to happen. To me. To you. We have hopes and dreams and plans and goals and then get on a plane in Boston on a mild September morning and are flown into a building at five-hundred miles an hour."
When all hope is lost and they are machine-gunning prisoners in the camp the core explosion of the fire of the Spirit is all that is left as the flesh is as good as dead. The final ending of all things and the erasure of the storyline, in fact, reveals the reality of the beginning. Piles and piles of bodies are strewn about the landscape - the wasteland of carnage and wrath. The outcasts and refugees wander around the wilderness hungry and directionless.
The African landscape at sunset set against the orange glow are the smoke and stench of human suffering. In the midst of the camp is a large NFL Jumbo Tron with a satellite feed to the QVC shopping channel. The refugees wallowing in the dirt are forced to view the salespersons eating holiday candied apples and pralines covered with dark chocolate. The rest of the world is rotting away in the pit. Or so it seems. Our little life here begins at conception and we don't know where we will emerge. Perhaps it will be Los Angeles. Perhaps we will emerge into an earth suit in Kigali.
See, the point is we just don't know. But later in life when we think we do know we are not happy. Perhaps the dweller in Kigali is content with their small cup of sorghum and glad to be alive over against the desperate Queen of Los Angeles striving for the silicon and pills to numb the pain of not knowing.
What exactly is this all about? Not really knowing from one moment to the next about what is going to happen. To me. To you. We have hopes and dreams and plans and goals and then get on a plane in Boston on a mild September morning and are flown into a building at five-hundred miles an hour. What happens to the soul when the body vaporizes in an instant? We just don't know. It is somewhere in time and space absent without flesh. But somewhere else that is home.
You are happy when you don't hold on to anything. You are just there. Being. The more you hold onto the more miserable you become - constantly holding onto people, places and things. There is nothing left except to be left alone with self. When that happens you will know the Spirit of God as the Comforter.
The image is copyright free and comes from the Guitenberg Project.
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