i was sitting in the back of the room during cru tonight, listening to the speaker and trying to eat my quizno’s sub without making too much of a mess. unfortunately my requirement of taking the tomatoes off the sloppy TBG sandwich made this nearly impossible, and my antics must have drawn attention to myself, because a minute later i was singled out and called up front and the speaker was telling me about his daughter. people were laughing, but i had no clue what was going on, because i was still scooping some gooey guacamole off my hand-out and putting it in my mouth. don’t ask my why i chose to do this in front of a large group of people. i made the appropriate grunts of approval to the speaker’s comments and focused on the guac as he had some more fun at my expense. it was great.
next thing i knew, i was asked to chant a lament: 2 samuel 1:19-27. this is where david laments for the death of jonathan and saul. i’d never chanted anything before, but i made a go at it, and all of a sudden i forgot myself, forgot when i was, and became one with the grief of god’s servant over the passing of his best friend. my emotions were also strangely flooded and charged, since i was chant-singing verses of mourning for my namesake–my self, almost. my voice died down finally and i was shaking, mostly from being nervous in front of a group, but also substantially from how cool it was to be involved with the words as they flew across barriers of time and culture. i’ve certainly never felt that engaged with a psalm before.
we ended the night singing the doxology. it’s hard to understate how meaningful that is.
i am a philosopher by trade, but i have a suspicion that the root, the backdrop, the canvas of reality does not consist in platonic forms, propositions, the cartesian product of infinite sets, or linguistic acts.
i suspect we will ultimately see that it is all poetry, thick with the living imagination of god.
random song on spin: “priests and paramedics” | pedro the lion
