April 25, 2010

• Book to my Kids: Chapter Two

  Well kids, I’ve got some bad news.  You’ll probably never exist.  I know, I know, I’m a terrible father.  I can hear you all going, “Dad, pleeeeease can we exist now? Pleeeeeeease?”  No. Quit asking!  We’ll never be there yet, okay!
  
  “Then why are you still writing?”
  
  Hmmm . . . you ask very wise questions for non-existent children, you know that?

  I suppose it is true that writing books to children that will probably never exist does indeed make very little sense.  But if you do end up existing, one of the first things you’ll find out about this world, either on your own or because I taught you, is that it makes absolutely no sense.  It is the first duty of every stranger visiting earth to recognize this, and if you don’t you’ll end up pretending a lot of things make sense which in fact do not. 

  If you buy into lots and lots of things that don’t make sense, and you believe all of them, you are what is called a culturebot: someone who imbibes every message and fact thrown at them as though it made perfect sense.  Culturebots listen to whatever most people seem to be saying, and that is what they believe.  They take democracy to its limits; the truth of everything and anything can be secured merely by voting on it.  This is why no one seems to think being alive is an amazing thing—because no one else seems to think that it is.  Noting that your existence hangs in the balance as we speak, I trust you to not make the same mistake.

  Culturebots believe whatever the culture says; that is what makes them a culturebot.  And if you tell them that the truth is more than fashion, that listening to the culture is not how to form our beliefs, they will not believe you, because you are not the culture. 

  Like I said, the world makes absolutely no sense.

  However, we have gotten a bit ahead of ourselves; if we are going to discuss how the world makes no sense, we ought to start at the beginning.  And the first concept that everyone ought to recognize makes no sense in the world is this: kings in the middle ages.

  Imagine the following picture.  A castle sits in the middle of a small country of farmlands, all of which are run by the king’s many surfs.  In the castle the king’s master bedroom opens out onto a balcony, onto which he struts wearing his finest robe, many rings on his fingers, his sceptre in hand, and a resplendent crown on his head.  All of his power, wealth, and honor converge on this moment as with a high brow he looks down on his lowly workers, a man truly at the pinnacle of pomp and vainglory. 

  Now open up the grand curtain of existence to the rest of the universe, and see the wider setting the king and his castle occupy.  Think of all the pictures of stars, nebulae, supernovae, and galaxies that I have shown you as you’ve grown up, and everything I’ve told you about them.  There are not merely thousands of stars, but millions of them, lining the galaxy from edge to edge.  Beyond that, many lifetimes away, more galaxies spin in all their majesty, containing untold mysteries of their own.  And across the spectrum of the universe, not millions but billions of galaxies freckle the sky’s deep and echoing canvas, a blackboard so wide that each entity embedded on it truly sleeps each night as an orphan. 

  The more you keep in mind the enormity of the universe, the more the pompous king down in his castle seems just plain silly.  He takes pride in his power, when he has power to do virtually nothing.  He is satisfied while considering what he owns, when what he owns vanishes in the picture of everything.  He assumes his dignity and value surpasses that of his surfs, yet he and all his fellow mortals stand condemned as beggars for significance amidst the humbling glory of the world surrounding them. 

  When considered in its proper place, the picture of the little king walking out upon his balcony in fact seems one of the silliest things possible.  Why does he think he’s so important?

  The point once again is that other people having an assumption is not a reason for you to accept that assumption.  Never work off the assumptions of the crowd.  If you ever become utterly confused by where you end up in life, trace back your thinking to when you accepted someone else’s assumption, and you will often find the assumption was in fact quite a silly one.

  Often times, however, it is we who have the unreasonable assumption.  I say this because the king in the picture is actually us: we are the nonsensical picture that lies at the heart of reality, our lives the little kingdoms we oversee.  We assume our powers are noteworthy and considerable, and our possessions quite the pile of delightful trinkets.  But there is one key assumption I share with the king more than any other: I am the most important person in the entire world.

  To be a king is to assume centrality; it is in relation to my life that other people stand.  Other people’s lives come and go; mine remains fixed and immovable at the center of everything.  From our balcony we oversee the small existence of our surfs. On a bar graph of importance, we are the tallest bar, everyone else vastly minimized.  And thus it turns out to be we who are the heart of the world of nonsense.

  We minimize other people mostly by sticking them in groups we don’t like.  If someone is a part of a race, school, political party, or social group that you don’t like, it’s easy to shut them away with that entire group.  Our head is a dump of different piles of trash, and we bulldoze people we don’t like into their respective piles. 

  However, what if a person is in multiple groups?  What is someone is in my grade, but they are part of a different political party?  Do we like them or not?  The key is that depends on which group you are thinking about at the time.  If you are thinking about grades, then you like people who are in your grade, and you like them.  If you are thinking about political parties, then you do not like them.  The world, as I have said, makes no sense.

  It only gets worse when you consider why we as kings assume we are important in the first place: because we exist.  If that’s the reason we think we’re important, why the double standard?  Why can’t other people be important for the exact same reason?

  And so in a world that makes no sense, it is up to us to respond in a way that let’s everyone know they’re important, and that the world can’t do without them.  It is really having good relationships that life is all about.  Friendships are constant lighthouses, always letting us know where we are in life, and that someone is looking out for us.  Marriage is the grand lifelong project to let someone know, as deeply as is possible within their soul, just how beautiful and wonderful their existence truly is.  And ultimately that someone is a human is the only thing you need to know when deciding whether to love them or not. 

  But that isn’t quite the whole story.  Because sometimes you’ll find there are people you don’t like, or that humans can sometimes be quite boring.  Off into the pile of boring people they go.  It can be very hard to pretend you think other people are important and likable.

  But here is a general truth about relationships.  Suppose there is someone in particular you don’t like at all.  For months you have to be around them, hiding the fact that you dislike them.  But then one day a person whom you greatly respect acts with great love toward the person you dislike.  What will tend to happen in a case like this is that you will start to respect the person you had disliked.  In fact, you might even start to like them.  When they are loved by a big and important person, your view of them changes completely.

  This is where the atonement begins to make a big difference in the way you see humans.  The atonement is the idea that God thought that every human was worth dying for.  This is the above scenario on a grotesque scale.  More than a person you respect, this is God; more than an act of love, this is literally dying for them.  It was even more than death; ‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’  A person of infinite value thought your friends at school were worth dying for; shouldn’t that change the way you look at them?

  That God died for everyone should make us ashamed of the dump we have in our minds.  We constantly treat humans like carcasses in our thoughts, so much so we don’t even notice it.  But with the atonement in mind, every single human being lights up, as there’s a whole new way to look at them.  Their whole thought life is a glorified affair, one you should take serious pains to listen to and understand, and celebrate as much as possible.  Now the entire picture has been reversed: we stand as servants in a world full of people that God has made to be kings. 

  For that is what Jesus did: he came as the only sane person in insane world, and loved everyone, despite the fact that people were working with the system of piles and dumps that we still use today.  All of the greatest literature is based on that very premise: what does a sane person do in an insane world?  That is the question I pose to you, kids, for I expect you to not imbibe the assumptions that people have that make no sense.  You are strangers here on earth and I expect for you to act accordingly.  How will you live?  How much will you love?  How does an alien act in a world that makes no sense?  How does a sane person respond to an insane world? 

  Well children, I suppose that’s all for now.  It’s my bedtime.  Don’t ask me when I wrote this; part of the world’s insanity does not have to be your sleep schedule.  The world is insane enough as it is.  Until next time.

  • 7:03 am
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