Here Comes Everybody

In the interest of engaging the neuroses and the bad religion that keep us resentful and resistant to the suggestion that the only thing to do with a common wealth is to share it, I have what I take to be an evangelically winning anecdote. My story occurred at a family reunion.

I once had an aged relative who wouldn't suffer anyone he took to be a fool, and his least favorite ship of fools was crewed by his family. With persuasion, he managed to appear at the gathering. But as soon as he could, he made his way into a spare room and took a very long nap. He came. He saw. He slept. And got away with it. At least no one could say he hadn't shown up.

After his nap, his sister spotted him and said, "Where have you been?"

"I was asleep," he replied with the ease of a wit who knew he need fear no attempt at reprimand. But he wasn't done with her. "And you know what?"

"What?"

"One of these days I'm just gonna keep on sleeping."

The macabre note of this remark might require some explanation. This relative was extremely well versed in the biblical witness and all manner of religious controversy. Both were intertwined within this family's culture in such a way that conversation in this direction was highly unpleasant (hence the bad energy of reunions). "I won't have to deal with you, and you won't have to deal with me," he seemed to say in a Daniel Plainview way. "Anyone care to dispute it?" He'd thrown down the gauntlet, and, as his sister excused herself, I decided to pick it up.

"And you know what you're gonna find when you wake up?"

"What?"

"More people."

And he laughed until he coughed. He knew I was taking a shot at his meanness by way of an appeal to a coming redemption, a more long-term reunion than this business with families, we might say. And it won't play to our tastes. It's a larger hospitality than most of us feel we can afford most of the time. It's the common decency that is the only eternal life worth talking about. If hell is other people, as Jean-Paul Sartre observed, it is probably also the case, as C.S. Lewis's the The Great Divorce proposed, that heaven is too. We'd better get used to it. There's no getting away from each other. God help us. And if we aren't up for finding one another interesting and valuable now (relatives, coworkers, enemies, immigrants), why do we suppose we'll want the human community then? Relationships are what we've got, the currency, we might say, of the kingdom that is here and coming. Were we hoping to get away from everyone?

I suspect there's something a little demonic in finding others boring or unworthy of our interest. Something profoundly antithetical to the life to come that Jesus describes, something resistant to the hospitality to come, the good graces on which we've all along depended. Contrary to many Bible-wielding motivational speakers and popular end-time novels, we do not know the details of how the end will sort out. But the messy fact of other people, near and far, reminds us that all grace is social. Bringing it back down to people (not disembodied souls, after all) will keep the good news seriously imaginable, seriously having to do with what we do with people--how we do by them--now. The good news of God's economy is inescapably social. Ready or not.

~ The Sacredness of Questioning Everything by David Dark

If you haven't quite realized it yet, I highly reccommend picking up this book.

Clarity Prevails.