Thursday, November 08, 2018

Interior states …

… Threepenny: O'Gieblyn, Flyover Country. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The whole scene seemed to me like a Bruegel painting, a sweeping portrait of community life already distilled by time. I imagined scholars examining it many years in the future, trying to decipher its rituals and iconography. There was something beautiful in how the pastor laid his hands over each congregant’s face, covering her hand with his own, something beautiful in the bewildered look on the congregant’s face when she emerged from the water. Although I no longer espouse this faith, it’s hard to deny the mark it has left on me. It is a conviction that lies beneath the doctrine and theology, a kind of bone-marrow knowledge that the Lord is coming; that he has always been coming, which is the same as saying that he will never come; that each of us must find a way to live with this absence and our own, earthly limitations.
An odd bit of reasoning, that the Lord is never coming because he has been so long expected to come. My own feeling is that he passes through incognito all the time.

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