Broken Ice on a Monday.

It was twenty-five degrees this morning in Seattle. The children and the commuters had broken the ice on the puddles and the shards lay on the rigid street like shattered glass. Too cold to be out walking, but I was out. The world woke at 6AM. I had eaten and even gone online by then. Every Monday is a new beginning, and whatever happened over the weekend is flung like broken ice and only the bare puddle remains. My bare puddle this week is muddled as most puddles are. When you are stuck in Limbo, it is best to not think about being stuck in Limbo. My Limbo is both real and imagined. The real one is the story, the Young Adult novel I crafted some time ago and sent to a publisher last week. I think of being a writer, a fiction writer, is not unlike being a batter. You get three strikes and then you're out. But what often happens is, you get hit by a pitch or walked, or you end up hitting foul balls for a long time. Every once in a while you connect with the ball, and get on base. I am still swinging, swinging, swinging, hitting foul balls. But I have a good feeling about my novel and my other novels too. And that is the trick in baseball and that is the trick in writing. It is the difference between batting .500 and being a strike out king. Luck is involved. Trust your gut. Believe. It is like believing in the truth of Christmas. Most baseball players, and I suspect - most writers, are superstitious. They have trouble with absolutes. Superstition is a natural process wherein you sense that there are other things going on outside your vision, powers afoot beyond your power to control. You sense, as you stare at your monitor, when you converse with strangers, when you walk the street early on a frosty morning with an mobile device wedged against your ear, or while riding buses watching the faces of those around you, and when you drive your car, and fly in an airplane - that this is an elaborately staged play with the director nowhere in sight. We all could be locked up for thinking these sobering thoughts, couldn't we? They have a word for it: paranoia. Welcome to the padded room; we hope you'll feel at home, sitting there in your straightjacket. Here's a thought: everything is both random, and predestined. These seem to be opposite ends of the sanity spectrum, but they aren't; it depends on your point of view. From God's point of view it is like a finely tuned machine, a clock with invisible gem driven gears that go all directions at once. Wheels within wheels. From our point of view it is folly, madness, random, and often cruel, like LOVE. And sometimes life is so ironic and funny that we burst into laughter at the profundity of it. We laugh at ourselves and our hopelessly ridiculous situation, and this is a healthy way to be. This is normal. Some call this coming to grips with what is and is not - Buddhism, or Judaism, or Christianity, or Hinduism. Some simply call it the Peace of God that, like a sheet settles down upon us and we close our eyes - and the world disappears - and all of this - our perception of time - is an illusion of what really is. We are but stardust and rapidly spinning universes of atoms. We are invisible except for the wonder of light. We are illusions, and as far as we know, we exist as part of a great ice sheet on a puddle, until God fractures our existence and we lay disillusioned like shards of ice on a rigid street on a winter's morning.

The aisles were mostly empty in the Prince of Peace Lutheran church on 145th last Sunday. I had walked there to meet God. God took the form of the elderly and the mentally challenged, who spoke out of turn once too often. One man behind me, who was of the latter, spoke loudly and above the voices "Your mercy is great!" Ah, now there was a testimony! Later on, I went to eat cookies and drink coffee with the church members, and found myself in a long conversation with an older woman named Monica. Her husband, Bill, wandered  away, and Monica told me about the complications of growing up with the Finnish language. She said the Finnish language is different from all other languages. While an English speaking person may describe a table perhaps in five different ways, a Finnish person could describe it in fifteen different ways. Language is strange that way.

Physicists and mathematicians say that there are at least eleven different dimensions, but probably an unlimited number. In some of them, we are as flat as slabs of ice on a puddle. They say that each of us has an exact replica of ourselves in each of these dimensions. Exact except that in these other dimensions the other versions of us are making different decisions than we are making. They may even be living longer or shorter lives as a result of their decisions. What are they saying, really? That we are splintered beings, that we feel detached and incomplete because our real selves are scattered across time and space? That would explain a lot. As if there aren't enough mysteries.

The Lutherans are not a lively folk. Ask Garrison Keillor. They don't generally talk about esoteric realities beyond this one. It is easy to be a Lutheran. To be a Lutheran you simply have to keep your eyes wide open and see only what is before you and that God is always nearby and will answer your prayers. Ah, if only life were that simple. If only it was enough to say, "Once upon a time a child was born in Bethlehem, and he was sent by the Almighty to save us from our sins." Ah, if only. If only Jesus had no doubts about himself and his mission. If only he had stuck with woodworking, with life as a carpenter. How much better to have dove tailed wooden joints to remember him by instead of a wooden cross. How much simpler our theology would be in the Western Hemisphere. How far fewer deaths would have occurred, how fewer wars fought in Jesus name there might have been. Ah, if only. If only Jesus had given the parable of the broken ice, then we would know what broken ice symbolizes. But we don't have that to lean on. And ice tends to break rather easily. Like faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is LOVE.

In the parking lot on the north side of the Prince of Peace Lutheran Church there is tent camp for the homeless. The church lets the homeless live there in their blue tarped sanctuary. They give them free dinners on Wednesday nights. I did not meet the homeless on Sunday, but if I did I might ask to join them. Jesus would, why not me? Listen: this is the fall of Western Civilization. The world is on the precipice of worst things, my friends. Go now; hand your sandwich to the first homeless person you meet. They will take it; they have lost their pride. The hand of the Lord of All has crushed them, but why? Careful now, hand the sandwich with observant eyes - it is the Lord you are handing the sandwich to. The least of these, the least of these. Yes. Watch and observe. Armaggedon is not far off.