yesterday, the feast of the ascension of our lord jesus christ, i helped a friend clean out a house he had rented for six and a half years to someone who seems to me to epitomize a miserable sinner.
how can i say that? you might ask. am i not being judgmental? no. merely observant.
sin is what makes us miserable. for six and a half years through i have no idea how many different boy friends and different drugs the occupant of that house had been surrounding herself with the detritus of a life lived ugly. the furniture, a collection whose unifying style was filthiness and odour, we put on the curb to be picked up as garbage, along with boxes of beer cartons and candles stubs and forks, remnants of some kind of business and broken pieces of once-useful objects.
like most cities in the united states, eureka springs is a collection of cultures, different outlooks, with little mutual recognition or understanding. tourists driving by the little yellow victorian cottage we were emptying would have no idea that the inhabitants were not living happy, fulfilling lives in this tourist haven. nor would the inhabitant of the little yellow house have any obvious reason to doubt the lives of the tourists passing in their new suv's were less than the joyful events vacations advertise.
the joyless artifacts i carried to the curb, as i found myself being covered with the dust and filth of the misery which passes unobserved and approved by modern life, made me especially aware of what we pray on ascension day:
"grant, we pray, almighty god, that as we believe your
only-begotten son our lord jesus christ to have ascended
into heaven, so we may also in heart and mind there ascend,
and with him continually dwell; who lives and reigns with
you and the holy spirit, one god, for ever and ever. amen."
and they made me wonder why we so easily settle for lives of quiet, filthy desperation when the kingdom is at hand.
1 day ago
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