Just as glad to go down as to come back up

Dear diary,

Are we speeding toward destruction in a way that feels right?

I could ask this question in more than just one way; for the pronoun “we” could denote various failing entities: myself alone; or my family & friends collectively; or our country; or the whole world; or…

It sounds like a scary idea: to speed toward destruction; but, at our core, it’s not the devastation that we fear: it’s whether we feel at ease about it: whether, at a remove, we can perceive it as a dignified fate.

Maybe this is my version of what people mean when they say that they feel “at peace with” a situation. I’ve heard churchgoers claim “I prayed to God and he gave me peace about our decision to put Lil Drum Kit to sleep.” (Lil Drum Kit is the name of the family’s pet.) (In this instance, sleep means death, no more: a merciful END to all life’s heartaches & the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.)

But I always wonder what our pets think. Do pets pray to their God and get peace about their owners’ decision to euthanize them? Being put to sleep seems undignified to me: I wouldn’t feel right about heading toward that type of destruction. I’d rather die in a fierce battle. If I were an iguana, I’d rather die trying to rescue a parakeet. Say the nighttime forest bursts into flames: You survey the scene & exclaim: “This is a good way to go.” Because it seems so romantic: burning to death with all your comrades, out there in the wild. You conclude: “Well, I guess our Creator must hate us,” and there’s something fitting about that. When the woods catches fire, it’s sort of like Hell, only temporary. You see Satan and his fallen angels, in the early chapters of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and they’re discussing amongst themselves the options of their new situation: After a great fall, they’ve awakened in an ever-burning landscape. That’s only slightly different from expiring in a forest fire.

& not a day passes when I don’t hear someone lament about “global warming” or climate chaos; which leaves me wondering: If it’s true, then are we choosing a dignified end? It could swing either way.

I am come to send fire on the earth; and what will I, if it be already kindled? (Luke 12:49)

Those are the words of Jesus, from the King James Bible. Also the 2nd letter of Peter (3:10) says:

But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be BURNED UP.

To be clear, I don’t believe the Bible. Nor do I disbelieve the Bible. My stance is that, when the Bible declares blah-blah-blah, then blah-blah-blah may or may not come to pass.

But I want to return to the above focus: Do we feel good about whatever doom we’re funneling towards? And when I say “feel good” I mean it the same way a painter might, if she were to explain “After adding those last two dashes of color to the canvas, I feel good about this failure—it is now complete.”

& now I wonder: Was Jesus at ease with his outcome? He must have known that he was hurtling toward destruction. He knew that droves of people were being crucified in his time. And more than one of the gospel writers speaks of Jesus as if he planned to go out that way. But other passages suggest that Jesus would have rather painted his ending differently:

And he went forward a little, and fell on the ground, and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. And he said, “Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me: nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt.” (Mark 14:35-36)

When the canonical gospels’ Jesuses (note the plural; for they are legion) seem irreconcilable, I tend to prefer Mark’s, which is the one quoted above. So I don’t think Jesus wanted to die on the cross. Yet the question remains: Once he saw that it was inevitable, did Jesus “come to peace” with his demise?

First, here’s his demise – from the fifteenth chapter of Mark, verse 37:

Jesus cried with a loud voice, and gave up the ghost.

& a couple verses earlier, Jesus utters his final words, which are our sharpest indication about whether nor not he was OK with his death:

Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” which is, being interpreted, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34)

This doesn’t sound to me like a lamb being led to the slaughter dumbly, let alone willingly. (I’m referring to Isaiah 53:7, which is always cited by my Christian kidnappers as a prophecy about Jesus: “…he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.”) But I’ve heard churchgoers try to explain away the angst of Jesus’ final words (“My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”) by saying:

“No! Bryan, you don’t understand: see, Jesus wasn’t exclaiming the above outburst in anguish; on the contrary, he was calmly and intentionally quoting Psalm 22, which begins with those very words ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?’ & then later the psalm ends with the declaration ‘It is finished!’ So Jesus was declaring his heavenly Father’s plan triumphant.”

To this I say: Psalm 22, while not overlong, is not exactly haiku-brief. You’re telling me that Jesus, while hanging on the cross and expiring, recited the entire thirty-plus verses?

“Yes! that’s just what I mean!”

Then it seems to me that Mark might have been a bad writer, because, even if you’re correct about him summoning Psalm 22, his gospel only quotes the initial verse—or not quite that: rather less than half of its very first line (“My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”)—which leaves us with a negative impression, when he should have quoted the LAST verse, if not the whole ending. Why would a saint botch his propaganda like that? And if you say that all scripture was ultimately inspired by the Almighty, then if Mark’s a bad writer, it follows that GOD’s a bad writer.

However, now I’m curious to explore how the scene would feel if this perspective were true—that is, if Jesus really did recite the entirety of Psalm 22 as he lay dying (or, rather, hang’d dying)—that would mean his last words were:

All the ends of the world shall remember and turn unto Yahweh: and all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before Yahweh. For the kingdom is Yahweh’s: and he is the governor among the nations.

All they that be fat upon earth shall eat and worship: all they that go down to the dust shall bow before Yahweh: and none can keep alive his own soul.

A seed shall serve him; it shall be accounted to the Lord for a generation. They shall come, and shall declare his righteousness unto a people that shall be born, that he hath done this.

So, even if my churchgoing adversary is allowed to claim that Jesus voiced the whole 22nd psalm while expiring, this leaves us with a Jesus who died urging everyone to worship Yahweh. In other words, Jesus does not shout “I hereby shed my blood to cleanse the sins of all who faith’d me”; but rather “Praise Yahweh alone: he is the only true and living GOD.” (By the way, I Bryan neither trust, praise, believe, nor have faith in Yahweh; tho I do involuntarily FEAR him.) (And let us not split hairs over the phrase “It is finished” – true, it does not appear at the conclusion of the psalm above; but this is an English rendering of an ancient text originally written in Hebrew, and I can imagine someone being able to translate it alternately so that it ends however one desires.)

Yes; whichever way you cut it, the passage doesn’t match what the Apostle Paul says about Christ. Let alone his church.

*

Darn, I regret that this entry got dominated by the Word of God. I wanted to say a couple more things about our house-shopping experience. But now all is lost; so I will give up.

P.S.

The first thing we did after accepting an offer on our apartment is go out into the world and make an offer of our own: we tried to buy another ugly old house. But the owners rejected us. And this was OK with me, because, while we were waiting for their answer, I was researching the terms of the mortgage; and I grew terrified at the amount of debt we’d be requesting—all just to inherit the woes of homeownership!—; so I said “If this deal falls thru, let’s just RENT an abode in the meanwhile—for it’s a jungle out there, a seller’s heaven; I’d rather hold back on buying anything at these inflated prices. Once the market crashes (and it surely will crash: it’s never not happened, in the history of capitalism—the whole bloodthirsty history), I say, once the market crashes, we’ll swoop in like a vulture and nab some crumbling palace.”

So we spent the last few days researching rentals. Comparing prices and visiting the complexes, checking out the environments and neighborhoods. What I concluded is this:

The rental world is more repulsive than Hell. It is sickening ghastly sordid nauseating repellent. At least it is, at our price range. So now we’re planning on buying a house again; yes, even in this bloated seller’s market. In other words: I’m running away from the gator, back to the welcoming jaws of the man-eating shark. I honestly don’t even care how much debt we take on, and how steep our monthly payments turn out to be, so long as we can avoid the high-rise netherworld. The sardine life. Boxes stacked on boxes, wrapped around parking lots; and all the vehicles are rusted, and not one has more than three-fourths of its hubcaps. And you can never spot the tenants: they remain indoors; but, if you could view them, I’m sure they’d look dazed. They use aluminum foil for drapery.

So, steering clear of the rental sphere, we made an offer on a second homely home. This one isn’t as homely as the first, but it’s rather unlovable. Its yard, in place of grass, features assorted clumps of weeds among dry dirt. And it has like umpteen trees, all of them overgrown and dead; so they’ll probably need to be uprooted, and let’s hope that’s expensive. I’m hoping that, once we move in, we’ll get a letter from the community demanding that we remove these eyesores from our property, and that the cost for doing so is, say, six grand per tree. Or make it twelve grand.

But the inside of this house matches the house that my parents used to own, probably because both models were built in the same bad year (1977); and this new house is even within walking distance of the place I lived in from age two to age twelve. So its windows are the same style as the ones I remember from my childhood. Yes, life, at least in my case, is an eerie hoax.

But our offer still needs to be accepted. So if we’re turned down again, we’ll be free.

But free for what? Free to look at more ugly houses. (Why not look at pretty houses instead? I can answer that question: Because they’re all too expensive. Besides, no pretty houses exist. There’s no such thing as a pretty house. Only people are pretty.)

But this place that we’re coveting has an extremely clean basement: no cracks or discoloration. It looks pristine. That’s important to me, because I need the basement to protect us from the worldwide flood.

This house also has a big backyard, with a fence around it. So our realtor said, “Hey, look at all this land! Great for a dog! Do you guys have any pets?” And I said, too quickly and forcefully, “No pets and no children.”

I guess I’m a typical male, after all – I’m gruff, unloving; & I abjure fatherhood. All I want is to sit in my giant black leather reclining sofa and fall asleep to U.S. football. And blast pop-rap in my motor-car.

And the house has two distinct jokes-on-us about it: (1) Its counters are identical to the ones that we installed in the place we just sold; and (2) its oven is ALSO the exact same model that we’ve had in our apartment all these years – emblazoned across its front is the word “AMERICA”; and the “E” is a flag.

But I repeat: if our offer ain’t accepted, we’ll keep on looking. The agent claims she already has a house lined up for us to consider—it’s not even on the market yet, but the guy who owns it is getting tired of polishing its innards, and since our realtor knows that we’re not averse to performing slave labor, she says the guy might be willing to sell the place to us ‘as is’: he’ll choose a price that is just below his comfort zone, & just above ours, so that we can all remain miserable.