Autumn Equinox

Saturday September 22 2012 Autumn Equinox Job 40 15 "Look at Behemoth, which I made just as I made you; it eats grass like an ox. Its strength is in its loins, and its power in the muscles of its belly... Its bones are tubes of bronze, its limbs like bars of iron. It is the first of the great acts of God- only its Maker can approach it with the sword. Is this the passage William Blake had in mind when he wrote “Tyger, Tyger”? And yet this is the God who has promised us an everlasting mercy. Yet I do not know anything that is everlasting. Not even memory is everlasting. Not even dust or the terra-cotta army men buried alive in China or books, set out like little toy ships at sea, carrying a persons words and thoughts from the afterlife, making it okay to die. (A person leaves behind something--a book--an idea--a photo--a letter--a child--does that person really die when the last person who remembers them dies?) Certainly of all the things that surround me, tangible and intangible, I am the least everlasting. The bowl that holds the apples we picked last week will, under reasonable circumstances, outlive me. It may venture to a different state; be passed down to my children, end up in a thrift store. It could see the invention of silent, waste-less automobiles and the extinction of the telephone. The apples in the bowl, ripe and smelling faintly of cider, probably will not outlive me. But the branches, the seeds, the flowers fruit and stem, the entire fecundate cycle of life in that one apple true will outlive me. My tea pot, which I use every day and never thank, will almost certainly outlive me. It will never need a root canal or see the physical therapist. It will never get sleep apnea or glasses, or arthritis. I have become so uncomfortably conscience of my own mortality I am sometimes surprised to find myself still living. My mailbox, made of punched tin, will sit and sit, wordlessly ferrying out my letters and opening its mouth to receive them back. It sits now, its red flag raised like an omen--not saying a word about the contents of the letter in its mouth, holding it still between its teeth like a baby hiding candy, not sucking, not chewing. Hoping not to be found out. It will not disclose what he wrote, or didn’t write, to his brother: about losing dad, and how the family seems without a guide at the helm now, how we can’t seem to find our way to say nice things to each other like we did before. Even that letter could outlive me. But if I am not here, am not around to hear it read again, what does it matter if the letter outlives me? Does a living memory of me effect me once I am dead? Can the dead, from where they are now, see and feel for us? If they are, as NT Wright believes, not yet in the new heaven and new earth (the last and final resurrection) what can they witness of us? Or do they care to witness? Have they already forgotten this “great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us?” Will, as Marilyn Robinson suggests, this world be Troy, and all that has passed here the ballad they sing in the streets? Or will it be a something fainter than a memory, like a dream you wake from and only vaguely recall--contours, maybe, and a feeling or a color--a pattern brings back something --or a face makes you think maybe you remember--but then you put it behind you as the day broadens with its realities (make the coffee) and demands (check email), the tangible solid things at hand put this other shapeless dream out of your mind--will that be all?