What the Teacher Might Have Said

Vanity of Vanities... all is bloody vanity. Whatever you believe, you should know that you're not 100% correct. Therefore, you are (in all likelihood, at least in part) wrong. If correct belief saves, then we are all damned. We are, at the very least, DNA, mixed during some kind of conception (whether passionate, passionless, or in a sterile machine), and propogating the information (genetic, social, mythical) until the meat machine wears out (or suffers some hideous accident.) Pleasure is a flash in the darkness, happiness a brief breeze in the harsh desert of the mind. Shopping helps, because it is, in a sad but real sense, a type of questing, a purpose (however shallow and fleeting.) But the acquisition of stuff is silly. The stuff itself rarely helps for long. Vanity. Nothing helps for long, because we are, in our own existence, utterly alone. Every quest, every joke, every song... eventually leaves us. All we know (all I know) is that there is something rather than nothing. This we ascribe to God, because all of our experience suggests that until something is {created, placed, formed, made, assembled, whatever} there is usually not that thing. Existence came from non-existence, at least, it is not non-existence. This we ascribe to God. God is the source of existence, which means God is beyond existent (trans-existent, or, in a logic-defying irony, non-existent? but still "real"... by this reckoning realer than anything that is real.) Words do not wrap around the grounding of being from non-being. Pagan gods came from already existence. They existed. God does not come from existence. We can create pagan gods, we cannot create a God beyond our sense of existence, beyond our "is", who is more real than reality as we know it (we cannot conceive of this properly.) We can only be awed that such a Being beyond being would make {him/her/it}self known to us. By clumsy words, by fingers pointing to the moon, by impossible to adequately describe experiences. Life is a snapping twig, its pleasures but for the moment, its brokenness enduring. Awe before the raw fact of existence, rather than non-existence, before the Source of that raw fact, who is known only through self-revelation, this must be the beginning of wisdom.

My apologies that this is neither coherent nor necessarily correct. Those looking for deep insight will be disappointed. Undoubtedly I'll deny writing this in the morning.