Grace

            The authentic religious impulse has just been validated for me, after a month or more of whitewashed inner withering, the soul’s incessant second guessing.  I still never see it coming—vindication of scientific theories and God’s possession of personality. 

            Here’s the deal: I’ve been stoking the compassionate impulse for months now—a new city, beautiful apostasy from the old self’s defaulted accrual, that autumnal feeling of urgency with one’s novelty in the world—and it simply hasn’t worked.  I’ve consistently ended every day feeling as if my mark has been lost on the world—or worse, that the mark was made in someone else’s name.  For there’s a sour side to the urgency of alienation from one’s surroundings, predecessor to the weary relinquishment of one’s presence in the world: discouragement seeps from every smallest crack made in one’s attempt at change, whether of oneself or others. 

            But today something slipped into place: God is deeply active, and surprisingly so.  The intersection of 1 John and a million of life’s grinning contradictions—I was riding my bike home from school when it hit me: there can be no love without knowledge of love.  (Surely it is best put simply, but the modern in me wants to slap the blunt apostle.)  We cannot convey life if we are not actively experiencing life, for we cannot give what we do not have. 

            And on and on I go, turning the sharp little thing in my mind, ultimately never figuring it out.  But surely this makes sense—surely we would not be calculating the distance between our lover’s lips as our hearts beat blisters for the next brush of skin on skin.