Thursday, 18 June 2009

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    This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    Not with a bang but a whimper
  
    --  T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men
  
    I've had this fragment of T.S. Eliot stuck in my head for the last few days, not really knowing why I should have such a thing in there to begin with.  The last time I read this poem was over a year ago, I think-- but strange how some things bubble up from our subconscious when we least expect it.
  
    Today was a difficult day.  I went from contentment to anger to bitterness to acceptance to gritted joy in the span of a few hours-- all because of money.  I am giving up the last of the "Smaug vintage", as Bilbo might say, and quite rightly so, for it is all that I have ever been able to save when I went "there and back again." 
  
    Giving it up means also giving up certain dreams, things that weren't really happening anyway.  I was hoping to use that money for another degree-- now, I don't think I'll have the money for that.  I was hoping to also use it for a wedding-- but I need not tell you how far that is from me as well.  No, the money was just sitting there, waiting to be used, and used it shall be-- and for good cause. 
  
    I didn't give it up easily, though.  I raged.  The first thing on my lips after I was confronted with this new poorer reality was fucking hell.  I thought "why me" and sucked my thumb.  I clenched my jaw until I thought my teeth would shatter in my mouth.  And then, I heard from God.
  
    It was as I was praying for someone else, it was as though God was challenging me on several different fronts, but the most important thing I heard was "some people need to be separated from their money."  It was something my old pastor and mentor in Hong Kong once said about other people, but something I turn over in my head.  However, this is what I usually mutter to myself as I watch congregants drive off in their nice cars to multi-million dollar houses on the West Side.  I didn't think that I, the poor church mouse, would need to be ever separated from my money.  Did I? 
  
    I guess I did.  Later, another pastor at the meeting I was at mentioned Abraham at Mt. Moriah, and it all became incredibly clear.  I was counting on that money for certain things-- for hope, for a future.  It is a subtle thing.  I was not, in one sense, depending upon God, but upon what He had provided.  The LORD giveth, and the LORD taketh away, n'est-ce pas?  And now, the decision on how to use it is taken from me, the burden of wealth no longer a part of my life.  Not because I still don't have the capacity to pay bills or go out for occasional lunches, but because the option of doing anything more than I regularly do is now gone.  That wealth was my Isaac, my hope for the continuation of a promise and a life. 
  
    Only this time, there was no ram in the thicket.  My dagger sheared into my own flesh and blood until I cut it away from me.  Quickly, quickly, quickly.  I did it quickly so I would not feel it so much, yet the feeling of leaning on emptiness is discomfiting to say the least.  Yet is it ever emptiness that I lean on?  Will God actually still provide?  Or is it really going to be like the Eliot poem-- "Not with a bang but a whimper."
  
    O God, I hope You show up here.  Not just for my sake, but You do realize people are watching, don't You?  If not for me, then for Yourself then! 
  
   
  
  

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