easy

I saw a movie once about a man who was wrongfully accused of murder and shipped to a prison island somewhere. He spent a number of years trying to escape from the prison and he was always caught one way or another, with years being added to his sentence each time. Eventually, after maybe 20 years of trying, he escapes. That's fantastic for him, but the scene in the movie that has remained most vivid in my mind is a conversation that he has with another inmate right before his successful escape attempt. He is trying to get this other inmate to escape with him, and the man looks at him and tells him that he ought to learn to be content with the garden he has been given to tend on the island and the food he has been given to eat. If my memory serves me correctly, he looks at the man for a moment and then turns his back on the man and walks off and, soon after, escapes. The movie ends with him strapped to barrels in the middle of the ocean, laughing and laughing and laughing and laughing. The kind of laughing that would remind you of madness unless you've come close enough to madness to know it's the laugh of relief, relief that you aren't in fact mad. I'll forget my name before I forget that scene.

C.S.Lewis once said (or wrote, which is really the same thing if you think about it) that our problem isn't wanting too much, it's being too easily satisfied. He was probably being honest about himself when he wrote that, but, as is true of any great author, he was being honest about all of us at the same time. I used to have a poster in my freshman dorm room that had James Dean on it and the quote from him was "Dream as if you'll live forever, live as if you'll die tomorrow" or some such thing. Besides the obvious fact that James Dean probably never said anything that articulate of his own accord, it reminds me that we love to get caught up in quotes. It's as if we think that to read something is to do something. I've thought that, and there are still parts of me that think that. There's nothing wrong with being inspired by quotes. There is something wrong with being absorbed by quotes. You ought to listen to other people but you ought to always return to your own identity after you're done listening. It strikes me that most of the things I've put myself through stem from a misunderstanding of either myself or of how the world works. See, you probably bought into that last sentence, in much the same way I have for most of my life. You probably thought "yeah, same here man" and then took another sip of your tea or coffee or whiskey. But that's wrong. Most of the things I've put myself through stem from being too easily pleased, too easily satisfied. They stem from always re-dilating my eyes when God looks away so that I can ask Him to please wait to turn the light up any brighter, my eyes can't take it right now you see.

Most of the time, I understand what I'm doing, and I do it because I want to. The idea of skeletons or ghosts or angry white men with knives or saws walking into my room at night doesn't scare me, though it did when I was young. The idea of everything that could have been if it hadn't been for my idiocy being shown to me scares the shit out of me. Maybe that's why Oedipus stabbed his eyes out. There's something about having to go on seeing things, or still being able to see things, that you've wrought that tastes like hell to me, and knowing is the same as seeing. If hell has gates, I wouldn't be surprised if, instead of "Abandon all hope, all you who enter here" being written on them, God wrote "You were too easily pleased". And I would be walking through those gates.

This isn't a post about salvation. This is a post about how sometimes I think Proverbs lied when it said that a man's heart is deep waters. It's a post about how sometimes I'm perfectly content with my piece of prison. It's a post about how, sometimes, I ask God for help so that the record will show that I asked for help. It's a post about how I'm worried Christ won't look me in the eyes when He meets me at the gate. You wouldn't talk to me anymore if you knew what went through my mind sometimes.