Bump

To escape the heat for just a moment, a man, dressed in a full suit, probably a lawyer, stepped out of the cattle herd flowing toward the turnstiles out of the McPherson Square metro station, and walked over to one of the giant circular fans whirring within its metal cage, trying to circulate air in the station. He stopped right in front of it, put down his briefcase, and tilted his head back. The fan blew across his neck, over his tilted cheeks and lifted the hair falling back from his forehead.

I watched him do this, and saw a pleased, satisfied smile settle into his face. For just one moment, he was breaking a pattern and mining a moment of delight out of a vein of possibility that most workmanlike prospectors did not even see. He knew it: this moment was there and he had found it.

Thud! I walked right into the retractable barrier that admits and releases passengers through the turnstile. Bouncing back a step, I reflexively swiped my metro pass over the sensor again, and the barrier opened before me. I laughed. Something about slips and falls and bumps strikes us as hilarious; no doubt there’s a theory of comedy to explain this. My own theory is that collisions and delight are both at the foundation of the material world: we imagine that atoms are things zipping around like inexhaustible billiard balls on an infinite table, colliding and crashing off in a new deflected direction every millisecond because that is just what makes sense to our notion of delight, even joy you might say, down at the deepest heart of things.

Ascension

There’s a book out there that I haven’t read yet, but I mean to, called The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The title is so wonderful that I like to imagine that I already know the gist.

Sometimes, a person can feel so at peace, that they sheerly whisp through the rooms and hours of a day. All is well, all will be well, no matter what comes—even if sadness comes. Lightness permeates all. Have you ever felt that way? There is a twinkle to your very existence. I like to imagine Jesus, forty days after being resurrected, having walked and loved and eaten with so much pure twinkle in his soul and in his body during those several weeks, that at a certain point he just hardly couldn’t help it: He lifted. Up! Lightness into lightness.

But why unbearable? Well, have you ever been light like that, and then remembered how much you love a processed cheeseburger and cherry coke late on a Friday night with friends who are a little drunk and thinking of nothing but the delights of filling their fleshyness with calories and movies and maybe even—well, probably, even—making out with a beautiful person? The lightness is higher, it is a more perfect pleasure; it is why Aristotle fell asleep with a bronze ball in his hand, so that at the moment he fell into too deep and delicious a REM it would slip from his fingers and clash to the ground that he needed to escape, jarring him awake to return to the pursuit of contemplation. The lightness is higher.

But, o!, the ground! Rich soil, indeed. We are beasts with bodies, too. It’s helpful to remember at these times that even as Jesus lept and lifted (and laughed—how could he not laugh at the sheer delight of it?) he left his Spirit behind.