Banker's Box

Can I possibly have any effect on other people when their lives are more important than mine because they all seek to protect and preserve our species? I sat in an old wooden pew at Big Cove Presbyterian Church this morning, the fifth Sunday of Easter, according to the spare church bulletin the pastor had snagged from the choir for us, and looked at the people around me. The lay pastor / elder announced that a young man across the aisle from me, Ryan, had recently turned 21 and was now a man.

A man. What is a man? I am not a man. I, as I know and have written about in this blog, am not a man because I am a robot programmed to write words in this blog. A man is a person who shares his sperm with a woman to procreate. A man is not a weightlifter, a truck driver, an oil rig worker, an athlete, a wealthy banker, a playboy, a hitman, a pimp, a thug or any other male-with-testosterone stereotype. A female can do these things, too. No, a male human animal is only a man after he has sired a child with a woman.

Now I know our modern civilization has argued the finer points of human existence and proclaimed that human beings are any members of the species, Homo sapiens. In that proclamation, there are male and female human animals who have same-sex, transsexual or other non-heterogeneous relationships and may even have figured out a way to raise children together. I am not denying their ability to do those things together. I am only defining what a normal sexual relationship looks like to the majority of animals that reproduce sexually.

Ryan may already be a man, in that sense. I do not know. If he desires to have sexual intercourse with a female human animal, conceive a child and raise the child with the woman, then I'm happy for him. He has achieved what I have not.

The pastor announced that Joe Berry, a storyteller and retired lawyer, will show up at church next Sunday and tell of life growing up in rural south Alabama.

Here I am, the casual observer. A choir of seven people. A female lay pastor, whose husband sings in the choir and whose daughter showed up for Mother's Day (from Colorado?). What do I see? Quiet country folk who are better than me in all ways normal. Sigh...

Quote for today, from a religious document, a section titled John, the fifteenth chapter and 13th numbered subsection: "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." [from the Holy Bible, New International Version]

In a place like this, I see who I am. I am an empty vessel, the translucent chameleon that longs to be not a mirror, but a window pane, invisible to the viewer. Ego lets this not happen.

Pastor: "We're all humans. We're all sinners." What is this idea she speaks of? We must all prune ourselves, she says, in order to bear fruit. What fruit we will bear after pruning!: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness, generosity and self control. All of these being spiritual versus personal questions not expressly condoned by the Presbyterian church.

A man's love is not a woman's love and that is okay. These concepts are coming from us upright monkeys - all else, including this, is mumbo jumbo.

Based on today's sermon, I bear no fruit they need here. But I already know that. Look through the loving eyes of a gardener and you'll know.

Get up and go to dedication of prayer chapel in back of church building - too crowded with people and accompanied by a wasp so I just returned to my seat.

Ate lunch at the house of my sister in-law (widowed) in celebration of my niece's university graduation. Had a nice family visit.

Who am I? I sat and watched two couples, my niece with her fiance and my nephew with his girlfriend - young people in love, planning marriage and what not. I observed the interaction between the 21-year old friend of my niece and her five-month old daughter and felt pangs of joy, seeing the next generation in motion. Not so long ago I used to toss my nephew, niece and her friend in the air when they were little children.

Has my life slipped by so fast? ...sigh... now these "kids" have the world in their hands, not me. I have fulfilled my wishes and become the middle-aged repetitious writer with nothing to show for myself but these words. In other words, I missed out on why I'm here. I did not reproduce my species. I was too careful when I practiced reproduction because I never found the perfect woman to have my child (or the one who thought I was perfect enough to help have her child) and now my childlessness haunts me. What now? I write.

Who am I? I am an example to others what not to become. What not to do. Who to avoid. I sought and found what I wanted. I have sacrificed my life for a collection of words I've put into a banker's box and stored in a safe vault for later retrieval. The words before me, either literally here on this blog or sitting virtually in my thoughts, do not comfort me. They guide me, they provide me many things I've repeatedly told myself in order to justify my existence.

As we left the church, the pastor handed out small slips of yellow paper with words that are meant to provide comfort to those who question their existence. Now I sit here and can't recall the words. Something by a guy named Halverson, perhaps? Words to the effect that you are where you are because God put you there for a reason. I sit here and recall the calm look on my sister in-law's face as she rocked her sister's friend's daughter to sleep in a rocking chair this afternoon. I saw the look of Bliss. Love. Calm. Beauty. Perfection. In that moment, my sister in-law was Madonna and the little baby in her arms was Jesus, examples of the religious symbols that dominated the meditative training from my youth.

The Purpose of Life sat comfortably across the room from me today and there was nothing I could do but watch. I have only seen that once before, while I traveled across the country on a personal pilgrimage in the fall of 1984, fasting for days while driving my parents' station wagon to the western United States coast in order to drive off a tall cliff and kill myself. On the trip, a flash of light appeared before me and I suddenly saw the reason for life: to love another person completely, which normally leads to species reproduction but not always does so. [Instead of killing myself, I drove for a few more days to sort out my new enlightenment and decided to return home.] Also in that flash of light, I sensed I was starving myself, needed nourishment and realized that the "love" you hear in radio songs is really lust and meant to hold your attention in order to expose you to radio advertisements.

Who am I? I am not you. Neither one of us is these words but these words are where we define each other and spend our time together.

I can never assume anyone reads these words except me. My ego does not need the artificial boost that readership provides. I assume that I receive no emails or other blog reader-sourced communication in relation to these words. Therefore, you do not exist. If you do not exist then I do not exist and I do not have any effect on you.

I wish I had organized my thoughts at an earlier age so that my writing in one language reflected a perfect understanding and use of grammatical rules. Instead, I love myself enough to just keep writing and hope that the words and sentence structure I use is enough to satisfy my need to exist in words. Sometimes I see my errors and sometimes I do not. That's okay. To err is human, to keep making the same mistakes over and over is a computer's fawlt [sic].