Our Awful Solemnity

In each subsequent generation from the creation of humans until today it is clear that all those things that are taken so serious by people are truly trivial to God. Conversely, the things that appear to people as being trite or playful are precisely those things that God takes most seriously. Both play and diversion are the chief characteristics of God in the creation of the world and its ongoing operating. Starting with Hebrew scripture, God’s call is for us to let go of our obsessions with what we think it all means, including our own contrived centre-stage roles in it.

When we are alone in the forest; when we stand on a vast snowy plain; when we come upon sharptail grouse feeding in winter; when we look up at the stars on a frigid night; when our hearts know committed love; when someone is a true friend; when we hear a fish jump in the evening on a still, large lake, when the Host is consecrated at Mass - at these times each generation’s values are turned inside out and the pure vision of the world and the illusions of human kind become evident.

Each generation believes itself to be unique, uniquely insightful, and extra-ordinarily gifted, and clandestinely and obliquely God’s gift to the world, in spite of their mantras that have convinced themselves that their dignity is tied to throwing off the ineptitude of all previous generations' ignorances.

But the more we persist in ignoring the actual reality of life, then the more we simply analyze reality into strange fantasies and complex purposes that are secretly designed to hide that reality and serve ourselves. Each generation involves itself in greater and greater absuridity, even though these absurdities really do not matter in the least, because no amount of misconception can alter the actual reality of things. Nor can it damage the actual joy found in actual reality by those few who have not so fooled themselves.

We are invited to forget ourselves on purpose.

We are called to cast our awful somenity to the winds.