The Lost Orchestra

When I was a little boy, I collected action figures. I had a lot of these things, maybe too many, but my mother likely reasoned that I needed my own collection of little plastic people to play with because my two younger sisters had enough Barbie dolls to populate an entire Barbie nation, complete with social tiers and caste systems, the majority of which were lower class citizens because they roamed the Barbie nation naked with terribly scissored haircuts and the occasional burn mark from when I was bored and decided to torment them.

I had G.I. Joes, Transformers, all the X-Men, Spiderman, Superman, Batman, Robin, Futuristic Spiderman, some weird action figures of unknown origin used mostly as victims of painful deaths by the real heroes, and a weird assortment of Klingon warriors from Star Trek (yes, Star Trek). Sometimes I wish I could go back to the time where I could derive hours of unbridled joy from creating epic battles fought under beds and behind couches with little plastic men. What is funny about boys this age with these action figures (I don’t think kids play with them anymore, but you probably remember how sweet it was) is that every kid almost always creates this kind of all-star cast of action figures. I never woke up from my nap, ate my cookies, looked at the box of action figures and decided that because today was Tuesday I would play with all of the Batman genre toys, since I had exhausted the superman genre the day before. Instead, I would pick through all of the toys, selecting the coolest ones, and make a team like Wolverine, Superman, Gambit, Optimus Prime, and have them fight everyone else because that combination of four people could probably have fought both world wars and won fairly quickly. I remember watching the cartoons and thinking how awesome it would be if all these different people combined forces, and made one big glorious ass kicking team. Sometimes I would be lucky enough to see a cartoon where batman and superman for some reason needed to help each other, and I don’t remember being happier than those short 30 minutes of cartoon bliss.

One summer I was a lifeguard at a pool, and since I sat on a chair for 8 hours a day staring at an empty pool I started to read books. Any book I could find I would read, sometimes in one day. I think I read the entire Harry Potter series in 2 weeks, partly because I was bored and partly because those books are actually really entertaining. I read one book called the Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien. One of the stories is about this sort of God figure, who created all these little elves and different types of people that we see in the Lord of the Rings movies. He makes them all musicians (this is a terrible paraphrase of the story, please do it justice and read it yourself) with incredible voices and talent, and puts a guy in charge of making this gigantic orchestra that is going to play this one song that is the pinnacle of all creation’s ability. It’s what the people were made to do, play music, all of them together, playing their little elf and hobbit hearts out, for the pleasure of the god creature. The god creature knows this will make him happy, because he will be able to see all the people he created at their best, making beautiful music, but also that all of the little people will be happy too, knowing they are playing music that is making the god creature smile.

The god guy, named Iluvatar, says “But I will sit and hearken, and be glad that through you great beauty has been awakened into song.”

Not long after the people start rehearsal and practicing, Melkor, the guy in charge of the orchestra starts getting cocky and selfish, and is pretty pissed at something, mostly Iluvatar. He starts sticking in his own little measures and crescendos and what have you, to kind of make the symphony his own and to grab a little piece of the glory in the symphony. He becomes so obsessed with stealing the show that he begins hating the very sound of the orchestra, and tries to ruin it. To make a long story short, he gets in big trouble, but manages to ruin the whole orchestra and symphony and now all the creatures that were made for making music are running around the earth doing all sorts of useless things, like making wars for no reason or killing each other and taking peoples food. Some of them still play music, but none of them play together because when they do they are worried about how good they sound, or that someone is taking the spotlight or being too loud or too quiet or too fancy, and forget that long ago they were supposed to all play together to make themselves and Iluvatar happy.

Therein lies the problem with this little fantasy earth the Elves and Hobbits and Smurfs live in. Its what the earth, the trees, and the sea all quietly lament, because they are old enough to remember what things were supposed to be like and how they were for awhile, and it hurts them to see how it is now. Nobody is performing their duty, the thing they were created to do, the thing they are truly amazing at. T

Tolkien’s story is pretty dead on if you ask me, as far as someone trying to sum up what’s wrong with the world. We were made for something, something that not only makes God look down on the world and smile, but something (the only thing) that will ever make us happy. If all those little elves and hobbits could just stop being selfish and remember what they were made for, all the other problems would be solved because the world would be doing what its supposed to be doing.

If we stopped being selfish, stopped killing, stopped hoarding food and money so other people could eat and live, stopped being greedy, maybe the world would make God happy.

If we stopped worrying about our moral checklists, or the way some people run their churches, and just remembered that the world sucks because everyone is trying to fulfill themselves with something other than what they should, if we just realized that a relationship with God, taking advantage of the companionship and friendship he offers, we would be so happy that we wouldn’t need to fight in wars or scratch our heads about feeding the hungry and needy. We are people designed to spend eternity being friends with God, taking care of other friends of God. We are designed to play music that makes him smile, and instead we’re all wandering around playing our instruments in different keys, playing different songs, and some of us don’t even remember where or what our instruments are. It’s really sad.

But isn’t that what’s wrong with the world? We aren’t doing what we were made to do. I hate seeing the world in a crappy state, but most of all I hate seeing people who are hurting and alone. I’m convinced that’s the root of the problem of homosexuality and heterosexuality. Just because people are having sex outside of marriage with people of the same sex doesn’t mean they aren’t suffering from the same loneliness and lack of fulfillment that the straight guy who runs around sleeping with scores of girls does. We need to be looked down at from heaven and smiled upon. We need to know that someone, somewhere, is happy with us. Someone looks at us with a soul-piercing gaze that in one second sees every flaw and imperfection and still smiles. We try to accomplish it with sex or power or fame, or even downplay it by saying “All I want is to have a good marriage with someone who loves me, then I’ll be happy.” But it’s all the same problem. One lifestyle might look better but still falls short of what should be.

“We were meant to live for so much more…”

-Switchfoot

Dinner With a Liberal

I ate dinner with a liberal last night.

He was a very caring, compassionate, and humanitarian individual, well traveled, well read, well spoken, and knowledgeable about art and food and the sort of things that make you wish you were more cultured. Unfortunately for him, he was the only known liberal at the table and the enlightened conservatives who allowed themselves a glass or 4 of wine were feeling rambunctious and asked him how he could not support the war. He tactfully evaded the question, and instead chose to make a general comment on the tragedy of war altogether. In an effort to save him from the impending inquisition, I asked about his travels and which place left the most impact. He thought for awhile, and surprisingly forfeited the chance to lighten the conversation by telling me that he will never forget the killing fields of Cambodia.

“You can still see people’s teeth embedded in the ground.” He looks at the other people at the table. “Most people don’t get off the tour bus. All you really see from the bus is enough I suppose, that huge mausoleum sort of thing, and by the time you drive up you know what it is.”

I don’t know what it is. I’ve never heard of the killing fields. Some of the older folks grunt as if they do, but I ask anyways.

“It’s glass pillar filled with human skulls, a sort of monument like the holocaust museums. I had to get out of the bus though, see it myself. It was just surreal. You walk up to this huge enormous thing, stepping on the uneven ground where the earth was moved to cover mass graves of women and children but the skulls… There are hundreds of them. Those were all people… with lives and stories and they were done in an instant. It’s an incredible and terrible sickening feeling all at once, like your brain can’t accept it. It makes you doubt the existence of god, just knowing things like that happen.”

My girlfriend pipes in at this point, her liberal bleeding heart was quiet and confined until now, she thinks she will embarrass me by aligning herself with him. She is truly moved by the story. “It doesn’t make me doubt God,” she says, “it makes me mad that humans can do that to each other.”

Brilliantly done. A unifying comment. Somewhere in America, the hairs on Barak Obama’s neck are standing. I’m halfway glad she didn’t jump down his throat on blaming God for human suffering. There has been far too much wine for that debate, we’ll save that for another day.

But another day probably will never come, this man is a stranger made a friend through food and drink and just like those things he will be gone in a few hours. Halfway glad a half hour later became halfway guilty. Guilty because that was a window in the soul of someone who has compassion, someone who sees something wrong and feels it, and I covet that sometimes. I am more guilty though, because I smiled when he said he doubted the existence of God; smiled the way you smile when someone says something you know is wrong but have doubted just as much as they have when you are alone and watching the news about some child being raped.

What frustrates me is that this man was and is so close to seeing the existence of God, he just has one piece wrong, one piece he can’t justify, and he turns away. He cannot accept the existence of God because the world is evil and terrible. He agrees with my girlfriend, and to him nothing she said contradicts anything he said. But at the same time, where they seem to agree is the fork in the road, where he goes a very opposite direction. They agree that god has nothing to do with suffering.

God is the antithesis of death.
God is the antithesis of suffering.
God is the antithesis of the world as we know it.

And that is why I couldn’t sleep that night. Because we agree, but disagree. Because that is why I believe in God. That is why I need Him, why I need Him not only to exist but to exist in a way that is intricately connected to why I exist.

God is the antithesis of me, and I need that.

I need God to exist, and I need him to fix me. I see suffering and death as proof of Him, the way hunger proves the existence of fullness and satisfaction, the way thirst proves quenching. Hunger pangs the stomach because the stomach is supposed to be filled, thirst burns the throat because the throat was meant to satiated.

The dull and sickening pain when suffering is seen, when death is seen, are powerful because every fiber of our being is racked with the awareness that something is wrong, that this is not the way it is supposed to be. We can feel and almost palpate a vacancy, a vacuum, where something belongs. Something better. Something big, but bigger now that we sense its absence.

Hunger, thirst, disease, all fool us with a power derived by accentuating the absence of the thing that is truly powerful.

I wish I could sit down with that guy again, and explain this to him, but as usual it takes me a long time to chew on things in my head and it is easier to write it than to say it, especially off the cuff in front of other people and especially when I hardly understand it myself. But I would like to ask him if it’s possible that death is sad because life was never supposed to end, that seeing a mass grave hurts because we were supposed to see the earth move and wonder what would grow, not what was buried beneath it, and that God does exist because there just has to be something else… something else that long ago ingrained in us something Good. Something that moves us when we see its opposite.

I wonder if he could believe that loneliness pangs the heart because the heart was meant to be knit to something.

To God.