Intersection
March 2018
Where my mind goes—sometimes it is taking a leap. Join me.
This is the picture: You sit in your car at the intersection, waiting for the light to turn green. All around, the life of the city swirls. Through the open car window wafts the pungent odor of exhaust—the mixture of gasoline and fire that tells of power and possibility both nauseating and enticing. People bob and weave on the sidewalk as they pass, lives intersecting on the street, each plugged into their own internal rhythm, part of a larger song—the meeting gaze, the averted eyes, the passing smile—all part of something bigger. The car in the next lane has all its windows down, blaring a throbbing beat like some unhinged heart. The driver slaps his hand on the car, carried along by the energy. Life bursts from every moment, breaks out like the sunshine piercing through the clouds, like the birds leaping from tree to tree at the corner.
Then the light turns green and you move on—the car, the air, the sound and sight and smell.
Except, you don’t lose the moment. In that frozen moment your mind is caught by the thought: What holds everything together? What holds all of that moment and its blazing existence—and where it came from and where it is going—together?
Or is there nothing holding it all together? Is it chaos, all of it the crashing together of so many meaningless non-things for no purpose and of no intent? Was all of that moment nothingness? The very experience of the moment asserts to the contrary. Something was (many things!) in that moment and it had meaning. This recognition speaks to a grand coherency, deeper than the surface scraping of flesh and bone, rock and dirt. At that intersection there was a tune, a tapestry, a coherency in all of the living and existence-ness in that place all the more marvelous for the superficial disconnect of each from the other. The mystery is there, and your ontological tongue tastes it. The mystery existence concealing and revealing truth.
What is that truth, the grand design? In that breath you existential eye opened for a moment and you saw yourself—and your every moment—in the midst of a stream of meaning flowing toward some end. But what? The woman on the corner will go home and beat her child who will grow up to abuse their spouse. The man walking by in the jacket sells drugs to kids and leaves a trail of ruin in his wake far bigger than the burger wrapper he just tossed aside. The driver in the car beside you will be dead in a week, driving home drunk from trying to drown out the pain and emptiness of his life. Is the mystery here the horror of the secret depths and dark end of all things? Is this all meaningless—or something else, a thing of great meaning? Woven together as one, were you in the midst of a song ascending to life, or playing out the grim notes to end in cold silence?
There is the prick, there the rub. Sitting at the intersecting road you felt the thrill of life, and then your mind’s eye saw the death of it. In the end, everything burns. Or rots. You looked and saw life going about its business. You looked again and saw death going about its own work. The undoing of all.
The meaning of mortal life finds itself in its end, the life that does not last. In death is the end—of your place, your civilization, your universe. Death supreme is chaos, for chaos is meaninglessness. If death is not mastered its victory is the non-meaning of all meaning—meaninglessness swallowing all. If that is truth then any meaning seen is a lie to crumble beneath the death of all meaning in the empty void of lost existence on whatever plain you chose.
Was it a lie that you felt, when you felt the pulse of meaning there in the shining moment at the intersection? Was the life you felt a false spark soon swallowed in death’s thrall? If not, then death must be mastered for life to be more than a lie. And if life is truth then the very death you see in breaking cars, crumbling sidewalks, and wandering lives are—in their unraveling—a testimony to the weaving of a greater skein. There is something more, something deeper. For if there is meaning that abides in the face of death, that is resurrection—death existing, yet defeated. Life then gives death its boundary, and meaning to the very thing which sought to bring un-meaning to all. At the intersection you sat there in a moment of a world living out its death—a death full of meaning because life would come again with the wondrous mystery of death’s un-meaning having been given meaning. The breaking of all is shown as the greatest fixing. And we wonder at the hand which has wrought it, or deny the meaning of the testimony of the moment at that red light intersection.
It was only a few days before Easter Sunday, and I didn’t even realize it.