Quits

I called it quits on the former church of my ambivalence couple months ago. Oh, I don’t know. It was obvious, I suppose, near the very beginning, when the pastor couldn’t tell me what predestination is. What the various thoughts through the ages on this topic might be, beginning with Paul.

Far as I could tell, all he had were blanks. Blank spaces in the dialog filled with noise. As he struggled to converse with yours truly on the odd topic.

And so it may have been predestined, as it were, that I would go questing. Questing, as I am today.

Downhill from there, theologically. So to say. A straight drop to the valley below.

And so I climbed out of that particular locality after I had heard enough. After I heard enough stones falling upon themselves, over and over, punishing themselves gradually into sand.

And now. Now? Now I’m touring, I suppose. Touring the universe of churches in this part of the cosmos.

Reminded a bit of Mark Twain on tour. The Innocents Abroad: Or, The New Pilgrims’ Progress was the book that came out of it. Travelog of sorts. Here was this and this and this and this and this. The ridiculous and the superb and the supine. The replete and the scriven and the undine. The raconteured and the splendid and the rapine. The raspberried and the sooty and the refined.

All mixed together, you see. The great wide human experiment sliced open like a beefheart in tenth grade biology for inspection by the student. For instruction on the workings of the heart at the heart of the living.

And so I am trekking once again. Hiking and ravening. Bringing the hidden among God’s people and their weird ways out into a travelog of sorts. Into the light of. Well, if it isn’t day, at least it’s into a kind of light.