20. I gave away my books of systematic theology.
On breaking out of boxes and the miracle of becoming yourself.
“Before his death, Rabbi Zusya said, ‘In the coming world, they will not ask me: ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me: ‘Why were you not Zusya?’”
Since I was young I have been on the lookout for the person to emulate or the club to join. Without knowing it, I have been guided by the unconscious belief that if I were to find the right person to follow, club to join, morning routine to implement, productivity hack to apply, etc. etc. etc., then I could rest. If I could only discover the correct system out there then I could finally feel like I have arrived.
Like a pendulum, I have spent my life swinging from one interest or pursuit to another; one label to the next. This is not a new topic for the B.W. Psalter.
In the past months, I have felt called (or pulled?) into the truth that Rabbi Zuysa so powerfully explained. We are not meant to become photocopies of great spiritual teachers. We are not meant to exist as robots parroting someone else’s designs. We are meant to live the life God has given us to live - with our unique experiences, interests, passions, and pains.
Thomas Merton once wrote, “A tree gives glory to God by being a tree.” So it is with each of us. We give glory to God by being ourselves.
There is nowhere else to go.
There is nothing else to do.
There is no one else to be.
It is a miracle to become yourself.
This week’s poem is another meditation on this theme and how it has played out in my life recently.
20. I gave away my books of systematic theology. I gave away my books of systematic theology. I graced them to Goodwill with some other tomes on pastoral liturgies and the minutae of the miraculous. I cleared the shelves of the heady conjecture produced in the absurdist genre called - with a straight face - theories of atonement. The scholars have made a pseudoscience of an art. They have discovered a way to turn holy water into ink as though enough written about the Big Mercy will somehow make it more digestible to us earthbound below being held together by its everlasting flow. I shredded the plans for liturgical, missional, organizational, and ecclesial renewal. I donated my membership pamphlets for the evangelicals, the Anglo-catholics, the radical leftists, and the broad church bourgeois whose devotion is brunch. A moment of rigorous honesty: I hocked the books. I made barely five dollars and didn’t donate a one. That money will transubstantiate into french fries for my children. The Hindus say, ‘God comes to the hungry disguised as food,’ My textbooks sought to trap the Transcendent on paper like a butterfly pinned to the canvas. Now the Numinous they sought to net has been transformed again into sustenance, resurrected into salty salvation in the same vein as bread and wine and the Everything that rests in the sediment of this ordinary moment and the invisible-inked footnotes of this very breath.