By Noel Lynch
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I'm lying in bed at Cook County Jail, 2 West--the psych unit. I've made it through Leviticus now. Chapter 25, verse 8: every 50 years a "jubilee" is declared, freeing indentured Israelites and returning land and property. I'm struck by a familiar feeling of strangeness mingled with terror. My mind jumps to my apartment and belongings. The burning bush, Gabriel greeting Mary. This isn't an accident; I really am being spoken to. Mood lifts to elation, the world is alive.
A year later, Pope Francis would declare a jubilee year, unknown to me at the time. Though my apartment and belongings are long gone, I discover a year's worth of income in my bank account. When he returns, he will return in glory.
*
Something happens and you're startled. It seizes you, you specifically and hits with the force of an accusation--whatever the connotative import. The sensation is invariably bizarre and implies everything that your elaboration will fall short of conveying; nonetheless, narration compels itself, running forth to take this recognition. Man's response to God's call. The story winds itself around the shock like a husk or a shell, repelling those who attempt comprehension. Delusions of reference, word salad, a distant approximation to something unquestionably, existentially true and universally understandable. Narrative detail matters less than the overall picture: the methods of psychotic explanation resemble collage and pointillism. Ensconced safely inside or underneath, there is an idea, and consequently, a hope, persistence.
*
I'm standing on a frozen corner, 2 a.m., sleet drifting. I've been waiting, waiting, waiting for a ride from someone I've yet to meet or even see. He keeps changing the location, sending me on a wild goose chase spanning, approximately, the past week. He says I should wait across the street, so I cross. Cross back 15 minutes later. Discouragement is nagging, confidence in his assurance fading. He says he's near, occupied with some mysterious business that he won't ever describe in detail.
I've been up for somewhere in the proximity of three to four days, feet aching, hands numb. I pick up walking again, deflated, exhausted, now devastated, sure this is the end.
*
Ritual is calcification: it is first, a spontaneous response, a reasonable behavior. But trying to hold to the relief, the decaying memory of the satisfaction, strips a grasping, strained behavior of its meaning, its emotional content. Each attempted enactment is more hollow, more abstract, more desperate, more anxiety-provoking, further from the naïve apprehension of experience. In this attempt to restore life, to remember, ritual is an eternal, repeating death that persists through time--Absolute.
*
I step off the bus at daybreak and take in the white, frigid morning, flakes sawing back and forth softly, sadly, to an uneven tune. Inside, I'm warm, single-mindedly intent on finding the location. There is a room for me in the Father's house.
The meandering journey falls to darkness as the hours pass: I fade. Now it seems that I'm in Los Angeles, the Chicago suburb transforming before my eyes. Houses, no longer homes, now catacombs, are radiating decay, afflicted by an ancient curse. Deep, rust-colored rot permeates my vision, trailing behind and threatening to overwhelm the clear, clean day I chase ahead of me. I run, following green signs to safety in elaborate, repeating paths--ritual--in order to decontaminate both myself and world without.
*
The psalmist, in Psalm 42, despairing of God's absence, remembers:
"Why are you downcast, my soul;
why do you groan within me?
Wait for God, for I shall again praise him,
my savior and my God.
My souls is downcast within me; therefore I remember you
From the land of the Jordan and Hermon,
from Mount Mizar[.]"
A view of faith external to the Christian metaphysical system and mode of feeling sees it as one meaningless choice among others. In opposition, one doubts the doubt, remembers, entering into the internal view. Disbelief is now only one pole in the drama of separation from and reconciliation with God. Without death, there is no resurrection. The multiple collapses into One until, inevitably, the mind wanders astray again. But this, too, is God.
*
Ascending a steep, winding incline, back in the direction of the movement. I'm in the back of a police van, present on earth and in heaven, too. I'm at where I'm going. Sense heightened, attuned to the sublime vision. A sprawling kaleidoscopic crystalline castle, an endless iridescent internal expanse. Two realities, Father and Son, seen and inferred, fused, throwing each other, in turn in inseparable relief. I'm in awe; I'm in heaven.
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