the light of things hoped for

[i found this while looking through old Tanzania journals. i wrote in on my last day in Masumbo, my highland Tanzania home campus on the mighty Little Ruaha River]

last night, before dinner, i went on a restless hike up the Masumbo access road. i have never been able to find a good view of the waterfall and river and mountains that tanalize in bits and pieces through the leaves of trees to tall to see over and too scrawny and thorny to climb.

following an old road over and down a pace and along the ridgeline, i finally saw it. waterfall, rocks and rapids spread out below me and mountains and clouds above; as the sun set behind me, i beat at some bushes with my trusty walking stick. i stood and prayed, knelt down, stood again, shook my stick uselessly at the sky.

lately i have admitted my doubt has led me from a desperate theism to practical agnosticism to outright avowed disbelief. i would, i want to believe in You, God but...

the heavens, and the waterfall and rocks and the thorny , dry hillside with its dusty crackling grass do not respond. i am a practical agnostic because God is not there. practically. daily. miraculously. comfortingly. at all. where others see, and seize with desperate courage, God...i see fig leaves. hurried scrounged conclusions to cover up our vulnerability.

no one questions their inadequacy: they do cover, they must cover. so the shabby and insufficient is touted grand and glorious, lest we stop and see how naked we all are.

the Christian has forgotten himself. like the atheist, the glutton, the know-it-all, the soccer fanatic, the sex bomb, the businessman and the poet, he is ignoring the human condition: the words lost, alone, broken, futile, empty, desolate, destroyed, lawless, craven, lusting, pilfering, petty, greedy and dead are behind them all looming fast, fierce and implacable.

the religious man will binge on comfortable, reassuring words like a drunk on cheap wine. his commitment to his safe foundational illusions makes truth a carefully orchestrated game with distinct "out-of-bounds" lines and foregone conclusions.

stripped of the inadequate leaves of a deperate theism, i stand exposed: lost, alone, broken, futile, petty, lawless and empty. dead and exposed, naked on a hillside of dry, stinging wind, mosquitoes, rocks, thornbushes and the gathering cool of night. i have begged God to show himself, demanded something worth believing and living for...

He is silent, or not there. the human condition, barring lucky patriarchs and the queerest of prophets, is uncertainty. the blind stumbling along in hope.

but hope I do. rain comes on winds, and the dry season is a cool relief from the heat and frenzy of the wet. dry-season flowers accompany the thorns and the Ruaha thunders on, it's throaty disquieting roar the ever-present witness to it's seldom-glimpsed beauty that wends and winds in infinite intricacy over under and through countless rocks in a totality of detail that cannot be known by the human mind.