He wasn’t the real Mark Twain. But he was to us, sitting in an elementary school gym, white suit and mustache, telling stories. And we sat spellbound listening to a man who looked and sounded like Twain. We laughed til our sides hurt, leaned forward to hear what happened next, and teared up as he talked about the power, terror, and finality of the atomic bomb.
Almost 40 years later, I feel like I am sitting in that gym again, reading Neruda’s, “Ode to the Atom:”
Infinitesimal
star,
you seemed
forever
buried
in metal, hidden,
your diabolic
fire.
One day
someone knocked
at your tiny
door:
it was man.
With one
explosion
he unchained you,
you saw the world,
you came out
into the daylight,
you traveled through
cities,
your great brilliance
illuminated lives,
you were a
terrible fruit
of electric beauty
Neruda goes on to describe the horror at Hiroshima, the ordinary day and ordinary lives that were no more.
He uses the phrase, “terrible fruit,” which is meant to send us back to the garden and another fruit with consequences.
“That’s why we can’t have nice things,” is a phrase I like to use; it makes me smile while at the same time shaking my head. It applies to so aptly to so much of the world right now. We do things because we can. If we are able to do something, we must be meant to do it, right? We can take remarkable scientific discoveries and twist and turn them in ways that can destroy the planet; we can take absolutely stunning sweeps of land and landscape, and see it as a resource to be used, rather than creation to be enjoyed and appreciated. We can look at one another as competition, or as enemies not be trusted, rather than with kindness and cooperation. We can, we have the ability, to do all those things.
But what we end up with–war, pollution, a culture of outrage and hate–is a result of that view and those actions. How we see things and how we act, give us what we get.
At different points in our lives, I think each of us has seen, felt, or understood that things could be different than that. That life could be different. That the world could be different. We get to choose.
Whether you read the Bible, history books, or study psychology, we have read about and can understand other ways of living. At some point in our lives, maybe we can point to times, moments, people, when life felt incredible, our thoughts and hearts were elevated, and we got this feeling that we were on the verge of understanding or being something more. Maybe it’s the feeling of being on vacation, or for a child, the feeling of Christmas morning. But then it fades and we are back to real life, our world of bills, deadlines, heartbreak, and sickness.
What if life, what if God was continually giving us clues how to bridge the gap–to make both lives the same? What if God knows we can do whatever we want, “because we can,” but is pulling for us to see things differently, and to make a life, and help make a world, where there is order, peace, and love, rather than everything running unchecked because it can?
What if by paying attention, by looking inside ourselves, and looking to God, we can rewrite our lives in ways we’ve only dreamed about?
Those are questions worth asking, conversations worth having, and a life and love to explore.
