At the Core

What do you see when you close your eyes? And what do you feel when everything is still?

I’m trying to ask a question, but I’m not sure what it is. I’m trying to get at the baseline. The core of it all. At the center, is it good, or is it terrible? When your love passes off into the other side, will they reach joy and goodness? Or fear, darkness, emptiness?

I believe in heaven. Of course, I believe in heaven. As my sister told me after our most recent funeral, it would be too terrible not to. That thought is not bearable. Goodness must exist. It must be possible. God’s kingdom must be somewhere and it must be able to come.

I used to have a much easier time believing this. In the past few years, I have become less and less certain that under all the crumbling walls, there is more than fear and loss. It started with a boy in a hooded sweatshirt who bought some Skittles and was shot dead. And then when a justice system I had trusted determined that fear of a black man is a good enough reason to kill that black man.

The battering ram, however, was the disease. People die all the time. That’s nothing new. And 64 is not such an unreasonable age at which to go, especially when given three whole months to say goodbye. But somehow when this man was taken, my faith was ripped to shreds. It was he, after all, who had partnered with my mother to lay the earliest foundations of this faith and my trust that the All in All is, in fact, good.

A friend died at 37. Another lost her baby. Marriages dissolved. Everything, everything crumbles in the end. It will all fall apart. And what do you think about that? It takes a lot of faith to believe that Good prevails. That the light shines in the darkness and is not overcome. That, in the end, peace, kindness, and love are the winners.

The sun still shines. The flowers still grow. I have food on my table, friends, and family. Is my faith so small and my eyes so shortsighted that I cannot see the immense Goodness? Am I a fish, so surrounded by its water that I deny it is there? I flounder, whining from within my pools of love.

The people in this country who insist they have the strongest faith come together to shut down our borders and turn away the world’s most needy. They put up walls to say KEEP OUT KEEP OUT, and I wonder how sure they are. Emptiness, lack, want, fear. Do they believe in abundance? Do they believe in light? Or is their faith even more ragged than mine?

Will the kingdom come? And where will it come from?