At the end

“Yes, I am coming quickly.,”  Amen.  Come, Lord Jesus.  Revelation 22:20b

Quickly –  Another annual cycle.  Maybe this last one wasn’t quite the same as the pagan idea of eternal return, that is, just going around and around over and over.  Maybe this last one created some changes; changes that will spin out new opportunities during the next annual trip around the sun.  Maybe.  But even if it does, something else happens.  We reflect.  We remember.  Perhaps we regret.  And that leads me to the following:

A man should not write down his thoughts until he has no time left to complete them.  Before that time, every word that is inscribed in a text becomes a fossilized memory of some prior state of mind, a relic of progress toward the end.  It is subject to criticism, evaluation, interpretation, speculation, and most importantly, misunderstanding.  Why?  Because the end determines the beginning; until a man reaches the end he does not know what his beginning was really about.

The only way to avoid this inevitable consequence of writing something is to keep it alive—by speaking, by dialogue.  Conversation is the constant resurrection of  a man’s thought.  It is the revision of what he means through interaction in community.  Writing is soliloquy.  It anticipates an unknown audience.  It does not engage a living audience.  Dialogue adjusts the past to the present.  A man discovers what he meant in conversation with another.

Perhaps this is the difference between the letters of Paul and the teaching of Yeshua.  Paul wrote, and as a result we have two thousand years of debate about what he meant.  Yeshua wrote nothing.  He taught.  He spoke.  Of course, we interpret what others wrote about what he said, but when he said what he said to his disciples they were engaged in a living conversation.  They understood him in the presence of others, not as verses in a text but as dialogue about life.

I have written thousands of words.  Every one of them must be revised according to the end of my story.  They are merely stepping stones on a journey somewhere to a destination I do not know.  The real meaning of those words can’t be known until the end provides the lens to see them clearly.  The meaning of my words will be apparent when I have no more time to write them.  In the meanwhile, everything is a process; everything is becoming the end.

Sometimes I think it would be much, much better to simply live in community together.  To stop all these words on a page and just talk, listen, be present.  Sometimes I think that all these words are really the roadblocks that keep us from being human together in much the same way that all those words in the Bible stand between us and the experience of the living God.  But then, who am I, an author, a word worker, to suggest such a thing?  How else would you know what I think about now?  Maybe he’ll return and we can see each other face to face.

Topical Index:  words, community, experience, Revelation 22:20b