The Radio

Today I drove something like 30 miles throughout the day. In that time, what did I see? Pavement. Traffic lights. The other mechanical beasts barreling down the black headstone to our dead and buried earth. Towering steel beams, pouring out their artificial light. Cold, colorless structures where men kill their dreams and sell the pelts so they can feed their families (or their flesh.) I saw the creations of men, wonderful and terrible, who are running from their soul.

When I take a rare moment to actually take in what’s around me, I begin to notice things. I notice the amazing contour of the clouds. I notice the beauty, and sometimes terror, of the sky. Sometimes it is a penetrating blue, sometimes it is a vast gray, but it is always a sight to behold. I notice the many nuances of the different trees and shrubs and grass and flowers. What seems just a sea of monotonous green at a quick glance, if studied just a moment longer, reveals such vibrant variety. No wonder artists spend their lives trying to reproduce landscapes.

There is something beautiful and refreshing about the world around us. We know that taking time away in a natural setting can work wonders to reduce stress in our lives. But what have we done? We have given ourselves over to a life where nature is unnecessary. We know that there is something refreshing in nature, but nature doesn’t pay the bills. So we have paved over the earth to commute faster to work. We have replaced the wonder of the oak tree with the efficiency of the sky scraper. We have traded the majesty of a starry night with the dull hum of street lamps. “Stop and smell the flowers?” We don’t even look at flowers! Practicality trumps prudence.

When we allow ourselves to become still, we know something is missing. We know there’s more to life than what we’re experiencing. But instead of acknowledging it, we develop an allergy to stillness. Better to be productive than to deal with the aching in my soul.

It seems that humanity will never graduate from her insistence on avoiding the divine. When we ate the fruit, we began hiding. We have never stopped. At first we sullied the beauty of our naked bodies with stitched leaves and fur. Now we sully the earth with our concoctions of mortar and lumber and concrete. If we can’t avoid the divine altogether, at the very least we can save ourselves from the divinity the earth reflects.

God has revealed so much to us through nature, not just about Him, but also about us. We see His amazing attention to detail and order reflected in the feather of a pigeon. We are stunned by our own fragility when we are faced with a dark, starless night. As winter passes to spring we see the illustration of the seasons of life. And just as the sun is present through those seasons, we see that God is always present in our seasons, whether seasons of death and decay or seasons of new, resounding life.

But what have we done? We have created a world devoid of pigeon feathers. We have created a world unaffected by starless nights. We have manipulated our surroundings so that the seasons don’t touch us and the sun is a menace for all its troubling heat! Give me my office or my bedroom! Give me my lamp and my air conditioning! To hell with nature! Who has time for that?

To hell indeed.

Modernity isn’t bad. Technology is wondrous. Medicine is a short step from miraculous! But why are we so subconsciously drawn to the beauty and majesty of the world around us, but simultaneously content with observing it from afar, or better yet, not being bothered with it at all?

I believe we sense the divine. When we look at a mountain range or the starlit night sky or a beehive or an autumn leaf, we recognize the divine. We know the divine is present, and our souls cry out! But if the divine is there, what does that mean? What about the rest of this? What about the life I’ve been building for myself? And even if I could somehow figure all that out, look at the beauty of the world before me! How could I ever measure up? Me?!

So, as we’ve always done, we hide. My soul cries out, so I turn up the radio.