I called God "stinky."
Advent in general, and this Advent in particular, feels to me like time spent setting up in the fridge. I’ve stirred my ingredients up a bit this year, and I have imagined this process as similar to a caterpillar in a chrysalis. Something about that didn’t quite fit though. Metamorphosis involves a worm turning to goo, down to a genetic level. I’m not sure that I could turn to goo, even if I wanted to.
Figurative war is so compelling that it can be applied to a lot of things: debt, bureaucracy, crime, drugs. And everyone knows these are not real wars, right? We are not carpet bombing the national debt (although it might be argued that an excessive capability for carpet bombing is a significant cause of our indebtedness).
One does have to be willing to adopt at least a bit of a counter-cultural attitude to pursue a mystical experience because so much of culture — at least Eurocentric culture — is filled with false promises that the desire that pulls John of the Cross out of the house in the middle of the night can be satisfied by a technological advance.
The only thing notable, it seems, about the road he has taken is that he did, in fact, take it. 42 is old enough to realize that things often don’t work out “better” or “worse”; they just work out differently.