The Battle in Our Bones -or- Please God, Give Us Another Chance and Make Things Like They Were At The Beginning Again, Like It Was For Adam and Eve

If you watched TV yesterday, you saw images of towers falling, dust clouds, weary people, and warfare. You were bathed in these images, for better or for worse.

One look at these images and we see the amazing tension of being human. In those images, and in the minutia of our days we are confronted with a complexity that we have yet to be able to fully explain, despite our best efforts, and our more entertaining efforts (thanks Freud! You make learning fun!).

Somewhere in this mass of bones and flesh is the capacity to do something heroic. For me, there is no more powerful image from September 11th than the heroism that sent regular people made of flesh and bone into falling buildings made of rock and metal. All of this for strangers; other piles of flesh and bone. These are some of the most powerful images in human history. “No greater love has a man than this; that he would lay down his life for his friends.”

Somewhere inside of us, we resonate with the deepest capacity of love. There is some primordial thing that builds up inside of our chests and stomachs that tells us to love at all costs. Love selflessly and foolishly. Love so much that you would run into falling rocks and metal. Love so much that you cease to exist in flesh and bone. And when those ideas and those words cause us to hold our breath and close our eyes, we feel something. We can reach back through our blood to the first man and first woman, and know that something in that blood was around when all was right in the world. When love was the only law. There is some strand of DNA, some cell structure, some splice of some gene in our bodies that knows that all of this is so close to being right.

We want so badly that real, first Love. Not the shadows of love, but the Love that was our first law. We die for the idea of that love. We die for each other.

But we are sick. Our bones ache. Our bodies fail. Tired limbs longing for rest.

Things are not how they were then, in the beginning. Our own bodies, bones and flesh, betray us. We are a world full of decay and disease. We can never be settled, and we can never breathe easy.

Complications come in waves. How can we love selflessly and freely when our own bodies will not be well? Or when we must dig and sweat and work in order to fill our stomachs? Or when we must pay bills and fulfill obligations? Or when we are faced with the reality that our flesh and bones are fragile, and always threatened by the reality of death?

This is the tension we must live in. A tension between the way things should be still, and the way things are. We try to do our best. There is hope, if we choose to have hope. There is hope that it won’t always be so hard and one day the complications will fade away. There is hope that there is an eternity offered to us that invites us to love selflessly and complication-free always.

For now, all we have are moments. We must do our best with these moments, We must mimic our eternity as best we can. We must try to listen to that thing deep within us that makes us love selflessly, and try to ignore the pain in our bones, and all that isn’t right.


God, we are slaves to bones and flesh. Our bodies are fragile, sick, and weak. Death is always present, threatening and mocking us. Help us to listen to that part of us that is right and good, the part deep within us that tells us to love with all we’ve got. Remind us of our hope, and help us to live in it. Keep our bodies from sickness, and make us well again. And may we all be heroic and selfless with our love no matter how much it may cost us. Amen.