PART 5: Clumsily Destructive Mud-People with Hearts of Gold

HOW IT ENDS

While regaling you with horrific tales of strange weather patterns, military coups, a likable and sinister world leader, and any other number of signs-of-the-times, I could lay out an apocolyptic grand finale that even the Great Volumes of Tim Lahaye and Jerry Jenkins couldn't dream up (I could also, like Tim-n-Jerry, make a version for kids!). I will spare you the comets, meteorites, bar code tatoos, raising of armies, selecting of Anti-Christs and all of that. It is all very confusing and fear-infusing anyway, and I think that sometimes we blame "the end times" instead of taking responsibility and trying to make things better now (like the environment, and world peace, which I think are good things).

Any conjecture as to how all this living here on earth will finish, is mostly guesswork as far as I can tell. I've read Revelation and can't seem to make too much of it. But maybe I watch too much TV too, so, who knows.

I'm going to use my Brief History of Humanity and the Clumsily Destructive Mud-People with Hearts of Gold narrative to try and sum up my own eschatology. So this is not a pure statement of facts-- like the stuff I wrote before undoubtedly was-- it is a lot of guess work, like Ms. Cleo without the fake accent and jail time.

So here we are; clumsily destructive mud-people with hearts of gold who have learned how to be both extremely loving and extremely suicidal and bent on turning ourselves and each other into plain-old-mud. We've become so apt at using our fleshy mud-lump brains that we have hundreds of creative tools for turning any and every living thing into mud, and could do so with the push of a button (granted, we've been a lot more responsible with the button pushing procedures... there are codes, there are codes). Some of us have swayed more to trying to love and laugh in the way that God told us when he had the heart-to-heart with us. Others of us have become argumentative and destructive mostly. We used Choice as our means to become either way.

Ed. Note: I have conveniently cut out any further explanation of who is in and who is out, and who might-be-in and who might-be-out, and the grey areas and complications that we chose to bring down upon ourselves way back when, while we were dumb and ignorant and fresh from the mud, coughing up the Breath of the Cosmos. Sorry, if you want to know what I really think about all of that and salvation and everything I'll try to sum it up by drawing you a diagram of an invisible castle. Exactly.

Ever since our heart-to-heart with God-as-human, Jesus; God's been working on trying to fix everything from his end of the deal, without messing up the whole "Choice" thing for us and our tiny mud-brains. If he actually just fixed it right away, and made everything okay again, I think our tiny, three pound mud brains would explode... but that's only a scientific explanation and conjecture. Instead, God has let us sit with his heart-to-heart for a while, and think about what we've done... and will do instead.

And then one day... Rescue. I wonder if it will be cataclysmic or beautiful. I wonder if it will unfold like a sunrise, explode like a firecracker, or happen as simply as closing our eyes one second, and opening them in eternity... whatever that means. If there are literal "streets of gold" and "mansions," I don't think we will notice them. We will be free of our ill-infected 3-pound mud-brains and will be able to operate on something that can see God, hear our story clearly, hear the Truth about everything, and experience something beyond the shadows we've known, without anything exploding or turning back into plain-old-mud again. Then we'll all have a good cry before getting about the real business of loving and laughing and living. Those shadow versions of life, laughter, and love that we knew when we were the Clumsily Destructive Mud-People with Hearts of Gold, will be real, solid things now. We won't have to come up with witty things to call ourselves like Matt, or Chet, or Jane, or American, or black, or white, or humans, or Clumsily Destructive Mud-People with Hearts of Gold. God will tell us our real names in the language of Deep Heaven. A language without the limitations of words, and a language which spoke out of nothingness and made humans out of mud and mud out of nothing. We will know the real word for "love" and we will laugh at how wrong we were. We will laugh at our questions and conundrums. We will laugh, and laugh, and sigh and "love".

And then, at the climax of How It Ends, after we've been given our right names, God will tell us his real name... not Yahweh, Jah, God, or any of those mud-people guesses. He will say a wordless word that will mean "I AM" somehow. I think he will say his name is "Ian." We were so stinking close down here!

And we will laugh and laugh and love and live.

PART 4: Clumsily Destructive Mud-People with Hearts of Gold

AN ANALYSIS OF OUR CURRENT STATE OF AFFAIRS AS MUD-PEOPLE

So that brings us, more or less, to today. As best as I can tell, the most accurate way in which to describe the state of humanity, given our history and our present conditions is the title to this little History of Humanity as laid out in this blog. I say that we are clumsily destructive mud-people with hearts of gold.

Here's why:

Clumsily, because we sort of do most things by accident. Some of our best good things were accidents: like penicillin. Also, some of our things that ended up being bad things were accidents, like the atomic bomb and AIDS.

Destructive, because we are in the incredible habit of destroying everything around us, including ourselves and each other (either turning each other back into plain-old-mud, or making each other feel like plain-old-mud which is just as bad sometimes). Open a history book for examples of the turning into plain-old-mud, and take a long look at poverty for examples of the making people feel like plain-old-mud.

Mud-People, because as I have stated earlier, we are animated mud according to our narrative of our own creation. Also, because my friend and roomate, Paul Sileo, uses this phrase to describe people he thinks are of lower moral and social understanding, who shop at Wal-Mart and seem to procreate with branches of their family tree. Sileo also uses an adjective form of the same idea, describing things as decidedly "mudly".

with Hearts of Gold, because in all of this mess, we do some really great things too. Overall, I think most of us mean really well at some point or another. We all want to be loved, and most of us try to do good things at least once in a while. Most people are not murderers, at least not directly or itentionally. We all mean so well, I think. This is the part of us that loves and laughs just enough.

As my primary evidence, and in order to support my claims I will now list some things that prove my point:
Mother Theresa, Hiroshima, a good joke, genocide, adoption, eating disorders, the wheel, global warming, holding hands, racism, happy families, hungry babies, etc. et. all. cont...

To be continued... (yes, yes... once more... sorry).

PART 3: Clumsily Destructive Mud-People with Hearts of Gold

HUMANS STILL DON'T GET IT and GOD ATTEMPTS A HEART-to-HEART

Using our fleshy, three pound mud-lumps a few feet above our asses, we started getting really good at being humans. We celebrated this by creating better places to live life and trying to seperate ourselves more and more from our plain-old-muddy surroundings. The Greek Mud-People and the Roman Mud-People were especially good at this, and very good at using their lumps and thinking up a lot of ways to keep Mud-People going, and a lot of really creative ways of turning Mud-People back into plain-old-mud. The better they get at loving and laughing, the better they get at arguing and turning each other into plain-old-mud.

At this point, God could see that the Mud-People were becoming too schizophrenic and were making everything meaningless by going all crazy-go-nuts with trying to make cool new ways to "love", "laugh", "argue", and "turn-each-other-into-plain-old-mud." At some point creativity stops being creative and beautiful and starts being insanity, with a death wish (i.e. for more on this, Google "famous artist suicides").

God is frustrated with humans again and decides to try something besides the flood thing he did last time with Mud-Noah, the naked drunk guy. God decides he better get muddy and try to tell us what it's all about, face-to-face. He chose Roman-Occupied, overcrowded Bethlehem to stage his entrance into the mud. Let me tell you, the stuff in that stable didn't smell like mud...

Ed. Note: Things can get confusing and complicated here, trying to figure out how God became human and stayed God and all of that. The best thing our fleshy, three pound mud-brains have figured is something where we claim that God is actually three things, but not three seperate things... just one thing. Hm. We call it Trinity, because that is more managable than saying the whole thing and trying to explain it every time. Plus it's a great name for a church.

God-as-human, named Jesus, tried to have a heart to heart with us. He talked plainly about why love was best, and how to love in a non-crazy-go-nuts-homicidal kind of way. He said stuff about not trying to turn people into plain-old-mud over stupid arguments, and to try to help each other deal with our humanity better. He even used mud to fix us some. And to make some Mud-People better.

The long and short of it is that his ideas were not very comfortable and we murdered him. We used a particularly creative device to try to turn him back into plain-old-mud.

So it goes. He didn't play by our rules and wouldn't stay plain-old-mud. We started trying to do what he said. We got better at loving and laughing, and continued to get better at arguing and turning each other back into plain-old-mud.

To be continued...

PART 2: Clumsily Destructive Mud-People with Hearts of Gold

HUMANNESS

So it goes, things became overly-complicated and fractured. Choice and Complication went straight to our heads (that bump a few feet above our asses), also originally made from mud, and containing the fleshy, 3 pound ball of meat we call our brains. We Mud-People really like these brains and are fairly proud to have them. The brains control all of our other mud-parts (maybe with the exception of our secret, no-no mud-parts) , and the brain also thinks up a whole bunch of questions and conundrums to keep us thoroughly confused and argumentative.

Starting with the second generation of Mud-People, our primary business became arguing and trying turn each other back into plain-old-mud instead of Mud-People. We didn't completely give up on some of the "good" things, and we tried to love and laugh some as best as we could.

Ed. Note: The Mud-Sumarians, conspiring with the Mud-Egyptians and possibly Mud-Norsemen, used regular earth-stuff to create beer. This helped with the loving and laughing some.

As generations progressed, we got better at laughing and loving, as well as arguing and turning each other back into plain-old-mud. God got frustrated with us and decided to give us a second chance and start from scratch. He picked a particularly love and laughter prone Mud Man named Noah as the clean slate (apparently, Noah was love and laughter prone due at least partially to his consumption of the "fermentation" as previously noted). Shortly after the flooding of the Earth and the survival of Noah and his peeps, Noah flubbed up and over-did the fermentation thing... he was laughing far too much and as his first act as a part of the clean-slate regime he ran around naked, celebrating his no-no mud-parts in front of his friends and family. Great start, great start.

So it goes, we got a little better at loving and laughing and a little better at turning each other back into plain-old-mud (the ongoing discovery of new metals was extremely helpful in the latter process). God picked out some special mud-people as his special, focused project and tried to get them to understand "what it was all about." They got it sometimes and didn't others. They really didn't get the part with slavery and the desert, but they eventually came around when that was all over.

To be continued...

Clumsily Destructive Mud-People with Hearts of Gold -or- The 1st Unmanned Attempt to Explain Humanity

All the audicity and rake-hellishness in the world could not have dreamed this post up. Somewhere in my faulty reasoning I allowed myself to write this blog by believing that if Stephen Hawking could write "A Brief History of Time," then I should be allowed to write a blogged understanding of humanity. I'm a natural competetor, and I'm no stranger to losing, so this wasn't that unreasonable of a jump to make in the world inside my head (or the small native village inside my head, which is probably a more accurate metaphor fo my inner-thoughts).

THE OVERTURE to HUMANNESS

In the beginning (as these type of narratives go), God created all this stuff. Somewhere in these days before days, God created the good-ol folks of planet Earth. Humans, we're called. Apparently, he made humans in his image, except out of dirt. (Our narrative tells us that God used dirt as a creative staple other instances, namely, mixed with spittle in order to make a blind man see... really, ask Harris Bechtol.) So, he made humans, who might be more accuratley called People of the Mud, or Mud-People for short.

Here's the kicker:

Mud-People were just interesting stacks of mud until God breathed some type of "breath of the cosmos" or something into the mud caverns inside our mud chests, called the Lungs. I believe that at this point, we humans had quite a coughing fit as our first act of humanity. We were trying to expel all of the loose dirt from our now-living mud-lungs. (And later, we'd invent cough syrup, quite by accident from stuff that we usually used to "get liquored up").

On top of the Breath of the Cosmos, God cooked up something real interesting in order to "keep things real" with humanity. He gave us choice. Not a choice, or the choice, but Choice.

Ed. Note: Predestination can go take a flying leap off of the edge of the Grand Canyon, and do us all a favor.

This "choice" thing was a lot of responsibility for people only newly made from mud, and we didn't handle it very well. Curiosity killed the cat, and it sure as hell didn't do too much for the rest of us. By and by, the snake started making a lot of sense and we decided we'd like a straight answer on what this is all REALLY about. Fruit came from the mud, we came from the mud; the obvious kinship made it easy on our stomachs. The fruit was overly-sweet and we became aparty to this mess that is good and evil and right and wrong and whose-version-of-right and whose-version-of-wrong, and other basic, frustrating complications of living and living well.

End Part 1. To be continued... (this blog will be wisely posted in managable chunks in order to maintain readership... a readership, I might add, who are complete slaves to time... thanks for fracturing my train of thought for YOU.)