Metanoia
The band formed only three months ago, and while their instruments were new to them, the songs were old to us. A five-piece from the city where we live, and on one of those perfect nights in Gloom City, I hoped the air would never change. I played with the circle of leather, pulling it up and down my finger reserved for a ring. Everyone I know thinks I’m insane, and maybe I am, but the idea of burning my soul down again makes me sick. With boxes checked in sincere contemplation, the discernment of vocation shows no sign of error. Still, a need for reconciliation exists, and in strict obedience, I make the examination of my conscience, turning over rocks from the last thirty days, taking note of the worms inside my brain and all my shortcomings.
The lavender and rhododendrons provide the band with their backdrop. The wide petals in light blue sit serene against the thin strands of purple. The people stand in the street, bobbing their heads and standing straight. The most typical Portlanders you can imagine pass by on bicycles, offering drive-by applause like bullets from machine guns. Some sip beers or kombuchas, their Birkenstock sandals strapped about their socked feet. Ratty overalls and unkempt hair are tied up to create an illusion of disregard while trying earnestly to portray the vernacular. I have plans to leave this place, and on a night like this I wrestle with the conclusion. Ultimately, it is what I want, to be with her, in the desert or in the jungle, in the Arctic or the Gobi, in the savanna or the swamp. Location matters not, and as surprised as that makes me, I’m thinking I’ve finally found a home. Four walls may protect us, but she’s the only earthly shelter to save my skin. Finding her again in daytime dreams, she paints the night with such color I fall asleep to the memory. Lightening my setting, she breaks clouds of dark blue. The subtle creep of her distant smile dispels the rain and negates the gloom.
I played over in my mind the morning when I killed wasps inside her kitchen while she swept off the night’s transgressions. I played over the memories that stab at me from a life previously lived halfway. Comparing and contrasting the time before new creation, transported from the gift of new wine to the sour grapes of when I was my own worst rival. Difference can’t begin to describe it: non-responsive, reactionary, adversarial in nature, hellbent on a form of destruction that is not unique but one known all too well. At a certain point, a man must cease to fight for a life so desperately desired, for a life that will never come. My will is evil in the face of what I need. The truth is I never knew what I needed. I had to be shown by an outside force stronger than I could imagine. The paradox of Matthew 16:25 is truer than the air I need to breathe, truer than the water I need to drink.
A flower grows from a seed I never planted. From the rich soil tilled by divinity, a flower blooms anew. Amidst the weeds, the flower cries out in metanoia. A change in the natural, a change witnessed, change unorchestrated and unintended, nothing short of pure grace. To turn away from the light is death, a death colder than any cold found on earth in any environment, as the freeze is unmeasured by degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit. Measured not by touch but rather by the degree of darkness void of it. Hell is not location. Hell is a place you enter at any time by the choice to turn away from Truth and supplant your will for His.
The cinders overgrown with moss become my front row seat, and the night proceeds. The realization I relay now sinks in deeper. The bond fortified by recall and recollection. I think of her beauty and how it does not rest in that which is sensory. Not in the appearance of her features, not in her smell or the sounds she makes, not in the feel of her hands or the taste of her lips, but in a sixth sense of secrecy only perceptible by that which is unlocked by contemplation and discernment. The only sense worth following, the presence of God that dwells in her. The path that lights in warm yellow, paved not in good intention but rather in truth. All of this to say that the permeation of doubt is quelled by witness and an effort to quiet my mind and pride, of any thought borne from the worms inside my brain.
