The Divine in Midtown

And all must love the human form,
In heathen, turk, or jew;...


I had to find a way to amplify my game, a way to take it to the next level, a way to actually get girls. So I took one out of the old hippy progressive "how to get a girl handbook" and started memorizing poetry. Unfortunately like most of our generation and our side of the Prime Meridian, I was and am a bit lazy. So what started as a serious endeavor to become a poet reciting laureate, became "Well, I memorized two poems, surely I'll only need two to get her to do things with me."

And the excerpt from above is from one of the, now three poems, I have memorized. I was proud of my accomplishment. I remember sitting at home, yes my mother's home, in the living room, looking at the pretty pictures and from them taking in the lyrical qualities of the verse. It was like I was back in third grade, where my ego was totally based on my educational acumen (yes, I was that literal nerd), and I just memorized shit to be a badass. I was committed to actually having this thing down to memory with no purpose other than being hopeful and wishful. And I did it. I don't remember how long it took me, but I had the thing down. Now all I had to do was, well, talk to girls.

Last night I went to a reading/lecture/glorifying-a-dead-guy thing at the Mid-Manhattan library. I was excited about this event for most of the week, and even when I got home from work yesterday I was still pretty excited. But then I decided, "I'll take a nap and be amazingly refreshed and superbly attentive for this reading" and like most nice ideas it sounded really nice. But then I actually napped and then woke up. And when I say woke up, woke up groggily an pissed-off-edly. I was committed to sleep in that fifty minute span and I had wanted, had my alarm and my pre-made-choice not gone off, to stay in that warm bed in my warm apartment outside of the cold of the outside city.

But I fought of the groggyness and made it out. And I got to the library in Midtown, which I must say I enjoyed being there for I hadn't been there in what seems like a lifetime, and as I found the conference room on the sixth floor I was giddily surprised with the crowd I saw. I don't know why I expected what I expected, but considering the subject matter of the person being discussed and considering the environment it was taking place in, mainly New York, I expected there, and annoyingly so expected there to be small crowd of young liberal hip kids like myself. However, when I walked in the room, I was excited to see that there was not a damn seat available to anyone. Not only were there no seats available, but even as the staff scrounged to find any chair possible (office chairs, lounge chairs, patio furniture?) still there were not enough seats. So I sat on the floor of this somewhat large conference room and to where behind me sat crowd of a few hundred, mostly old mixed race and mixed heritage and definitely mixed epistemelogical people.

And the subject matter at hand was Bonhoeffer. A new biography has recently come out which was composed by Eric Metaxas, and on hand was Metaxas to unscrupulously offer up a quick verbal bio of Bonhoeffer and what he himself had encountered, or actually, how he was affected by his work on studying and recreating the narrative of Bonhoeffer's short but heroic life. Now I am a Bonhoeffer rookie, easy. I don't know much more than the normal religious progressive. I've read a bit, watched a documentary, even struggled a bit through Discipleship, but nothing too extensive. So this was going to be a healthy reimmersion.

But again I think I came away more enjoying the experience rather than the objective information: sitting there with a few hundred people, where a majority may have lived in this world during the reign of the furer, where some of these men and women behind me felt the growing tensions of the world of the early twentieth century, where some may have lost friends and family during this horrendous time. I was there with them, as we listened and discussed who Bonhoeffer was and what he meant. And it was interesting, because Metaxas is a very interesting biographer because even though he studied at Yale, he is by no means, and this comes from his self-judgement, an academic. And throughout his discussion, as he cracked sometimes witty and sometimes absolutely terrible jokes, you could see that this man who dedicated serious time and effort to recreating this somewhat unknown historical figures life, was only one or two steps higher than normal society folk like myself in the social hierarchy.

However, what Metaxas did that I found honorable, was when the conversation turned, as it so often did, to the truth behind Protestantism and the praxis of Christianity, he easily and deftly deferred that this conversation was about Bonhoeffer and about how that man approached life through his lens of belief. And even at times when I got annoyed at how Metaxas filtered in his own undercurrent of "truth" and "rightness" into the conversation, he would cap it off with how it really was credible in the line of sight when Bonhoeffer was the focal point.

I think Metaxas's goal was not to bring to light every possible aspect of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but rather stir some interest in six hundred so odd pages and a conversation that motivates people to really see that there lived in our current history real Christian heroes. It was so fantastic to be apart of this discussion where at the end there were people who questioned the validity of God and the divine, challenged Bonhoeffer's own scandalous attempt at assassinating Hitler even if it was heretical, and really learning together parts of the world's history in a setting that allowed for a very plural setting that may be the ultimate representation of what the church could possibly be and there and maybe just there, where God is dwelling too.


...Where Mercy, Love, & Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too.




Without Relent,
Peace
Remoy
Remoy Philip