It’s a very strange thing to really try to fully comprehend almost any aspect of life. To deeply concentrate (or meditate perhaps) on science is bizarre. Think about the atoms that make up everything. How does that even make sense? We’re on a rock hurling through space amongst unknown trillions of other rocks and we brush it off like it’s no big deal. That’s remarkable! Everything is complex beyond the comprehension of even the greatest scientific minds, and it will continue to be so. 

          The opening line of this song “Hey my morning, you rising sun, God is out of town when I call, too,” refers to a struggle that I think many people, myself included, have with practicing religion. It is sometimes difficult to go through the motions of a prayer, a mass, a service, without feeling this incredible distance between me, a minuscule speck in the grand scheme of things,  and the Being that is ostensibly the Creator of the vastness that we all inhabit. Some people might think that it actually helps to dissipate this feeling of great distance when we engage in these sorts of physical acts that involve physical representations of what God might be. I don’t find that it works that way for me. Maybe that means I am not doing it properly. I instead find myself struck by the feeling of being a low-priority caller to a room in which the phone rings and rings… 

          So too does the rest of the song delve into another form of distance, this time between two people. The reason that people are so interesting is because they are so complex, and at the same time, the reason it is sometimes difficult to be around people is because they are so complex. It is impossible to pin a person down in great detail (including ourselves) because the heart and mind of everyone seems to be as deep, vast, and incalculable as the universe itself. “You forget the perfect picture of me and the idea of you…” Sometimes, a person seems to be as far away and mysterious as God himself, no matter your degree of love. Perhaps, in an attempt to simplify someone and shrink the distance between us, we create watered-down versions of them in our heads. Sometimes we think much higher of them than we should, sometimes lower. Particularly with the former, it is easy to fall into a state of mental idealism in which we fit perfectly with a version of this person that we have created because we were so desperate to shrink that distance. Maybe, it is okay to be okay with that complexity occasionally, and not worry too much about the distance. With God, with a lover, with the world. Maybe that mystery can even be a positive thing. Instead of working so hard to figure it all out, perhaps it is sometimes best to be a bit awestruck; to be left with a little bit of wonder.

 

Love,

NM

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