Men split to find things they need. And to find hidden things. They split to access the soft, sweet pulps that hide within rigid husks. And they split to see impenetrable fortresses crack, yeild. They split to begin two new things, or to end one thing permanently, for purposes or for sheer sensations.

Men treasure and hoard what they find inside things. A crop of crystals. Sweet milk. Blood. Gold. Some of the inner things have inherent value, while others derive their value simply from having been inaccessible. Men are driven by a curious and violent lust, one that craves both resistance and access.

Men have split atoms, the least vulnerable citadels to date, and terrible powers burst forth. Our curiosity and conquest came to an aweful crescendo.

Every time something has been split, it disappears. The deer is gone and only venison and fur remain. Only cords of wood lay near the missing tree. The life of a thing, it’s identifiable essence, suddenly vanishes.

We are individual. Which means we cannot be divided. Split a man in two, and he disappears. Try to crack him open and sip on his soul, and you’ll find a vacant sack of tissue. Attempt a pyschological dismantling, and you’ll gain access to strange and meaningless artifacts, while the self has slipped out the back door, retreated to an inaccessible safe haven.

Splitting is the business of the educated class today. Our chief concern is the cracking open of the apparently whole. We want to see the puppeteer, the operator. The quest for understanding has led inside further fortresses, including ourselves. But every unveiling, every penetration requires a forceful, violent split in the fabric of something whole. As soon as we break that thing, we enter into a state of morbid curiosity. The living whole, the object of desire, flees the scene, and we are left with the post-mortem components, fascinating in a dead way. And that is the state of most academic discourse. Post-mortem fascination. A rigorous and insightful picking at bones.

Life, essence, identity: these continue to dart off to the perifery, hiding, breathing and watching from their verdant burrows. Where are these pockets of vitality, and how can we find them without scaring off their trembling inhabitants?

Look at that shepherd, exerting such undo energy, abandoning the majority of his livelihood for a fraction. What is that?

It is an impulse for completion. He doesn’t cut his losses or choose the lesser of two evils. In the shepherd’s mind, he is the shepherd of a hundred, and certainly not ninety-nine. One sheep is the difference between whole and unwhole, the perfect standard and the rough approximation. One hundred is heavenly peace, and ninety-nine is a hellish, aching discord.

The shepherd’s search is also love. It is love for a certain sheep, for an individual. It is a love strong enough to count meticulously, to run cold at the disappearance of one, to scower the fields. It is a love that overrides the practical notion of simply moving on because more sheep will be born in due time. It is a love that sees beyond the species “sheep” and sees instead many different “ones,” irreducable and irreproducable ones. The shepherds heart does not take comfort in the vast sea of wool that patters as one across the pasture; instead, he lives for the moment when he says “one hundred,” because that means every indispensable creature is safe and near.

This is an age of lost sheep. Sheep lost in droves, stuck in billions of lonely crags. It seems there’s one counted for every ninety-nine lost. Lonely and disparate bleating echoes across the chilly heath. What of this accumulation of the lost? What of these innumerable losses, each devastatingly precious?

The multiplication of humanity has multiplied the lost. Lost beget lost, and loss multiplies in the heart and mind with every new generation. But Christ also multiplies Himself, through the generations of the church. The shepherd lives in His disciples, lives and grows in reach.

The church cannot operate on the basis of cutting losses, of the lesser of two evils. The church cannot conduct itself like a corporation, sending out general advertisement, hoping to reach a large majority. It cannot live for the impression of fullness. The church cannot do its work predicated on human assumptions, because our assumptions are always short of glory, short of one hundred. In an age of massive states and schools that fail to account for great numbers of their charges, in an age of passing the buck to a government agency, in an age of lost sheep leading lost sheep and wolves devouring, the shepherds of the church must seek after the ones. And it must be selfess, because it will go unrewarded in this life. It will make you un-famous, inefficient, and exhausted. You will be hated by some, because you insist that every last person should be a Christian, instead of those already predisposed to traditional Western values. The church is truly the church when every last shepherd is in pursuit of every lost one. The true church is a scowering shepherd on every craggy hill.

I write this as a hypocrite, freshly incited.

We hold beliefs, which means we put in an effort to bear the weight of them. Beliefs, unlike instincts or underlying assumptions, must be held with some measure of will. They burden us, because they feel unnatural, they are against our nature, and thus need to be laboriously lugged along.

Christianity is this weight to me. The glory of an unseen God, the gaping of an unseen hell, the living of an unseen code, and the unseen victory of a crucified man (OK… just not seen by me). I carry these massive spiritual weights in a world light with materialism, naturalism, and relativism. They burden my speech with caution, as I strain to speak communicable truth, words that honor man’s mind and God’s heart. They burden my thoughts, which range from spiritual meditations to carnal fixations to philosophical musings. They burden my art and actions, both undergoing a constant identity crisis (are we serving the hopeless, mortal ego, or the erternal, all-encompassing God?)

So sometimes, I stop believing. I unload the weight of the terrible unseen, and embrace the all-encompassing grime.

Beneath unbelief, there is belief.

When I lighten my load, when I relieve myself of belief, the lightness is not relieving. Certainly, the ache of maintaining idealogy is temporarily soothed, but it is replaced by a feeling of foolishness, as if I’ve oversimplified the whole scheme of things. I look in the mirror and at trees, at my baby and at writing and politics, and I give my insensitive little brain a good smack. You are an idiot, I say to myself, for seeing grime only. God and hell and Christ rise from beneath the foundation of things, not unnaturally, but pre-naturally, meta-naturally. The weight of atheism becomes unbearable in light of all that is seen and felt, all the complications and beauties that arise from within and beyond.

Yes, you have a team of crack lawyers; brilliant and committed advocates, people convinced of the worth of your life. They present the jury, you, with a series of arguments that draw up an admirable, if not shining, picture of you, the defendant. The mother who knows you’re smart. The friend who could easily imagine you in the Major Leagues. The pastor who is immovable in his belief of your compassion. These lawyers plead and contend, reason and persuade, urging you to look and see what they see so clearly.

And then the prosecution. Every bit as decisive and determined, full of great faculties of reason, coupled with deep-seated passion. A passion to see the “sad truth,” that you are an unfortunate assemblage of matter, destined for anti-self-discovery, and full of tragic and insoluble inconsistencies. The devastation of their arguments lie in the absence of dramatics and hysterics. Their analysis is calm, resolute, tempered, and marked by a surprising empathy for the defendant they condemn. “No,” they say, “condemnation is too strong a word. We’re simply after the affirmation of plain truth.” The father who suggests a more reasonable plan of study. The husband who equates your anxieties solely to maladjustment and chemical imbalance. The sister who hugs you and smiles and talks like she’s mentally replacing you with someone more interesting.

There are witnesses. Tangential people who’ve witnessed you. To them, you were a great employee, a real bastard in the check-out line, a timely rent-check-payer, kind-of-cute-but-not-my-type, stupid, a genius, a committed-father-and-loving-husband, a classic mean-girl, a classic case of ADD, a class-act, an obnoxious ego-maniac… these fragmented visions lie before you like a shattered something. It is up to the defense to piece them together in an ultimately encouraging fashion. It’s up to the prosecution to show how incompatible and incomprehensible they really are.

And now you are twenty, or twenty-eight, or forty, or sixty-two, and you have finally tired of this incessant case, more drawn out, costly, and melodramatic than the O.J. trial. You’re disillusioned with pretty much every participant, because you’ve noticed that if you simply look from another angle, they are defending themselves against themselves, and are, in a sense, using your trial to assess their own lives.

After a while, you are able to ignore everyone, and look at yourself, there, next to your lawyers, and there, in the jury-box. Just as the air clears, just as the illusion of everyone else’s expertise has cleared away like a dissolving fog, you are faced with the disorienting notion of looking at yourself, as if possessing two distinct selves. You find it difficult to make any determination. Is the real self the seeing self, or the seen self? Are you an established creature, or a constant creator of self? Your last attempt at objectivity has been severely thwarted. And you should note how unbearably and vacuously egocentric this moment of self-reflection is.

So the court collapses, each component showing itself to be something other than what it appeared to be. The premise was flawed, the whole exercise an elaborate hoax.

Even God, who is characterized as one who judges, cannot be the kind we imagine. With all of his insight, intimate involvement in our every molecule, He must not resort to the sort of proceedings that involve disparate external evidences. I can’t imagine Him straining over a hair follicle or a receipt to determine the verdict.

He wants to recognize us.

He made us in a glorious, admirable fashion. He set us to glorious, admirable work. And on that day of judgement he wants to recognize the creatures that he crafted. And if we fall short, if He says “depart from me, I never knew you,” it might have had something to do with all that staring at ourselves, all that egocentricity. Because “to be” is in direct opposition with “to stare at oneself.” The one who endlessly considers his own nature depletes his own nature. You cannot know yourself very well, which can put you in a place of existential paralysis, or in a place of extreme dependence.

Case in point, I don’t believe the end of time will play out like A Few Good Men. All of us, naked in the presence of God, will lose our worldly bearings on legal loopholes, impressive speeches, and briefcases of evidence. There will be no uniformed guards, and to be told “You are free to go” may as well be a condemnation. God as “judge” or “father” or “Lord” or “helper” will be exchanged for God as God. The most substantial question will be raised, and the answer will ring out in the fabric of your being as a resounding yes or no. The least trial-like trial will culminate in the weightiest verdict, and every inch of you will agree with it.

I strolled my baby boy through the park this morning. We stopped at a bench so I could eat some sweet, sticky bread and coffee. The sun shone sideways, spotlighting bands of grass and gravel. It was brisk in a good New England way; fall up here is almost like another spring, in which the deadness of heat gives way to an awakening chill.

In this spirit, a milky gold larva writhed in a band of sunlight next to my bench. I noticed how it stopped crawling on its six crowded legs, turned over, and strained into an arc. In the warmth of the sun, it was either gripped by death or transformation. I watched, hoping to see a slimy something split through the thin coat, that alien moment in insect life which defies our understanding of identity and mortality. But my baby boy was starting to grunt and writhe, snapping me out of my abstract meditations.

Rather than leaving the larva a delicate mystery, which would have made for a pleasing end to this entry, I scooped the thing up with one of those maple tree seed helicopters. I dropped the startled creature, along with a few bits of gravel, into a plastic cupholder on the handle of the stroller. Wondering if I had upset the balance of nature, I strode on, keeping an eye on the specimen. Due to lack of sunlight or the shock of the transfer, the larva curled up fully, locked its legs around its tail, and froze indefinetely. Poking it with a stick did nothing.

I scooped it back out into another patch of gravel in hopes that it would stop playing dead. But it maintained a posture of death, and I left before I could be completely sure that I killed it.

I’m honestly not too worried. This little bug was only a representative of millions, I’m sure. And if it didn’t live, it fed a worthy bird. Though I fumbled and mishandled this mystery, I was unable to ruin the poetry of it. It reminded me that even when I lack grace and connection with life, even when I squander the opportunities for transcendence around me, wonders never cease. No matter how plastic and disconnected we become, the overwhelming majority of the universe continues its noble, strange magic. I worship God today for His unblemished standard.

Right now, in all honesty, I’m thankful for the predictions of Pastor Camping. He managed to rouse my spirit in these last few hours. He managed to weaken my knees, a literal effect of anxiety. He loosened my blood in the veins. He brought me to the end of the age in theory, and it helped me take my life more seriously, more urgently. I felt the fuller presence of Jesus just beyond the gray clouds of mortality. I knelt and prayed in my unborn baby’s nursery, and fought for my better impulses to win out. I experienced a fresh hatred of inactivity and fruitless worry.

If we’re not reminded of the certainty of God’s great intervention, both personal and universal, our aging won’t result in any improvement. Aging alone never makes a man better. It makes him more self-assured, steeped in the myth of personal superiority. As we add on years, we display them like trophies of survival. Though we say we learn our mortality through the funerals and disasters that befall others, I’ve seen too many people step out of the funeral parlor unchanged. There is no collective difference in the quality of American lives since 9/11. You have to feel yourself dying. You have to see hell open up, real hell. You have to feel the real rumbling of God’s approach. These things cannot take affect vicariously.

At 5:55, I felt that there were certain things in me fit for hell, fit for burning. And I hungered for life. Now, at 7:06, I’m sincerely thankful that I have more moments to draw closer to life before I’m held finally accountable.

This truth came to me again tonight as I drove through cool wet wind. I opened the driver-side window to a view of the black nighttime atlantic, lapping up against our old shores. My fingers clicked and turned the radio controls until a symphony of strings emerged. The music was perfectly wet and moonlit, the harmonies tied so thickly, the tone bordering on brutality and filled with romance.

Then I began to adjust the dials of my desire’s inner eye. What want would pair well with this night and song, like pairing a wine with a dish? I tuned through dark haunted houses in the rain, through midnight vespers in candle-lit churches, through the strange corridors of youth, through loneliness and hidden visitors, through a prophetess in a dark room, and each channel called upon the cool moisture of this spring night. My blood felt cool and dark, and writhed with joy.

I now adjusted the dial of my mind more acutely on one beautiful strain. I envisioned the prophetess ordering my death from her wise and lovely face. Her intent on my destruction was so focused, so severely personal, and it felt like a miracle. There wasn’t an ounce of regret or compassion weakening her full resolve to crush me, to rid her beautiful night of me. I was vermin in my own dream, and I wanted to be chosen for death.

O God of goodness far fiercer and more excellent than my meager sum, crush me and my gross determination to simply breathe. I long so heavily for the full extent of your manifestations of grace that I’m eager to see anything hindering it to be dismantled, including the self that I’ve established. My own soul betrays me for a deeper and more ancient love.