Bottle of Awesome

Nono, Ol' Duct Tape still rides; I've just been up to my elbows the last couple. Which is just as well since I really needed the time to collect my thoughts anyways. Jartstar wanted to know what I thought about the Resurrection; and, really, I'm fine with textual analysis but everything else I mostly keep under my hat for being bran' spankin' new in these parts. He mentioned the notion of 'cradle Christians' which comes with the converse implications of Linda's tasty quote from CS Lewis a while back: Waking up tomorrow to a world of immortal people. The undead.

Think about that beyond the fine craft Lewis makes out of the language. Fookin' undead people. Not "I'll see you Monday, Bob!" when you've got "I'll see you in hell, you bastard." rolling through your head. No, try this one:

"I'll see you forever."

Contingent on a great many things beyond and not beyond my control or yours? Dude, we're gonna be hanging on the couch jawing about Plato. Forever. You're so screwed.

But cradle Christians -- love that phrase -- I doubt have this as much in mind. It's never been something they picked up one day while browsing things at Borders. From their earliest memories they've known that this is simply how the world is. How it works. Nothing interesting about saying that since that's how we are with everything that runs around the inside of our skulls. Water's wet. Jesus rose from the grave. Sofa shadows on the wall for all time. Two and two is four.

No surprise then that some come off a bit crotchety about the whole deal then. Stalking around with bits of wood looking for folks that can't do addition. "2+2=3!? What's my name, Bitch!"

And bang, a bagger. Totally normal. And just perhaps, a bit jaded to the entire wonder and majesty in the whole deal. And just how stark raving bad-ass it is. Which is probably why everyone knows who the Jailhouse and Born-Again types are. The one won't let it rest for excuses and the other won't stop bubbling on so optimistically that you're fondly looking to tempt the insufferable prick off the track with rented women, Nigerian bank accounts, and anything else you can catch onto.

But it's a sober deal isn't it? All these sorts getting randy on their outlook for life shouldn't be treating it all like a new toy, should they?

Growing up we all had Christmas as a cultural... 'thing' here in America. It's just a deal we all do that's gone and got itself about as much religion as President's Day. We all just grew up with it as that one day. There's always that lurking notion that there's this really important stuff lurking under the surface. After all, there's this thing about Christ and some others going Gaia and dancing naked under the moon. Naked. In the snow. Oh! And burning large bits of lumber, can't forget that. It's very important when people are stalking around over addition.

And even though you know what's under that paper. Even though you know what day it's on. Even though you're just putting on the graces for a family event. You open it up, and it has blinking fucking lights! The whole wonder and amazement just pours into you and you're stuck in random bouncing elation that has people checking your personal effects for illicit substances. So yeh, it's totally like a new toy. For eternity.

But wait, that's wrong isn't it? The whole God package isn't sitting in some little box of butcher paper. It's about the day, man. Nope, that's all misplaced priorities. It's just a day. It's about the celebration, the wonder, and the gift. Did I just call Jesus a Jewformer with blinkin' freakin' lights? You bet your ass, I did. Follow the instructions right and he transforms into Salvation.

No sense in fooling
We're covered in dreams
Having too much fun flying to land
Floating waste high in tendrils of green
We're so small but we feel oh so grand

And this all has precisely what to do with the Resurrection?

Absolutely everything. Coming in from the outside it's one thing to 'get it,' and it's something entirely different to understand it at your core. The old hands glowering around with their cricket bats come at things the other way. The Resurrection occurred and that sets everything else in motion. It's just addition.

But then not even the supporting cast in the play took stock in their own prophecies or they'd have been standing over His grave with some mattocks and batons to settle the score properly. Here now, today, some prominent naysayers try to do the same on the nightly news as daily fare. That's all a bit of ignorance though. One cannot pull Christ out of his tomb sitting in front of the TV , on some given night in Hoboken, anymore than one can put Him back in the dirt the same way. For old hands it's a proof of it all. For the new hands the incident itself is ancient history. It was just a day. A ground-shattering one, but just a day.

And then the totally random occurs. Complete throw of the dice. Evolution if you want to be cheeky about. Just a freak event out of the clear, blue sky. To set the scene let's say you're...

Let's say someone you know, distantly at best, is whiling an afternoon off in the company of an Atheist, a Retro-Druid, and a closet Lutheran while Men Without Hats is playing on the stereo. This someone, most certainly not myself, is running around the Raccoon City Police Department in high dudgeon and reasonably well armed. This individual bolts through the door into a narrow hallway that leads to the staircase. The staircase leads to the closet below. And the closet below is where the typewriter ribbon will put our protagonist in a state of permanence -- until the memory card dies. There's just one catch for this anonymous, schmuck. Between him and the stairs is one of the shambling undead. Slowly he lifts his revolver up and lines up for a head shot. A shot taken numerous times on this very same hulk of pixels over a decade. And he freezes as I suddenly... he suddenly realizes that that things right there. That thing he's been slaying for ages?

That's the good guy. And he lowers his gun and walks forward.

"Come get me, Jesus!"

Yeh, delivered with all my... his characteristic tact. See? Evolution, it's totally like that.

The Lutheran liked it, but that wasn't the point at all. The Retro-Druid hit the bricks shortly after since the Atheist and I were going rounds on the Zombie theory of Christianity. And how queer is that really? When an Atheist takes the plate to defend the sanctified sobriety and required Victorian trusses of classical Christianity while I'm rapidly winding into drinking a bottle of awesome over Christ, the undead. I've cracked light on it before to be tiresome when I was still trying to balance on that fence. But no, it's correct.

Christ is a zombie. Trump and shout, lake of fire? Shit-tons of zombies. Your mortal shell going in the dirt and you going on? Fuckin' zombie. The horde crawling the earth to get into everyone's brains and gain converts? Mormons. George Romero got it. I was late to the party.

All those folks I know that skulk around with bits of wood... Well, they're likely sharpening up those 2 by 4's right now. But that's vampires, not zombies. And that's the Resurrection for people that start with the notion that you came from dirt and that going back to dirt is a pretty certain finale to things.

The Dude popped out of the grave!

How can that not be staggeringly cool? Yeh yeh, addition. Where's my lumber?

Screw the proof notion, that was for His contemporaries. The proof is all around us in this very day. We're drowning in it's majesty and quantity. (Heh, I say that like I always saw that. I have no shame.) Yet the wood-walkers are carrying on about dry days, the engineering necessary to roll boulders, and judicial consequences for inattentive Praetorians.

Nerds.

Thing is, CS Lewis is in good form as an understated Brit. He's right, and goes right past everything since we're not talking about 'a' Resurrection. So skip the History Channel and just try yourself out. Pull up a picture of Arlington Cemetery and start counting crosses. Now put faces to each, because you're going to be spending a lot of time with them on Monday.