Flash Fiction: Back in the Day
Back in the Day
It looks like a manual. Smeared with dirt and God knows what else, it is heavy, floppy in a paperback kind of way; a thing of at least a thousand pages. Roger flips through it noting charts, diagrams, photos and numbered pages. There is an implied order to it; subtlety; implied authority for simply existing as such. No one would write that much language if it wasn’t somehow connected to reality in some permanent way. Not on purpose anyway.
Just holding it implies a wisdom of something intricate now long past.
Roger remembers such books lining his office walls: most were outdated before they were printed. But to have them around implied a studious nature and that one was keeping up ..or perhaps at least one was possessed of exactly the right amount of humility for the money paid, was teachable and not afraid to be openly seen catching up from behind. “See! I’ve got books!”
The difference between the guru who wrote it and the newbie who read it was minimal; so minimal it was obsolete in less than a month. Any competitive advantage it had given its reader it had also given all the other readers. So they needed new books. New gurus.
Roger smiles. Everybody, even the handicapped, is a guru every now and then. God is fair that way as He hides Himself in the whole while men take the credit for cash.
Roger drops it slowly; it falls out of his hand and lands in approximately the same position on the sand from which he had picked it up.
It was on these occasions of re-encountering the small proofs that he had actually lived that life that the same thought came to him: just because other people had learned that same lesson didn’t mean it was worthless that he had to go through it himself and alone. The vanity was in trying to place it with regard to others; always thinking of the connection with others and not thinking at all about being alone with Jesus Christ, even though that was the stated ideal of old time.
To have an image of that ideal with Christ is one thing: it is communal and can be shared. They called it fellowship. But to arrive. No one could say what it was until they got there. Then they couldn’t say what it was to those coming behind; those coming were too full of delusions even a step away.
Roger watches the tide rush in and out, only a few feet from the book. Not everything has to be unique. It is the race to be unique that has destroyed the most. If some other guy has nailed it with a comment so awesome in its completeness to describe the totality of it all, so what? Even in the middle of all the gibberish, everything to understand, everything true has already been said over and over again. But he knows he has to live it out anyway. He has to keep trying to nail it and then give it to those a step away.
Isn’t it? Isn’t that It?
He has never understood unique until everything had been taken from him. Everybody knows being alone in a private wisdom a time or two. But he knew on that private beach for three grand a night and all the Jack he could drink at the tables, that most of that truth he ran into from behind and knew with a certainty the fathers had been there too ..is already obsolete because it can be bought. But Christ..
Kids watching him through the fence nod in wisdom as one of them says: See? Le dije: la gente rica ríe loco.
( Spanish via babel fish: See? I told you. Rich people laugh crazy. )
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It’s not finished but there it is for now..
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Isaiah 28:9-13 Whom shall he teach knowledge? and whom shall he make to understand the report? Them that are weaned from the milk, withdrawn from the breasts? For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, there a little. … For with stammering lips and a strange tongue will he speak to this people; to whom he said, This is the rest: cause the weary to rest; and this is the refreshing. But they would not hear. And the word of Jehovah was unto them precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little: that they might go, and fall backward, and be broken, and snared, and taken.
In the Name of Jesus Christ, Amen
Am I now come up without Jehovah against this place to destroy it? Jehovah said to me, Go up against this land and destroy it. 2 Kings 18:25
Anti-Christ tried the lie that God had sent him to conqueor Jerusalem through the Assyrians. But God says to the worshipers of demons who hate Jesus Christ and Israel: "But I know thine abode, and thy going out, and thy coming in, And thy raging against me." 2 Kings 19:27