Meditation Challenge
Me: Were we going to do a half-hour of religious blogging?
Mom: I kind of lost my inspiration cleaning up cat shit.
Me: God is IN the cat shit, mom!
Mom: Fine. YOU write about God in the cat shit.
Me: Challenge accepted.
We all know that the good Lord made all things bright and beautiful. Actually, when you flip that back to standard order it sounds like God wants everything to be pretty.
Well. I'm not pretty. I mean I'm okay-looking, and I don't want to trivialize the problems of fat, trans, big-nosed, lazy-eyed, frizzy-haired, old, male, or otherwise structurally non-pretty people. But if I say "I'm not pretty," is that a rejection of God's hypothetical plan?
I don't keep my room clean either. I try to keep dirty dishes in the kitchen but sometimes the only clear space on my floor is where I've kicked stuff out of my way. I've noticed that mess in my room correlates with my depression--so is God less present in my room when I'm depressed?
I love my parents' cat. We got him as a kitten when I was a child, but an old enough child to try to nurture something smaller than myself, unlike when we got the previous cat--I tortured that poor animal out of curiosity and spite--but not this cat; I cuddled this cat and taught him not to be afraid of people. But he's old now and craps on my mom's desk. If God is love, God was present between me and the kitten, and is present now between my mother and the old cat, two ornery habit-bound creatures competing for the use of the desk.
You are waiting for me to tell you to see the beauty in the cat shit, but I'm not going to. Cat shit smells bad, it's full of toxins, and it doesn't look too nice either. But ugliness is part of creation and you don't have to look away from it to find goodness or truth or any of those things you need. We all shit--we all have an ugly underside. It unites us. That's humility. God is there when you scrub cat shit off the floor. Hell, God is there when you sit on the toilet, that's what omnipresent means. You don't have to find shitting beautiful to accept it. You don't have to comfort me by telling me all the ways I'm beautiful. In fact, don't.
I am also not denying that beauty exists. I get a kind of peace from beautiful things that has value to me. And if I were a bit nicer to look at, people would put a bit more value in my tip jar. Those are real effects and they're not evil. But they're not absolute either.
This is humility: accept that some parts of you are not made of pure shining white angel feathers. Serve yourself, other people, and elderly felines in all their ugliness.
If you accept ugliness, you can begin to recognize the difference between shallow prettiness and true beauty.
If you accept ugliness, you can begin to find prayer in scrubbing shit off the floor. Or you can accept that you're never going to. My mom is a pretty wise human.
Mom: I kind of lost my inspiration cleaning up cat shit.
Me: God is IN the cat shit, mom!
Mom: Fine. YOU write about God in the cat shit.
Me: Challenge accepted.
We all know that the good Lord made all things bright and beautiful. Actually, when you flip that back to standard order it sounds like God wants everything to be pretty.
Well. I'm not pretty. I mean I'm okay-looking, and I don't want to trivialize the problems of fat, trans, big-nosed, lazy-eyed, frizzy-haired, old, male, or otherwise structurally non-pretty people. But if I say "I'm not pretty," is that a rejection of God's hypothetical plan?
I don't keep my room clean either. I try to keep dirty dishes in the kitchen but sometimes the only clear space on my floor is where I've kicked stuff out of my way. I've noticed that mess in my room correlates with my depression--so is God less present in my room when I'm depressed?
I love my parents' cat. We got him as a kitten when I was a child, but an old enough child to try to nurture something smaller than myself, unlike when we got the previous cat--I tortured that poor animal out of curiosity and spite--but not this cat; I cuddled this cat and taught him not to be afraid of people. But he's old now and craps on my mom's desk. If God is love, God was present between me and the kitten, and is present now between my mother and the old cat, two ornery habit-bound creatures competing for the use of the desk.
You are waiting for me to tell you to see the beauty in the cat shit, but I'm not going to. Cat shit smells bad, it's full of toxins, and it doesn't look too nice either. But ugliness is part of creation and you don't have to look away from it to find goodness or truth or any of those things you need. We all shit--we all have an ugly underside. It unites us. That's humility. God is there when you scrub cat shit off the floor. Hell, God is there when you sit on the toilet, that's what omnipresent means. You don't have to find shitting beautiful to accept it. You don't have to comfort me by telling me all the ways I'm beautiful. In fact, don't.
I am also not denying that beauty exists. I get a kind of peace from beautiful things that has value to me. And if I were a bit nicer to look at, people would put a bit more value in my tip jar. Those are real effects and they're not evil. But they're not absolute either.
This is humility: accept that some parts of you are not made of pure shining white angel feathers. Serve yourself, other people, and elderly felines in all their ugliness.
If you accept ugliness, you can begin to recognize the difference between shallow prettiness and true beauty.
If you accept ugliness, you can begin to find prayer in scrubbing shit off the floor. Or you can accept that you're never going to. My mom is a pretty wise human.