letters from barabbas

"I don't exist much in the physical realm," I said half-sarcastically to John a month ago.
I was restoring an old library book entitled At Ease in Zion, making it into a journal for Calla Maria's birthday. Marvelling at the monument I was establishing, the sacraments of artwork and gift-giving, I couldn't get my mind around the mechanisms of remembrance. How can we engage our bodies in something so intangible as human interaction? How do you wrap up your love for someone and extend it across the space between your hearts?
Fashioning my affection into something tangible and permanent, lost in thought in the living room, John brought up talk of a tentative trip to Philadelphia this May. I want to get a feel for the city because I am considering spending a year there after graduation and working with Chi Alpha. He said he would like to stop and spend a day at Gettysburg. I scoffed, said he could have fun with his history. I'd go hang out with the Amish, something more worth my time. He was surprised at my insolence. I tried to describe how I don't understand monuments, how I'd rather read a book or pray about something than look at a slab of marble, how I can't transcribe spiritual reality into physical reality.
I have a hard time connecting with an abstract concept by focusing on a concrete representation. Somewhere between my heart and my hands there's a gap that I can't overcome. I've been been aware of this dichotomy for years, but pondering it especially much ever since Dr. Gresham made me read The Unbearable Lightness of Being, examining my selves from various angles, trying to seal the gap.

I was trying to explain it to Josh today. He posed the question: Is this something that is a part of your personality, something unique about you that might even be vital to your personal ministry? Or is it just a defense mechanism, the result of twenty-one years of managing sin, chasing approval, Gnostic denial of the sensual?
Whatever it is, I can feel the Holy Spirit drawing my soul out of its prison. He's pressing on the walls of my heart, ready to burst them, so my spirit can flood out into every inch of my flesh: fingertips to toes, mouth and eyes and nose. Perhaps he'll cut the telegram wire that runs between my mind and my heart, forcing them to intermingle, communicate face-to-face.

:So I can hold my girlfriend's hand and feel it draw her near.
:So I can shake an outcast's hand and feel it bring him in.
:So I can squeeze a patient's hand feel it calm her fear.
:So I can take my Father's hand and feel it lead me on.

I'll step into my skin and walk around in it someday. It's part of growing up.
You can help me bridge the gap, perhaps. He's already using my friends. He's using other people's thoughts, others' revelations.
Read this: it's an exercise I intend to try this weekend.
If you know of any other exercises I can try, let me know.
All of this is will just be practice, though, for the day...

when i stand on the edges of Jordan
with the saints and the angels beside
when my body is healed and the glory revealed
still i can boast only Christ
- derek webb

Until then, no matter how sensual I become, I'll never be completely me: existing and eternal and alive, at ease in Zion.

For we know that if our earthly house, this tent, is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed with our habitation which is from heaven, if indeed, having been clothed, we shall not be found naked. For we who are in this tent groan, being burdened, not because we want to be unclothed, but further clothed, that mortality may be swallowed up by life. Now He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who also has given us the Spirit as a guarantee.
So we are always confident, knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord. For we walk by faith, not by sight. We are confident, yes, well pleased rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord.
--II Corinthians 5:1-8, NKJV