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Walking through the Russian literature section makes me feel
like a sinner, insensitive, Dostoevsky and the other jawbreakers—
you know, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Turgenev, Dumbledore—every single one of them keeping their sadness
in their beards—epic, masculine cellars of a people’s despair overflowing onto bland, black suits—the weight of generations
raised on vodka and potatoes and cold statues. Just flipping
the pages, I can hear the coughs of tuberculosis and pneumonia,
the click of malnourished bones—sure, we’re generalizing here, probably being a little ethnocentric, but every one of those
volumes still comes off the shelf like a tombstone, and also like an anvil, because the grief is that heavy
and also because, if we’re honest, the Central Party ran out of tombstones years ago. You can stack all of the Russian literature
together in the whole wide library and have enough height to change a lightbulb and enough sadness to create a blackhole—
so please just don’t stack all the Russian literature together. Just a single sentence can carry more sadness
than Simple Plan’s whole discography and weigh about as much as the Oxford Dictionary of English, which is a lot of weight
for a bookshelf or even for a human being. But thankfully, thank God, sadness is like smoke,
and sometimes you just have to open a window, let it diffuse into the greater air, get swallowed up—so let’s open a window.
Let’s open a window together and grab the Oxford Dictionary of English and benchpress that baby, get swol, like Arnold
but really like Ryan Gossling—hey babe, read me those 17 syllable words—let me soak in their sound—
defenestration, smaragdine, sesquipedalian—let me luxuriate in language. Now, teach me Russian. Teach me Greek. Let’s read
about the implementation of elementary Russian into primary schools, hold the book’s calloused covers like our grandparents’
hands when we were children, the spine flying between them like a rope bridge, our feet walking on air.
What a joy to be alive, to breathe, to hold a book another man held in the spring of 1984—maybe a woman? How old?
How did he or she feel about lilacs? About the Cold War? About macroeconomics? So many opinions held beneath the skin
and bones that held this book up against the rudimentary physical forces acting upon it in the spring of 1984—that are also acting
upon it now—that makes us colleagues, compatriots— we have all got at least one thing in common.
There was a person who hand drew the type face of this book. I bet Russian people have different fonts like we do—
Vani and Helvetica and Times New Roman and creepy, gothic Chiller in Cyrillic and different and wonderful.
My friend Jonah is dear to my soul, and my friend Jonah promises, swears, that anything in the whole world is interesting
if you just pick it up and put it under a microscope, and my friend Jonah’s soul is the biggest microscope I know—
he tells me of the homeless people who come to his bank
to deposit Catholic Charities checks for $7.25 and who tell him
about their cats. Homeless people have bank accounts and cats. I found one once, climbing the fire escape
of an abandoned rehabilitation center for youth in downtown Lynchburg, Virginia. I found the white and orange cat’s
brand new food bowl and water dish sitting new and terrifying and out-of-place beneath a weed grown from the building
for so long it had a half-inch stalk and leaves the size of decorative 17th century serving plates.
Homeless people are people. The Oxford Dictionary of English tells me that there are lost words, but I think that sometimes
we just lose each other in our words, people lost like trees in the forests of our phrases and labels.
In 2013, U.S. tax code was 73,594 pages long, and I used 500 pages of computer paper every semester at Lycoming College
in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, sometimes more, and thank God I have never, ever, ever read the tax code—
depending on how you calculate though, just me and the tax code are anywhere from three to nine trees, and my page count alone
is enough to start losing people. Pray over me in Chinese— there are scores and scores of Chinese dialects, and Jesus Christ
speaks every single one of them. Jesus does not lose people. Pray over me in Dutch, too, and Swahili why don’t you?
Jesus knows all of the languages. Let’s sing the national anthems of other countries together—they have them, too, you know?
There are 150 countries—that’s 150 histories all thumping their geopolitical chests and trading their dollar store toys
and their oil and their minerals and their literature like Pokemon cards—the Earth is the bushes at recess, and we’re all hiding
from one another, passing Charizards for cargo ships of coconut oil and tanks. And speaking of tanks, tanks have tow trucks,
and those tow trucks for tanks have turrets on top because sometimes tow trucks for tanks need turrets—
a friend of a friend got a concussion in one so bad it split the two hemispheres of his brain like a heart. The tow truck for tanks
hit a Jersey wall in Iraq trying to turn around because sometimes tow trucks for tanks need to turn around, too.
My friend of a friend got his concussion, each brain hemisphere deciding on a mutual trial separation at the behest of the bolt
in the ceiling that cracked his helmet. In the divorce, his ability to build things got forgotten, bounced about between the parents
but never quite feeling at home. My friend of a friend is a very, very real, fleshy, heart-beatin-kind of person,
just like you and me, and he’s currently somewhere in southern Connecticut, trying to build himself a barn again, painfully,
devastatingly slowly, trying to relearn how to build again, to coax his talent out from under the stairs, to come home.
Let’s rewind: there are Jersey walls in Iraq. There are people in Iraq—people who drink beer and chew gum and text
while they poop and have babies—there are day cares in Iraq. The people in Iraq have 46 chromosomes.
We have 46 chromosomes. The terrorists have 46 chromosomes. The members of ISIS, their impotent machetes
hacking away at all the wrong oppressors, have 46 chromosomes. They are made in the image of God.
If I’m honest, sometimes I hate that. If I’m honest, too, Jesus was probably brown. Jesus probably looked like a “terrorist.”
Jesus was a terrorist, or a revolutionary, or a something semantically similar. Jesus was a threat. It’s amazing
what you can do with words. Jesus was and is and will always be my King. Jesus threatens my comfort and my status quo.
Jesus makes me want to kiss you. Not on the lips, but on the head, in the deepest love I have ever known.
I want to hold you as honestly as I can, wrap you up and dance, spin you beneath these warm lights. We are alive. Our God is alive.
I’m currently sitting on a wide, white marble bench perfectly positioned beneath a clear, glass skylight, leaning my back
against clear glass—I’m walking on air again. The walls of this art building are lined with the pieces of people’s souls,
glistening strands strung up and down like veins, and this bench is shockingly well-designed, a startling blessing.
There is music on—someone is practicing the piano. That’s something I cannot do. My fingers, they can’t even fathom it
when I ask them, and that’s just electricity, me asking them, and I am surrounded then and now and always and you are too
by an unfathomable number of indefinable little specks of matter— whatever the heck matter is—all bumping into each other
at just the right time, at just the right speed, at just the right way, to produce a girl I cannot see practicing Chopin in a backroom
I can’t see either—what a miracle! What a miracle to be alive, to breathe, to sit on a shockingly well-designed,
wide, white marble bench perfectly positioned beneath a clear glass skylight, to reach out and put my fingers
in Doystovesky’s beard and to comb out that sadness.
What a miracle to watch Jesus combing and waxing the cellars
of our sadnesses, catching all of it up in His Hands, and raking our sins into mutton chops and planting seeds in our superfund
hearts and growing corn and pumpkins and squash and tomatoes and zucchinis—what a joy to watch the harvest come in!
You know if you’ve seen it; do not forget it. What a joy to interlace fingers, to dance, to study Greek grammar,
to have O’hara tell me of the trees and their spectacles—I can hear them breathing now, too. And Pablo, I can see those flowers
that don’t bloom and I carry their light within me now, too, next to Yuri Gordon and his fonts. Oh Yuri! What a joy to be alive!
The soul is an empty library, and I feel daily, minutely, momently God Himself is checking the books back in. One by one,
I am growing up in the knowledge of God, the speaker of worlds, the designer of knee caps and holding cheeks in palms and hair
between fingers, the designer of tastebuds—Chick-fil-a and Chipotle a ballet across my tongue! I am in love with you
and with being alive, with the music that’s on—Jesus dropping a needle on the turntable, the Earth one grand 45,
America a hymnal, and the Holy Spirit teaching us to sing it. And Syria’s one too, and the ocean—Pacific and Atlantic,
two dialects, like Chinese, and Jesus hears them all, speaks them all, spoke them all first, teaches them all—
day and night the heavens pour forth speech. Pray over me
in Dutch. Worship with me in Hindi. Shout with me in Ebonics.
God has seen me naked every moment of my life, and He still calls me son without hesitation. Do the Electric Slide with me beneath
the stars—what language do they speak? Who knows, but I know its praise. Teach me the Hustle. Let’s hug everyone in the whole
freaking world and my friend Bradley, too, but let’s do it in Swedish and make Swedish meatballs for everyone, Swedish-ly.
God is a generous, generous, generous, faithful god. Let’s eat Ramen and raw cookie dough and give thanks for minimum wage
and yachts and play Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 with old friends and their wives because praise King Jesus there is music on,
can you hear it? Praise King Jesus there is music on, can you hear it? Praise King Jesus there is music on, can you hear it?
What a miracle that, in a time of nuclear war and plots to bomb everyone and days where I cannot shake the sadness on my own,
two people can still love each other, and I can eat raw cookie dough with them and do kickflips and not break my legs.
Praise King Jesus there is music on, and so I am learning to dance, through the rows of Russian literature, through the lobbies
of libraries of schools I don’t go to, through gas station parking lots and grocery store aisles, through the Capitol Rotunda,
through Tiananmen Square and Times Square and Trafalgar Square and Trailside Elementary’s Foursquare Court,
through Chipotle, my favorite restaurant, through Cape Canaveral and the subway and Chernobyl and riding that Ferris wheel
and doing the Hokey Pokey and chang chang, changitty chang shoobop all the way to the top, dancing all over my grave,
Jesus and me and you and my parents and Tolstoy and everyone— we’re all dancing, and we’re all singing, and it’s a Hosana
and a Hallelujuah and AMEN.