When will the ruckus be over?—
This churning chaos of a world
In which our lives have been set
And in which we have been tossed
To and fro all our lives,
Sometimes hurt in innocence,
And sometimes in guilt,
And most all the time,
Wishing for something more peaceful?
Will it go on forever?
Will it never stop?
How can it be right
For such madness to go on unchecked?
Is the Driver asleep at the wheel?
Why doesn’t he pull over and set things straight
Here in this back seat?
Does he not see what’s going on?
Well, I think I know what time it is.
I think I have got it figured out.
Finally.
The ruckus does stop quite suddenly
For each and every one of us,
But not all at once, as we might think proper—
As we might imagine it playing out on some movie screen.
No, it stops for us the moment we die—
The moment we are done here, and are taken up to meet that Driver
Whose skills or sanity or awareness or care we may well have questioned
Once in a while during our time here.
And we meet him,
And introductions are made,
And one way or another, it becomes clear
What kind of person we have been,
And how we have chosen to conduct ourselves here,
And to treat our fellow man.
And somewhere along the way in that heavenly appointment,
It becomes exceedingly clear that that second world of two is a special one,
Where not just anybody is qualified to live—
And that there’s good reason, after all,
To try people out first down here in the chaos of Earth,
Where, although we are hurt by the evils of others,
Some of us choose to respond by creating more evil,
And where, although we are hurt by the carelessness of others,
Some of us respond by deciding to be without care ourselves.
And that is why we are here on this Earth,
Where the Light shines such as it does,
And some want more of it,
While others want less of it—
And where there is a great tide of those
Who love certain aspects of the Darkness,
Pretending misosophy is the best sometimes—
That it’s not that bad, really—
And bidding us join them as they overcongratulate themselves
On the occasional good they happen to do from time to time.
And this is how they live,
Rarely wishing for more,
Except for the exit of consequence, perhaps.
And we should have seen all this coming,
Given the Book, and all,
And we should have wanted something more
Than the chaos and the compromise
And the carelessness and the incuriosity,
Given the Mind, and all,
And given the Story, of course.
But who better to miss the point of the Story
Than the chaotic, compromised, careless, and incurious masses?—
Those wide-road travelers who
Moo their way past the narrow gate
Seeing no promise in it?
And so shall we see then,
In that timely meeting in that second world,
Whether we did see it coming—
This moment in which Heaven declares
That certain things did matter after all.
And we shall see whether we learned anything,
And made anything of ourselves,
Making those hard choices between Good and Evil—
Choices of the sort that really cost us something,
And that required the willful whittling away
Of those parts of us that did not fit the Image.
We shall see whether all those who say they want to go to heaven
Have ever thought really hard about it,
Because you can tell that some of them, by the way they live,
Wouldn’t like life in heaven, for it would mean that
They’d have to live differently there from
How they want to live down here.
And I don’t think they’d like it at all.
And I don’t mean they’d have the choice
To change their minds and stay once they got there,
For they’d no longer have any say in the matter at that point,
Since by the time they got a chance to meet the Driver for themselves,
They’d have already shown their true colors—
Which is the whole point of being here in the first place.
And it being then out of their hands at that point,
That would be the end of that.
And I’m not going to be surprised if some of them,
After seeing what fate befalls them after all,
Might just curse the Driver, insanely,
For having let them carry on here
As they themselves had freely and stubbornly chosen to do—
Against his written counsel
And against common sense, even,
And against the complaints of those they were hurting
By their bad behavior.
And if they should curse him like that,
It would make it plain—
In my mind, at least—
That he had judged them justly
As being unfit for his Holy City,
For they were unfit for Holiness itself,
And what unholy person is fit to live in the Holy City?
And thus, they have another place,
Long-since prepared,
Where there is no Light at all,
And nothing but Darkness
With no hope of change—
Unless it be in being snuffed out altogether
After a time of suffering.
And for some of them, being audaciously complete in their transgressions,
No such hope was ever prophesied, so far as I have read.
And that place,
Worse than this one,
Makes this place look not so bad after all.
And this place,
Both beautiful and ugly,
Where our feet were set at birth—
It makes the good long for more goodness,
And the not-so-good long for a place
Where goodness—
Which tires them out a lot of the time—
Is not required.
And this world churns on,
As if having been tutored in its early years by a Grandmaster of Evil,
And still remembering his lessons,
Having never having figured out since that his evil ways were flatly disproved
As the Story unfolded—
Which a better species might have learned to teach its children by now.
But we don’t really learn as a species. Not really.
We mostly learn—or not—as individuals.
And there are always those who complain,
As we have likely done ourselves,
That someone should do something to make it a better place—
As if it were possible in the first place for one person to teach everybody’s children.
And we long for such reform only as long as it should bear no requirement
That we should have to change our own behaviors.
And that attitude, of course, is the stupid way of this stupid world.
But even so, some of us do learn our lessons,
Even if with great difficulty.
And we who do learn should expect to meet the Driver in due time,
In a meeting in which our Hope becomes Sight,
And we no longer have to swim against the tide
To go the right way.
And on that day,
What trouble shall we think this present world
Shall have been to us—
Light and momentary as it has been?
And our decades and scores and jubilees seeming nothing
In the Face of a glorious Eternity.
And then we will understand why the Earth goes on as it does,
For there will still be room in that Good City
For those who learned to love Goodness while
They were here, and had the choice to make—
Or not—
For themselves—
Where the nonbeliever naturally senses no serious danger in his sins,
And where the true believer must often side with Righteousness on principle alone,
And against the counsel of a thousand pretender Christians who think him the heretic,
And who, along with the nonbeliever,
Will see no serious danger in his sins—or their own.
Things are not altogether so bad here,
For the Earth is, in our time,
What the wise Driver designed it should be for now,
And each is free to choose what to make of Goodness,
As he sees fit in his own mind and in his own time.
This ruckus is not entirely bad for us after all.
And even still,
After all this time,
“Generations come and generations go,
But the Earth remains forever.“
