An Alleluia Song
I’ve been coast to coast, through three different mountain ranges, and to almost every major city in the Midwest. I’ve met persons of every shape, color, size and creed, and I’ve loved deeply and madly and I’ve survived torrential depression. I’ve read hundreds of books, studied scholars and philosophers, psychologists and prophets, historians and poets searching for something, some answer. I’ve received none. Simplicity is what I desire. Apathy is my result. I am 25, a deep and analytical thinker with a horrible memory, a loner afraid of commitment and intimacy. I grew up on an isolated dairy farm, embedded deep in poverty, and I’ve forced my way into the world, something bigger than myself, forced myself from a dead and dying generation into a generation of millennials, into a postmodern, technologically savvy, social networking and empty world. I’ve danced with hipsters, drank with rednecks, surrounded myself with nerds and gamers, immersed myself into both conservative and liberal worlds, words that mean nothing anymore. I’ve slummed around with self proclaimed whores and womanizers and girls carrying that stigmata of title around with them. I’ve drank with Christians and argued with atheists and still have no more understanding of each. I am no longer a modern peasant, no longer around heavy drug addicts and alcoholic loving welfare users entrenched in poverty; yet, I am no more a middle class surbanite or a hipster or or an intellect or a millennial. I feel no more at home on a farm or a small town or a Starbucks in Seattle.
Yet, there is something here, something unremarkably holy about these little america’s within this country, something about the people that drive one mad with fits of curiosity, neighborhoods and communities desiring life unable to see the magnificence of it around them, brothers and sisters desiring love and wholeness unable to love themselves, mothers and fathers searching for meaning and finding it in peace, love, hatred, or fear.
And I desire it, this beauty marred by brokenness, this pain marred by love… I find myself more and more desiring that which I cannot receive, paths that I cannot follow, love that I cannot give, sins that I cannot shed, pain that I cannot heal, thoughts that I cannot think, life that I cannot live.
So I will surround myself with these people I cannot understand, these Kerouackian folk, the ones that are ‘mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved’ and I will surround myself with the ugly and the beautiful, the restless and the content, the loved and the hated, for these are the Kingdom of God, these are the ones who have inherited the world.
I will sing my Alleluia song and take communion for all those who have ever been afraid of the dark or pissed their pants, for all those who are perfect simply because they are human, for the ones that have lived before and will come after, caught in this place and time and human story that is bigger than any ever imagined, and I will love them in all the lazy language that I can muster, in my simple and broken Alleluia song.
The Bum Diary 