Bollywood Boy and...Christ

I had been vaguely musing over the fact that I'm quite overdue for an introspective theological post and lo and behold I was drawn into deep thought by a pop lit book masquerading as journalistic inquiry into Hrithik Roshan's meteoric rise into cinematic reign.

When I finished reading Justine Hardy's Bollywood Boy, yesterday, I couldn't help but pause in thought over the cost of fame, the weight of adulation, sameness in difference--life in general. [I won't bother reviewing the book. Folks have done an accurate enough job on Amazon.com.]

The thing that started my head spinning was this, "You know I am so tired all the time. I can't remember not being tired." Spoken by Hrithik during his interview with Justine, these words, in the last 5 pages of 264 hung like a heavy mist in the dialogue of my mind. Dang, I thought. How many times have I said that in the past year? Their dialogue continued leading Hrithik to say, "I just wonder what it would be like if it could all just stop and I could get on with learning how to act." By the time I completed the last few pages of the book, the mist hadn't lifted, it had settled. I wonder what it would be like if...I wonder.

In about 15 seconds my mind connected these questions with my personal quandary of existence: What is the point of pursing something that you would wonder about if you had not pursued it only to be wondering after receiving it what it would be like to be released from it? Does the weight of unmerited adulation exhaust more completely than the glare of undesired obscurity? What is the difference between being dead tired from inescapable success and being tired from the inescapable monotony of normalcy if in either instance, you are unable to escape? Any difference is merely outward.

My mind quickly switched gears:
If difference is merely external, only an internal stability will weather the innumerable questions of possibility--an internal stability I don't believe I possess--a complete and clear sense of purpose to weather obscurity and the monotony of life. Hmmm. What else could make life more bearable? Love. Love? Love. It is so easy for me to love beauty and its manifestation in mankind. Purpose is not something that can be gathered from beauty though the aching absence of purpose can be softened by love. Perhaps love redirected will produce the needed result. Weird. A verse from my Sunday school days came back to my mind, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, your soul and your mind." [ref] It rang like a nursery rhyme weighed down only by the settled mist.

So began my dialogue with Christ:

I do not see you Messiah in all things. I see beauty and I love it most. I do not feel drawn by your words, rather feelings of retreat. The song of beauty offers escape so sweet, so easy to follow. I sing in harmony with it, a song I learned when first I learned to choose. How then can I find such sweetness in your voice? How can I be drawn so easily to your side, to your otherworldliness that I will sing your song, your praises, your harmony as if it were the only song I had ever known? Why can I not rest in your love? Find in your eyes fragility, humanity? See you everywhere, hear you in the pauses, in the words that are not said and receive you, believing that you will receive me every time?

I asked and I received. It's a curious thing--barely explicable, too fresh to unwrap--a quiet, growing sense of receiving and being received by an invisible, omnipresent and personal being in my response to questioning whether he was beautiful and being shown that he was. ;)
He is.