The City IX

If the city is God¾or at least God's superficial shadowy photocopy¾how do God's lovers, chosen randomly from human stock and given divine weakness, seek him?  How do they seek what-is-not in what-is?  Initially, they simply seek the question¾its shape, taste, smell.  They may not ask it¾for they must hide their interests even as God hides in death¾but it disguised in the billion other questions of the city.  But just below is this central seeking question, which other lovers may hear and to which the dead God may point.

To seek God is to seek beauty, to seek beauty is to seek death.  To seek God in the city is to seek beauty and death in life.  How does one do this?  The human does not know.  The intersection of the city and the human strives toward this knowledge.

Loving God is like a husband loving his wife.  The city reveals this knowledge, and laughs.  But the human does not laugh; it shrivels like a prune and thinks it is dead.

I know that the city was begotten, not made.  This knowledge has much to do with God's death.

The cadence of divine justice is not synchronous with the human.  Whether the human lives or dies, whether it seeks or rests, whether it is holy or mediocre¾these are human concerns.  The divine lives and dies apart.  Nevertheless, while whether the human believes God is alive or dead makes no difference to God, the direction and weight of the belief makes a difference to the human.  Thus, in the city, with the human believing concretely and absolutely in God's death, human justice has the opportunity to become more apparent.  This appearance does not negate God's justice, which continues to act, though in the city through varied means, but overlays it, as a fog overlays a landscape.  This overlay is the human's gift to itself, an obfuscation and a thick grey glory.

Death and life are entirely different states to the human—one largely unknown, the other partially known.  But to the divine, death and life are simply different states or masks one wears, as if to different balls.

Humans who claim allegiance to a living god still exist in the city.  But neither their practice, which is the city's truth, nor their souls, if I could lay them on the harsh husks of hospitals and skin them, show any such allegiance.  The only humans who can claim such allegiance do not claim it, but rather hide, like the One whom they love.