reading

With Dotty

“Gosh darnit, Dotty! It’s what I have to do. I feel it in my bones.”

“But why on earth do you have to go roaming out into the desert? It’s dangerous.”

“The desert will challenge me to grow spiritually, like the ancient prophets.”

“Judas Priest, Matthew! You’re comparing yourself to a prophet?”

Dotty’s mounting reservations about what Matthew intends to do only serves to feed his hyperbolic allusions….

“I am no prophet. But my apprenticeship in the desert will help me recreate God’s word, which has in recent years been corrupted beyond recognition.”

“Listen to yourself, will you? Sometimes you sound like a crazy.”

“That’s also what they said about the prophets. Like them I will be mocked, rejected, and persecuted. But I will endure.”

A brief moment of silence. Dotty is at a loss for words. Matthew has to catch his breath. Then … “Understand me, Dotty. Time in the desert wilderness is prerequisite to carrying out God’s calling. The desert is where Moses ran onto the burning bush, where Elijah overcame his despair, where David wrote many of his prophecies, where John the Baptist lived in seclusion before carrying out his noble mission.”

“Please, spare me.”

Matthew pays no attention to her, as his voice reaches a momentous pitch … “The desert’s noble Joshua trees offer a welcome sight, conjuring up the image of a prophet beckoning his onlookers to the Promised Land. It’s where I will walk and talk, in the desert.”

“I want you to be just you.”

“This is who I am becoming, Dotty. It will be me.”

“What about me? What about your parents?”

“My parents? In the book of Matthew it says that if you love your dad and mom more than Jesus, you aren’t worthy of him. And you? When I’ve fulfilled my calling, I’ll be here for you. You will be proud of me.”

“I’m proud of you now, just the way you are.”

“I know. But for now … I hate to say it, Dotty, but I’m afraid you would interfere with my work. My body is the temple of my mind and spirit. It is also the source of temptations. I pray to Christ that he lead me not into temptations and deliver me from evil. But temptations there will always be. And I can’t simply swat them away like flies. I must avoid their source. Especially this devil’s instrument”—with a grimace he points to his crotch, while Dotty meets his grimace with a more convincing scowl.

“Stop it, Matthew! This kind of talk is nuts, and you know it.”

“Do you realize you are now flattering me, Dotty, like the sinners who called the prophets lunatics?”

“Now you’re calling me a sinner? For crying out loud!”

“Have faith, Dotty. If you were pure in heart, you would be ecstatic about my calling. But you want me to deny it. Saint or sinner? You decide. I’m afraid you might be like all the others.”

“I’m not like the others, and don’t expect me to be perfect. I just want to be with you.”

“You need to read the book of Romans about sins. I have to overcome them.”

“Romans!” she screams. “Half of what you’re saying comes from the Scriptures. Why don’t you just talk like everybody else?”

“How can I? My eyes have been opened. But the adversary wants to lead me into temptation. I must constantly be on guard. I have to be more perfect than the other people.”

“Heavens! Now it’s a holier-than-thou attitude.”

“Not at all, Dotty,” Matthew says with calm, patient demeanor. “I’m weak, so I have to struggle against the devil’s designs.”

“Weak? You are a shining example of a good Christian. What more do you want of yourself?”

“I must strive to improve myself, once and for all, putting the sin in me to death. Above all, I must have nothing to do with lust and other evil desires.”

“Matthew!”

“Don’t worry, Dotty. I must think not of myself, but of my mission.”

“We all think of ourselves. Even Jesus. Besides, don’t you ever think of me?”

“I must avoid all temptation and become consumed by my mission.”

“Are you saying again that I am the one leading you to sin? Goddamn it, Matthew! Get real!”

“Dotty! Never again utter God’s name in vain around me!”

“Is that your only response? I can’t stomach any more of this!”

Dotty high steps off. Matthew passively watches her, as if it makes no difference to him. Of course it does, but he has more pressing issues at hand.

As a teenager, Matthew had become disillusioned with the church. Its leaders “talk the talk but don’t walk the walk,” as he was prone to put it. He tried other churches over the heated objection of his parents. He studied the Scriptures. He frequented the local library, checking out whatever he felt might be relevant. All to no avail. Then he began plowing through secular texts of all sorts. Still no answers. He felt he must do something … he had to do something … he was determined to find the truth. But it eluded him—until his moment of epiphany, that is.

Why Matthew’s obsession with truth? During his early teen years, he began trying to walk away from his past. He felt it was undeserving of the person he wished to become. Why? Because his past deviated along a path strewn with sharp twists and turns through threatening mountain passages and gaping valleys, all of which were strictly prohibited by his rigid religious upbringing.

Matthew had his first encounter with sexual interaction at age six. It was a brush with homosexuality, of sorts, with another boy his age. Then when entering pubescence—that clumsy period when the body is growing so fast the mind can’t keep up with it—he became aware that he was aroused by boys as well as girls. There were daily masturbation sessions. At every opportunity, whenever he could seclude himself somewhere for a few lascivious moments. Then there were experiments with transvestitism, using his sister’s clothes. He was acting out of compulsion and he didn’t like any of it. It plagued him constantly. He found himself reading the Scriptures in an attempt to understand the hows and whys of what he thought were his evil motives. They refused to give him the answers he wanted.

Shortly after graduating from high school, he decided there surely must be more to life than sex, of whatever kind. He thought about foregoing marriage and becoming a dedicated pastor. Quickly rejected the idea. About becoming a hermit and dedicating himself to meditation after having read a self-help book on Buddhism. Didn’t last. About becoming a bachelor doctor and saving lives. When he discovered the amount of study involved, he nixed the idea. His mother talked him into seeing a therapist. No solution. She took him to a psychiatrist and he faithfully ingested the prescribed medication. No improvement. Then there was sleep disturbance, appetite change, mild suicidal tendencies, and dysphasia. Through it all, he felt he didn’t belong. Anywhere.

He denied his panic attacks, occasional auditory and visual hallucinations, self-mutilation, and other obsessive compulsions. “Nothing wrong with me. No siree! I’m as normal as can be.”

But during his moments of solitude, it was another story. He was caught up in despair. What was wrong with him? Why couldn’t he be like the others? Why couldn’t he talk like them? Act like them? Use everyday expressions and wave his hands and body around like those popular kids in school when he talked? He tried. Diligently. But he couldn’t go through what he took to be the proper motions. He was different, alone, out of sync with everybody.

He felt like his body was in one place and his mind—or soul, if he happened to be thinking spiritually—was always somewhere else. As if his body had no mind of its own. As if it was not real and his mind was the only reality. As if what everybody else experienced, he didn’t experience at all, and what he experienced, nobody else did. He felt like he wasn’t with them at all. Not really. He was always elsewhere or nowhere. He felt disconnected, out of touch, out in left field. Lost and alone.

Is this some insane kind of hell?—Matthew once asked himself. Has God given up on me? Have I become such a sinner that there’s no hope for me?

At times he wondered if some part of his past had been blocked from his memory, and during that time, he had become one of the devil’s workers. He resisted the thought. But it persisted. So he couldn’t resist it. It burned within him.

It was especially during this time in his life that he became an obsessed reader in search of answers. He read everything he could get his hands on. Not only Scriptures and religious writings, but also fiction, biographies, history, anthropology, psychology, politics, economics, social issues, New Age and self-help literature, pop science, science for the public written by famous scientists, newspapers, and magazines. He dedicated lethargic hours to e-mail discussions, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and assorted gibberish on the Internet.

You name it. He couldn’t get enough of it. Much of what he read was in conflict with the principles his family and friends held dear. He read it anyway, with wide-eyed curiosity. There was massive input and little output, given his isolation. Yet, when the occasion happened to present itself, he could, with surprising cogency, articulate both sides of diverse controversial issues at the drop of a hat. At the same time, he fought valiantly to resist giving up the principles taught to him by his parents. He was caught up in a serious conflict and he knew it.

After all, had his parents not lovingly homeschooled him? Had they not warned him about those evil, secular affairs of the world? As a family, did they not dedicate an hour or more each day to reading and discussing the Scriptures? Did they not properly admonish him when he went astray? And praise him for the shining example he set at church? For his remarkable facility at reciting biblical verses in Sunday school classes, at home, and among friends and relatives? For the shining example he set for his peers? Yes! He was the spitting image of a faithful, God-fearing, young Christian. His mom and dad were as proud of him as could be.

In his twenties, he met Dotty. His experience with the other sex had, up to this time, been severely limited, to say the least. But Dotty was different. He felt an attraction toward her the likes of which he hadn’t known. Her voice low and rough. Her laughter a boisterous explosion he found appealing. Her looks tellingly tough, with a hint of masculinity that charmed and attracted him—though they occasionally made him a little leery of his own feelings. Her manner of walking, with purpose and determination.

It’s not that she was pushy with Matthew. She wasn’t. Her apparent hard-hitting manner was somewhat deceptive. What at the outset attracted her was Matthew’s sincere resolve, his purpose, his fortitude. She would like to depend on his support and protection. She would like to have his intelligence, his way with words, his wisdom. But she didn’t. Consequently, when with Matthew, she uncharacteristically became rather uncertain of herself. She often took to vacillating, and her words and actions became correspondingly vague. At the same time, Matthew’s child-like need for understanding motivated her. She cheered him on. She wanted to be his buttress, his prop, his scaffold, his sustenance. It left her with a good feeling.

In short, Dotty and Matthew complemented each other. To all appearances they were an ideal match.

“Oh Matthew,” Dotty once said after he told her of his prophetic vision and they ended in a spat. “I want to believe in you and I know you want to do good. But stay here. We can do the Lord’s work. You and me. Together.”

“Even if I wanted to, I can’t.”

“Why on earth not?” she meekly, but persistently voiced a note of resistance.

“Because believing and living a moral life here isn’t enough. Faith isn’t known by words, but by works. The more I believe, the more I have to show it, instead of simply saying it.”

Dotty turned her head slightly with a telltale pout. Matt became encouraged by his own voice …

“My faith must be the substance of things I hope for and the evidence of things I haven’t yet seen. Reread the book of Matthew, Dotty. You’ll see.”

“What you want to accomplish is big, too big. And if you fail, what will you do? Torture yourself no end?”

“I cannot just fast and pray while staying here and going through the motions. It is not enough. There must be more. That’s why I’m going into the desert.”

“Living a good life here isn’t enough?”

“No. There must be deeds.”

“Your good life here could be deeds enough.”

“No. I must get away so I can know what the Lord has in store for me.”

“What if you’re out there in the boondocks and others don’t agree with you? Think of the problems you can get yourself into.”

“I will be Jesus’s mouthpiece for those who choose to accept him. I cannot think of me. I must focus on my calling during each waking moment.”

“You’ve told me you aren’t yet sure what your calling is.”

“I will be sure.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I am.”

“How do you know?”

“I will walk humbly before Jesus. He will show me the way.”

“If you’re not yet sure you’re sure, how can you in the future be sure without a shadow of a doubt?”

“When I know, there will be no place for doubt.”

“If you are completely free of doubt, will you not have closed your eyes, ears, and mind? Is that not fanaticism, Matthew?”

“No. It is knowledge. The most sublime form of knowledge. It will flow like water. I will submerge myself in it. It will cleanse me of evil.”

“Sometimes you scare me.”

“Fear me not, Dotty. Fear him, the all-knowing one.”

Footsteps approach the front porch door. It opens.

“Hey, Dad. Glad you’re here. I’m beating my head against the wall trying to convince Dotty that I must do what I must do. Tell her. Tell her about the change that has come over me.”

“My son, my cherished son. Living example of the teachings of Christ. How can you not accept this, Dotty?”

“Matthew wants to go his own way. Without me.”

“Yes, he does, my child. And I am the most fortunate parent in the world. He has been chosen from among the multitudes. You are privileged just to know him. He is next to godliness. Along with Jesus’s carpenters, fishermen, stone masons.”

“Yeah,” Dotty reluctantly concedes with furrowed brow. “And now he will be among drunks, adulterers, and prostitutes. I’m afraid he’s going to run into a heap of trouble.”

“He will be fine. Don’t worry your pretty head, my child,” Matthew’s father patronizingly says as he gives her a tender pat on the shoulder.

“I’m still afraid of what might happen.”

“God will protect him.”

“I know I should be happy for him,” Dotty says. “But lately he’s been so, well, I hate to say it, but so strange. I’m afraid of what people might think of him and do to him.”

“He might be threatened, spat upon, kicked, and beaten. He might be judged and found despicable and loathsome. But he’ll be protected. He’ll become a shining example of God’s work.”

“Why Matthew? Why not somebody else?”

“God moves in ways that are mysterious for mere mortals. Matthew is looking to overcome forbidden acts, to overcome sinful ways, to reunite himself with his Creator. Then he will function as God’s mouthpiece.”

“Thanks, Dad,” Matthew says, appropriately gripped by his father’s words.

Nonetheless, Matthew remains somewhat in the dark about what he calls his “calling.” But he thinks he’s getting there. He’s moving toward what he labels “illumination,” which sheds a little more light on ignorance, so as to provide a higher degree of knowledge. Indeed, he must seek illumination. For he believes that half of what many people take to be absolute truth might be a great lie and absolute truth might surely appear stranger than the strangest of fictions.

“Yes, I must seek illumination the right way,” Matthew keeps telling himself. “Every move forward can hold the promise of increased knowledge so I can fight the ignorance surrounding me.”

This fortifies his view of himself ambulating, step by step, over the desert sands, as his future stretches out before him. Step by step, halfway, then half of the remaining distance, then halving the next stretch, over and over, with no apparent end in sight. An interminably receding horizon. That is his calling.

Recently, Matthew has often found himself engaging in soliloquy, talking to himself, carrying on an inner dialogue. Is it out of his undying faith? Is it a mental muddle akin to terminal dissonance? Might it perchance be that he is at the edge of that awful pit of madness? Or is he in adequate control of his feelings, and his inner dialogues serve to help him resolve the conflicts he’s caught up in?

Whatever it is, it conforms to his ironclad, incessantly repetitive, irreversible logic regarding who he now is and what he must do. His removing himself from others and engaging in self-referential dialoguing now gives him a strange sense of pleasure. It comforts him, gives him confidence. That is the positive side. The negative side is that it threatens to endow him with a dangerous sense of overriding self-importance.

Which brings up a question. Was Matthew’s self-proclaimed moment of epiphany real or a figment of his prolific imagination? Whichever the case, as far as he is concerned, it was real. And he feels duty-bound to act on it. “Whatever will happen will happen,” he often remarks. Yet, on the one hand, he somehow feels he will end up lionized and deemed blessed beyond measure. On the other hand, like Dotty’s father said, he might be disparaged, vilified, slandered, beaten, or perhaps martyred for his efforts. At any rate, the cards have been dealt. Whatever will happen, will happen.

Matthew has no idea how confusingly labyrinthine his life might become.

The Beginning Began with the Word

He is traipsing along at the bottom of the gully when it knocks him for a loop, throws him to the ground, engulfs him body and soul. Matthew Jones’s moment of epiphany, that is.

The gully is almost always dry. The desert expanse surrounding it might get a paltry ten inches of rain in a good year. So the gully is considerably more dry than not, except when it perchance has rained. Once or twice in a dry spell, it rains, hard. Enough to fill a zinc-lined oil pan left out in the back yard. Well, at least half-full. Or half-empty. However you want to take it. Anyway, Matthew is walking downstream. They call Matthew’s direction downstream, whether there is any water or not.

Which brings me to the main point. When there’s a stream along this stretch of the gully, it is because the water has very gradually cut into the dirt. It’s hardly worthy of the name dirt. Dust is more like it. Tightly packed dust. Most of it hard during the dry season. The water cuts into it little by little, leaving a gash, a gully. And right here, where Matthew is walking, the scar in the earth is only a little wider than his outstretched arms and darn near twenty feet to the top. Straight up. No way to get out unless you keep walking until you reach a low place. From where Matthew finds himself at this moment, a low place is more than a quarter mile downstream.

Anyway, here’s Matthew, ambulating along. At times losing a couple of inches with each step since the gully floor is punctuated by patches of loose sand. Suddenly, he hears a voice.

Naw, impossible way down here, he thinks to himself. Up there in the middle of nowhere, it’s not so hot because of the breeze. Down here it’s like descending into hell. No voices down here, for sure. Anyone in his right mind would never be caught walking along this parched arroyo anyhow.

Except Matthew, of course. Why is Matthew down here? Because he’s thinking. He and Dotty, Dotty Page that is, just had another squabble. Usually these spats are gone and forgotten in a few hours. Not this one.

She goes by Dotty Page because they aren’t married. Matthew wanted to marry her. She said, “Wait.”

“Wait for what?”

Dotty said, “Because we don’t know each other well enough.”

Matthew replied, “Good gosh, woman, we’ve been seeing each other for a year and a half.”

“Yes, but we need more time.”

“Time? What do you want with more time?”

“I’ve got to think about it,” Dotty said.

“Think? What’s there to think about? Let’s get on with it”

But Dotty wouldn’t budge. Matthew insisted. She got her feathers up during one of their heated moments. Matthew, frustrated, gave her a little shove. “Just playful like,” says Matthew, or so he thought at the time. She ran him out of her house and hasn’t so much as spoken to him since then.

Now he’s in a bind. What’s a guy to do? Look for greener pastures elsewhere? No! I love her. Why can’t she see it?

He walks along the camel-colored gully floor, which sometimes has a slight brown, red, yellow, or blackish tinge, depending on the minerals present in the dust and sand. He’s lost in thought.

Darn it, Dotty! What’s got into you this time? He thinks about telling her if she’ll listen. We always got along fine. You remember that trip to Grand Canyon? Now that was some canyon! My uncle called it an oversized gravel pit. You remember those two women in that movie? They were chased by the highway patrolmen and they revved up the car and drove into the humongous gully? Hair a-flyin’ in that convertible? That was some scene, wasn’t it? Yeah, we had fun on that trip. Just our two families. That motel of big, white wigwams in Holbrook where we stayed, getting lost in Flagstaff while trying to find the road to Sedona. And then Las Vegas. Ah, Las Vegas. The lights, the casinos, losing some money, eating like hogs, shoveling it in at the trough. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. What’s important is that we had a banging good time.

What’s that!

Eerie silence.

Wasn’t nothing, I guess.

There it is again. A voice. It’s saying something. Saying something? To me? Way down here, almost concealed in this slit in the earth that goes halfway to hell? The only voice around here would be telling me, you imbecile, get yourself back up there where you belong!

What? Again? he says to himself while squinting his eyes and twisting his head around in all directions. What’s it saying? Something like, ‘You are one of the chosen few from the many.’ Chosen few? he wants to ask; but he doesn’t; he just stands there with his mouth hanging open.

Again? It’s telling me, ‘Forget your worldly pleasures and spread the word.’ “What in tarnation’s going on?” he says out loud with an emphatic question mark. I don’t have any worldly pleasures. Just want to marry Dotty. And I can’t spread any word, because I don’t know what word it’s talking about…. What now? You say, ‘Fret not, for the word will be forthcoming if you follow your heart?’ What cussed heart are you talking about? My heart is Dotty’s. She’s my one and only word, the only person I’ve been chosen for. Plain and simple.

Matthew almost trips over a rock worn round over the centuries. He catches himself and clumsily hops and skips a few yards forward, gets his balance back, stops, and looks back to see what cut his thoughts short. “Stupid rock!” he says out loud.

Then he sees an indenture made by the water in the gully wall to his right during the last flash flood. He thinks, There’s a shady spot. I’ll sit and cool off a spell. Try to forget about what my mind tells me it’s hearing.

He sits. But his back is arched because the indenture is too low for him unless he scrunches down. He sits there anyway. Thinking. Meditating would be attributing too much to Matthew’s thoughts about his situation at this stage in his life. He is in a bind. A double-bind, so they call it. If he leaves Dotty, what will he do? And if he keeps on at her, she might get tired of him and that will be the end of it. He thinks, How can I get out of this? And then he says out loud … “How can I get out of this? Huh? If I do one thing I’ll lose her, and if I do the other thing, I’ll lose her. How can I win?” He has exhausted his options. Or so he thinks.

Matthew is from a solid Christian family. That much is obvious by now. It is a poor family. Not dirt poor as they say, but darn poor nonetheless. Shortly after Matthew was old enough to walk, he had only one pair of shoes he learned to tie by himself. Later, he learned how to put liquid Shinola on them every Saturday evening to make them presentable for church on Sunday. With his only pair of good trousers and a starched white shirt, his face polished clean, and his rebellious hair more or less in place, he was fit to get some religious learning.

When he learned how to take the Lord’s name in vain and did so, his mother retaliated by washing his mouth out with soap to learn him a lesson, and then later that afternoon, his dad took off his belt and gave him a good thrashing. When he was caught masturbating in the chicken coop, his mother flogged the palm of his right hand with a ruler, and for two weeks, he had to eat supper in the bedroom he shared with his two brothers. After that, he had to memorize Scriptures for an hour every day before going to bed. As if it wasn’t enough, every week he had to sit down with the preacher and listen to the same advice over and over again. But, it still wasn’t enough. After each Sunday school class, he had to give his mom a report, in great detail, and she would emboss it with more stories straight from the Bible.

Yes sir, he was given a proper Christian upbringing. But recently, as we now know, he hadn’t been so sure about it all. That is, he hadn’t been so sure about it until today, at the moment that severed a piece of time out of the infinitely receding past and infinitely projecting future.

Now, at this moment, at the bottom of this scar in the earth, Matthew is once again up and walking and thinking about that strange voice he heard or thought he heard. Dotty is accompanying him. In his mind, that is. His right knee suddenly buckles and he collapses and then he turns his head around, like he usually does, to find out what caused his fall. Nothing. Just the sand almost as fine as dust. No pain. He just crumpled. That’s all.

Funny. This never happened to me before. Not this way at least. As far as I can recall. He gets back up. When in the upright position he yells out, “That blasted voice again? I don’t believe it. What the Sam Hill’s going on?”

Then he sees it.

I say “it” because I have no idea what he sees. All I know is that he sees “it” because it almost blinds him. Putting this in the best words I can, it is epiphany, ecstasy to behold, overwhelming elation, indescribable joy, the blindest of blinding lights, entering him and illuminating him with dazzling intensity the likes of which centuries upon centuries of human history have rarely known.

It carries him away like a trance. It is heavenly bliss of the sort he’d heard about from the preacher and one or two of those people who stand around outside the church house chewing the fat after each sermon. It’s a frenzied flurry of music from some divine choir and a swirling vortex of passion that puts him on cloud nine, in seventh heaven. At this moment, Matthew knows what it was like when Paul was struck blind. When Moses saw the finger of God writing the Ten Commandments on big, flat stones. When Abraham was ready to sacrifice his son and God told him he didn’t have to do it after all. All wrapped into one.

Matthew, at this moment, embraces all moments. He becomes everybody and nobody and he knows everything and nothing and he is right there, thrown to the sand, and he is everywhere and he is past and present and future. He is one of those grains of sand below him and he is the entire world and the heavens. He’s terribly sad and indescribably glad, in love with Dotty and everybody equally, and with Dotty and Dotty alone. He’s within smooth-flowing harmony along with conflict tying itself in knots. He’s Matthew and he isn’t because he’s everybody. He’s in paradise and purgatory.

“I was filled with the Lord, Jesus Christ,” he later said when stating his case.

Right now, at the bottom of the gully, he can’t move a muscle. He’s completely inert. There. On the dust and sand, which is him and he is it. Can’t move. Can’t think. And Dotty? She’s now lost in all this. She’s nowhere, yet she’s everywhere, so diluted in the whole cauldron that she’s nowhere.

The voice is still telling Matthew he’s been chosen. But he can’t move, either to see or hear better or to talk. Still, he now knows the voice is there. He senses it in his heart and gut—surely it should be his soul, why not his soul? He trembles, uncontrollably. Still can’t will himself to move a muscle. Straining to hear the voice again. Can’t. Knows it’s beckoning him. He’s feeling it. What’s it saying now? Must be the same message. Or dictum. It’s dictating and he must rise to the occasion. Dotty’s no longer on his mind. The dictum is. He must obey it. He can’t obey, whatever it is, he must obey…. He doesn’t want to obey it…. He should obey it…. He must obey it…. He’ll obey it…. Somehow….

Obey what? He wasn’t thinking any horrendous, sacrilegious thought he might have been thinking when he heard the dictum, was he? No. He couldn’t have been thinking it. His mind wasn’t doing the thinking. It was his soul. He now resists his own mind’s thinking. He must resist it. For there’s something bigger at hand.

Ah, the voice is coming through again. Faintly this time. Yet, there’s an irresistible force to it. How can he deny this strange, eerie power pressing him into the earth? It is crushing, overwhelming, awe-inspiring, breathtaking, humbling. He knows from that very moment, he is no longer captain of his own ship. He’s not himself, but only a mere carrier, a messenger carrying out a design of unearthly wonder. He is neither himself nor some other, but an “other” other who carries him outside earthly and mundane matters. He transcends everything he has ever experienced: sights, sounds, tastes, aromas, touch. He is beyond himself. He manages to open his mouth and respond to the call.

“Your command is my desire, sir, I am your servant.”

What pleasure this gives him! Passion of the most penetrating kind. He has dedicated heart and soul to the supreme power, the omniscient, all-seeing, all-knowing force, master of the elements, of nature, of all living creatures, and of human creations in his image. The joy of joys, total delight, ineffable bliss. His very existence is inert and put into motion for one reason and one reason only: to carry out otherworldly designs.

And Dotty? Who? Where? Another grain of sand among the infinite number of them strewn across the beaches of the five continents.

Matthew slowly puts himself in an outstretched position, flat, on the dusty sand, with arms extended at ninety degrees relative to his body, and his face down, there, on the dusty sand. He remains there for about fifteen minutes. Then he slowly sits up, lotus-like, eyes bugged, mouth agape, ears perked up. As if he’s raised himself from the dead. In fact, he has. Yes, he’s born anew. Waiting. Waiting for some further dispensation from on high.

Whatever happened that day, Matthew doesn’t exactly remember. He knows he heard a voice and the voice was God. He knows what he knows. He knows he was ordained. Had fate smiled kindly upon him? No. It wasn’t fate at all. What happened had to happen, because there is no way it could not have happened. And now he has to do what he has to do.

After Matthew has his wits more or less under control, he gets up from the gully’s floor and leaves for home. During the days that follow, he returns there often, where it happened. Or where he thinks it happened, because he doesn’t know exactly where it happened. About halfway from where the gully drops vertically around twenty feet and has cut into the desert’s dusty floor between the two ridges of hills, to where it ends its attempt to hide in the fracture it so disrespectfully made in the earth, and spreads out on the desert floor and heads toward the river many miles yonder.

He’s there. Where it might have happened…. No. Correction. There are no mights or ifs because he knows it happened and what he knows, he knows, and so it has to be here. And he knows what he has to do, but he hasn’t done anything yet because he has to think about it. No. That’s not right, because he is no longer a thinker, but a reflector, reflecting this dusty sand here and the desert floor and the floor of the entire earth and these clouds and all the others and the sky up and up with no end in sight.

He has returned here today. And he is reflecting. It’s like there is a mirror in front of him and a mirror behind him and both of them are reflecting themselves, getting smaller and smaller until Matthew’s infinite reflections become a point and the point disappears. That’s why he’s here … no … it’s here, because here’s where everything that was and is and will have been is.

Well, at any rate, he-it’s here, reflecting. He must do what he must do. He knows it and he knows he knows it. He’s who he is and nothing other than who he is; he’s self-reflexive; he’s self-contained; he’s self-sufficient. He can’t be anything other than who he is because there’s nothing other than who he is and who he isn’t, which is nothing. There’s nothing else because if there was something else, he wouldn’t be everything that is … and nothing that is.

An impoverished description, I must admit. Alas, the best I can do is write that he’s here and there is no not-he, because he’s everything. Well, so to speak.

Matthew later tells the local town folks he received a message from on high. His would-be soul mate, Dotty Page, is now on speaking terms with him. She wants him to downplay his claim. She thinks hardly anything is simply an either/or matter, as Matthew is prone to think. For there’s always a possible alternative to each and every pair of choices. Such alternatives bubble up from between the horns of the eithers and the ors. Or as she likes to put it: between the either and the or, there’s almost always some alternative, a middle path.

“It’s what’s in the middle that counts,” she occasionally tells Matthew.

He, of course, registers proper indignant outrage. “Middle, you say!?” Matthew screams out at her. “That’s the focus of the worst possible sin! The devil’s tool!”

“You’re bringing that sick idea up again? No, Matthew. You’ve got it all wrong. What I mean is, there’s always a third possibility, some other option, and then another one, and another one … with no end in sight. Look for new options.”

“I’ll have none of it. There’s either true or false or good or evil. I will either do what I have to do or not. And I will do it. Period.”

Leonard Morris, a mutual friend, believes in Matthew, even though others say he’s suffering from self-deception, that he’s a dreamer, an idealist, a fabricator of illusions. That’s no way to get things done in the real world, they say. It’s no way to get on with life. Another friend, Jeanie Huntsman, just wants to gab, about anything and everything, believing that’s genuine communication. So, she hardly pays any attention to Matthew’s dilemma and never ceases telling him Dotty’s for him and he’s for her, so they should stay together. John Farnsworth, who was once a good friend, rejects Matthew outright, like a lot of his former friends do. So it goes. Some are in Matthew’s camp, some reject him, and others pay him little regard. Almost all of them have one thing in common. They think like Matthew, in either/or terms. As far as they can tell, Matthew’s either got his head on straight or he’s off his rocker.

And Matthew? At this very moment? He’s still here, now sitting on the dusty sand. He lifts his face toward the heavens, toward the dwelling place of his maker. And….

Now what? he asks himself.

In the right side corner of his eye, he thinks he sees something. Up there. At the top of the fissure. Something that shouldn’t be there. An oblong, light-gray patch. Matthew focuses his eyes better to counteract the waning sun’s rays. Why, it’s a coyote!

He contemplates Matthew. Matthew contemplates him. A few fleet seconds go by. In the approaching dusk. Soon to be dark. Then he vanishes, the coyote, that is. He doesn’t turn to the right or the left. Just vanishes. Into thin air.

The coyote was reflecting Matthew, who is here, and Matthew was reflecting the coyote, up there. But, not anymore. The coyote was up there and now there’s nothing at all.

That’s it, Matthew reckons. I was the coyote that was reflecting me, while I was reflecting him, and everything else. Then it … he … disappeared. Maybe he went off to chase a jackrabbit.

Along a counterclockwise path. That is what Matthew means. That’s how jackrabbits run when they’re pursued. No straight line for them. Around and around, counterclockwise. So, if Matthew … that is, the coyote, goes on, he will eventually return more or less to the same spot, again and again, in pursuit of the jackrabbit. What goes around comes around.

Is that my destiny? Going around and around in circles? Getting nowhere?

Matthew thinks about it. When two coyotes are chasing a jackrabbit, they collaborate, one chasing, the other waiting to take over for her mate. They go around and around, in pursuit of the jackrabbit, finally exhausting it. Leaving it lying on the ground, with its ribs heaving out of control. Then, it’s chow time. The coyote … Matthew … has his destiny cut out for him.

A vicious circle, until I reach the end of my rope? Yes. But unlike the coyote, I have no mate to give me a breather after every circle. But, naw, none of that. No feeling sorry for myself.

After all, Matthew’s here. Isn’t he? Yeah. Here. Where he received the word. Where he co-participated with the word. Now he knows who he is and he knows what he has to do and where to go because he has to do it. Straight as an arrow. Onward.

In some convoluted way, he knows what will happen to him because it has already happened. Dotty is of little help. His parents are shouting praises to the Lord because he’s found Christ in the proper way. Other adults are saying he’s strange: “What in tarnation’s come over that kid? He’s lost his wits, fit for the loony bin? He’d better shape up or ship out. His dad needs to slap some sense into him.” And so on.

Matthew pays them no mind, for he knows he will go into the desert. Undergo his baptism of fire. Isn’t that how it must be? Go forth! Into the wilderness. Get purified. Then spread the word. Save the sinners. That will be Matthew’s mission. He will change them in the blink of an eye. He can do it because he has the spirit. He is the spirit and the spirit is him. He’ll not just talk the talk, but he’ll also walk the walk. In sandals. Sandals? Yes! That’s it! Sandals. The original way. The real way.

He later knows he will carry out his mission in Mexico. That’s where they need him. The poor and destitute. They must accept Jesus in the fitting way. Matthew is the way. They must see and understand the way. Matthew is that way. They must also better their economic condition. Matthew is the way. He’ll guide them. Like a good shepherd and his flock.

I, Matthew, among the chosen few? Yes!

He can never say never. Never say no. And yet, he thinks, How is it that I can be counted among the select few? Who am I? Nobody. Surely I can’t be chosen. Or can I? Maybe I can, maybe I can’t.

Doubt, uncertainty, vagueness, ambiguity, unpredictability, fuzzy boundaries. They are all somehow beginning to seep in. Very gradually. He must overcome them. But he can’t…. But he must…. How can he do it? There is apparently no how. Why should he even try? But he must. He’s been called. So he will….

That’s my problem, he thinks. I should be thinking about nothing more than doing it. The way my parents taught me. And the Bible and the preacher.

But there’s now that lingering note of doubt. And with it, indecision, hesitation, insecurity. Why? Maybe it’s because, like his mother tells him, he reads too much. All those worldly books and magazines and newspapers and hour upon hour of browsing the Internet?

But if so, he thinks, how is it that I could have been chosen?

His mother once spotted The God That Failed by Arthur Koestler among the books he checked out of the library. She flew into a rage. “How can you? Have you become one of those awful, secular, humanist sinners?” Little did she know that the “god that failed” was communism. Koestler had been indoctrinated and then he realized it was a false god and he left the secular doctrine for good. Matthew drew inspiration from the book. It revealed the evil empire for what it was during the 1940s and 1950s and how it was destined to fail until the day that wall came tumbling down.

Yes, Matthew does good. And he knows it. For he has been chosen. So he must gird up his loins and carry out his mission on earth. He must cast away his doubts and get it on.

And yet, how he occasionally longs for those straightforward, unperturbed, and apparently unfettered, choices. Simple. Understandable. True or false. Good or evil. Christianity or everything else. Simple. They offer a world of clear-cut opposites. They pay homage to mysteries, wonderment, and at the same time, they promise a knowable and predictable world. They instill clarity, certitude, control. More important, they guarantee a knowable God.

Why, then, do I find myself slipping into this swampy morass, this jumbled, chaotically cobbled manner of thinking? Am I really chosen? Yes, but maybe no, somehow. Well, maybe it’s both yes and no. It can’t be. So, is it neither yes nor no? Neither yes nor no because there’s something else, something new and undecipherable? Like Dotty says? No, that’s too messy. I must simply say ‘Yes!’ Never ‘No!’ But ‘No!’ there always is. Lurking in the diabolical shadows. I must believe, on no uncertain terms…. But I can’t, or can I? I have to … I will.

But how? Maybe I can believe at different levels? I’ll try it, just to see what happens? But that would be something like lying to myself. But, it isn’t lying. Not really. Then it must be like disbelieving or like what they call agnosticism where I neither believe nor disbelieve.

In whichever case, I have to resist becoming like Buridan’s fabled donkey. He is thirsty and hungry after a hard day’s work. A bale of hay is placed on one side of him and a bucket of water on the other side. He looks back and forth and back again, caught between the either and the or, unable to decide. He finally dies on the spot, either out of thirst or hunger or both. Nobody knows which. And me? I must choose, somehow.

At least for the time being, Matthew’s in a mental glitch, incapable of making an irreversible decision and acting on it, because of the slippage in his customary, bivalent way of thinking.

He must decide. He can’t decide. Or can he? Yes, he can. Because he heard the voice. He, just an average guy, nothing extraordinary about him, never really excelled at anything. He heard it. No mistake about it. He must have been chosen. He had to have been chosen. He was chosen. Wasn’t he? Of course he was! So what is he going to do about it? Do what he has to do. Why should he do otherwise? How could he? He’ll do it. Nothing more, nothing less.

He can be the light of the world. Because he is born again. His newfound purpose, his grand message to the world, is that everybody must be born again, and who is not cannot enter the Kingdom of God. Everybody must aspire to Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, not in the flesh, but in the spirit, for the spirit of God will dwell within all.

Matthew reasons, My body is the temporary dwelling place of soul and spirit. Is it not? It is my heart that feels, my mind that thinks, and my will that follows God’s will. When somebody is born again, like I am, the spirit will no longer have much need of the body, for ultimately it will spend its days in this life and everlasting days in God’s presence. God’s presence? Who am I to hope for so much? How can I so much as dream of it? But I can hope, I can dream, I can become God’s messenger.

Matthew’s body and soul and vocal chords erupt in a monumental, Yes! Praise the Lord!

Matthew has made his decision. No doubt about it this time. This is the beginning, the word, launching him out and beyond to fulfill his preordained destiny. He has chosen, definitely. He is sanctified. He is no longer of this world. He has been eyewitness to Christ. He embodies Christ. He is the very gospel of Christ.