Extravagance |

by Nick Hayden
November 20, 2015

“If I were God, I never would have made procreation such a messy, intimate, emotional, painful affair. It’s crude and unclean and sometimes horribly unpleasant. I would never have made trees. I would have made lampposts. Goldfish, but not the sawfish, in my world; cats, but not the cougar; grass, but not the ivy. It is fortunate that I am not God. He enjoys the beastly disorder of forests and rivers and caves. […] And so we build hospitals and office building and laboratories to shield against the pain — and hide us from real joy.”

The above-quote is from a little known project that preceeded Children of the Wells by nearly a decade. It was called The Story Project and it was a collection of the fictional blogs from a varied and interesting group of fictional writers who lived together in a New England mansion. The above writer’s name was Vincent, and he lived in a meticulously spotless lab in isolation from others. He preferred to control his environment.

I’m no Vincent, but I feel the draw of ordering my life “just so.” I tend to want to use my time efficiently, to edit things repeatedly, to balance my checkbook accurately, to cross items off my checklist daily. And these things, indeed, are well and good.

But there is something that kills in these things, an instinct that grinds the edges off life and mechanizes it. God created the world in an orderly manner, but he did not create it as Henry Ford might. The universe might be compared to a cunning made watch, but it so often defies that easy description. There is a diversity, a wildness, a sense of surprise and head-scratching weirdness to the created world. You need not look far into space or deep into the ocean or long through the aisles of Wal-mart to see what a strange cacophony of men and animal and galactic bodies we’re surrounded by day-in, day-out.

We miss something, I think, by isolating ourselves in safe little havens of calendars and Netflix and Internet-relationships. We are safer, but we are not better. For a writer and reader, it is like this: if the stories I create and consume draw me into myself, I have perhaps failed to understand. If they draw me out, I have grown wiser and better.

It is nearly the holiday season. It is nearly time to celebrate with some sense of indulgence because to celebrate is to overdo–to cook more food than is necessary, to decorate a little too much, to thank God that he gives us not just nutrients, but taste, not just the potato, but the genius to mash them and drape them with gravy.

And soon we shall gaze upon the Nativity and see a baby who is actually God, the Creator disguised in flesh, a wild, inexplicable extravagance–astounding, inconceivable, but not so out of step with the God who thought we must have both the jellyfish and the giraffe.

There is a beastly disorder to loving others, to living in the world as it is, in seeing the God of the universe in all he has made. It is not safe, and I dare say I am not good at it myself, but this holiday, perhaps you and I can embrace a bit of that messiness and enjoy well this weird, wonderful world all the more.