What Me, Worry?

"Everybody is wondering what and where they all came from

Everybody is worrying 'bout

Where they're gonna go when the whole thing's done

But no one knows for certain and so it's all the same to me

I think I'll just let the mystery be

Some say they're going to a place called glory

And I ain't saying it ain't a fact

But I've heard that I'm on the road to purgatory

And I don't like the sound of that

I believe in love and I live my life accordingly

But I choose to let the mystery be"

-Iris Dement

If I were creating my own church and assembling a hymnal, that song written by Iris Dement and popularized by 10,000 Maniacs would rank high on the list. After several decades of pondering on these things, going to the Domain for my pseudo-seminary that ended in a pseudo-collar, it's about all I have to say about all that. No one knows.

I'm reminded of Ray's frustration at the end of Field of Dreams, the greatest movie ever made, when Shoeless Joe won't let him go into the cornfield and see the mysterious place where these generations of long-dead ballplayers retreat laughing into specters at the end of a day's game. Shoeless Joe explains, good naturedly but at the same time with a measure of parental sternness, that he can't go in there because he can't go in there, that it's not for him to know what's hiding behind that curtain of cornstalks. Some sublime theology going on there.

Peg's generally having nothing of it. And not just Field of Dreams, which annoys her to no end because Ray uses a hoe to check the roots of a cornstalk in a thousand acre field ("No farmer would do that!" she exclaims whenever the scene comes up), but the larger notion of leaving matters of death and what it all means as something we just can't resolve. I've finally found her repeating back to me the phrase I've used often as I've grappled and given up: "I don't know what's out there, but I'm prepared to be surprised either way."

That's humility, the start of wisdom for all of us. And a kernel of hope hides in the proclamation, to the extent it presupposes an "out there" that may be nothing at all. Maybe so. It's not for me to know.