“The fires that do not go out.”

M.

I remember standing in the middle of a night club and thinking, “there is something here.” I did not see a sea of sinners or a drunken mob. I saw the mask of all reality slip and underneath was a hunger to be seen, to be happy, to forget the troubles all around and to focus on the genuine need to be loved and understood. The electricity was not simply desperation or intoxication. It was finding, in the middle of all that noise, the fire that does not go out. It is a shout from our most primal state.

Religion wraps this shout in rules, governments want to put it in the context of purpose and profit, business concerns want to channel a supply chain directly to it and hedonists want to live in that curve of the universe forever. It can burn you. It is dangerous. It can consume the people around you. But none of that is final. The fire is. It will burn brightly and to the end of all time. It will go out but then it will be lit again. We cannot cure it. We can only learn to live in it. Not revel, not concede, not push it down or up or over, not even worship it. No. It calls us to the deeper things when we despair under it. And the deeper things will answer it. This is our faith.