ordinary

Cosmic scum like us

February 17, 2017 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

Of the many times I mourn those who live in some city or another, night is when I feel sorry for them most.

I do not speak of crime, or more the threat of it—how so many in those cramped-close jungles of concrete and steel must lock themselves away along with the sun lest they be set upon by evil-doers. I remember taking a trip to Baltimore years ago to visit some of my wife’s kin. The windows of their house looked out upon busy streets filled with litter and exhaust. There wasn’t much to be seen, which was fortunate given I couldn’t see much anyway for the steel bars set over the glass to keep out intruders. I remember wondering how it was that anyone would live in such a way. A comfortable cell is still a cell.

I rather mourn city folk at night for the simple reason they are not afforded the luxury of a view on par with my own. Step out into my yard on any evening when the moon is small and the clouds scattered to the other side of the mountain, you’ll see what I mean. The stars in the Virginia sky are a wonder this time of year, so clear and close you are afraid your breath will chase them away like bugs. Millions of them scattered to all directions, never-ending and straight on to the very curve of the earth, divided overhead by a great milky arm of our galaxy itself. So many stars you cannot fathom to begin counting them all.

I like it out there, looking at them all. Few things in life offer such a perspective.

We humans have been staring at the stars for quite some time and for just that sort of thing—to gain a better view of ourselves and our place. Back when the smartest people around believed Earth occupied the center of the universe, it was fairly easy to see humanity as something special, set apart. Something fashioned by the very hand of God.

Of course the whole center-of-the-universe thing didn’t pan out. Turns out we’re not so special at all, cosmically speaking. The universe is vast and growing more so every second, and just about every part of it we can see is mostly the same. Ours is merely one planet among billions at the far edge of one galaxy among trillions, which over the centuries has changed the way we see ourselves.

Special? Hardly. Needed? Don’t even go there.

Humanity is about as inconsequential as a thing can be. We’re all no more than a happy accident. As the astronomer Carl Sagan laid our situation out, “We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star.” Stephen Hawking made it sound even more pessimistic: “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet.”

Yay us, right?

Call me crazy, but I am of the opinion this sort of thinking has seeped down to infect us all. Doesn’t seem to matter where I go or what I read or who I listen to, it’s all some version of that—nothing really matters because nobody really matters, so screw it because we’re all gonna die and be forgotten anyway. If the politicians or the media or celebrity culture doesn’t ruin us, we’re sure to ruin ourselves.

We’re not all that special.

Then again, maybe we are.

For all the talk about how our planet is so mundane, scientists are discovering the universe itself seems fine-tuned for life. Which is strange, given it seems for now that we’re the only kids on the block. So far the planets discovered beyond our solar system aren’t much Earth-like at all, much less places fit to support the sort of life we know. Intelligence seems a difficult thing to produce in the great beyond of space and time. It takes a lot more than water and oxygen and a few billion years of a stable environment to make even cosmic scum like us.

If that leaves you feeling a little lonely, you’re not alone.

Being special has its drawbacks. Given the size of the universe and the trillions of galaxies holding billions of stars, chances must be pretty good there is at least something out there, or someone. All that wasted space would be a shame otherwise.

But maybe even that doesn’t matter. The universe may be immense and growing, but the speed of light is still fixed. Life could be flourishing in the farthest corners of the cosmos, we’ll never know because we’ll never get there. Even over the span of thousands of years, we’ll be fortunate to visit even the closest stars. Maybe we’ll find someone to talk to. Maybe we’ll have only ourselves.

It seems arrogant on the face of it, believing everything I see in my small patch of Virginia sky exists for us alone.

I’ll be honest and say I have my doubts on that. But I also believe we’re much more than the insignificant inhabitants of an insignificant planet turning around an insignificant star.

We may not be so special in the grand scheme of things, but in our own tiny part of that grand scheme we certainly are.

We are each needed. Special. Wholly unique and so infused with a value far beyond our reckoning.

And maybe for the sake of us all, we should start treating each other like it.

Maybe next year

January 2, 2014 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

I found the invitation on the front door last Saturday afternoon, affixed there by a thick strip of camouflage duct tape. The New Year’s Eve party at a neighbor’s house around the corner has been an annual affair for as long as we’ve lived at the edge of the wood. According to the card, they’d decided to step things up a bit. Barbecue was on the menu. Entertainment would be provided by the big screen that arrived on Christmas morning and the pool table that arrived the Christmas before. Fireworks at the stroke of midnight. As if to employ one last effort to state the obvious, underlined on the inside of the card was a promise that it would be “The best damn night I’ll ever have.”

I didn’t go.

I laced up my boots and grabbed my hat and took a stroll around the corner to deliver my regrets in a proper way. The neighbors understood. We’ve known one another for quite a while.

New Year’s has always been a quiet time for me. The circumstances lend itself to a certain introspection. The last of December to the first of January is always a good time to take stock of things. It’s a fine spot to pause in our travels and look around, to see how far we’ve come and how far we’ve yet to go, and to make sure we haven’t somehow gotten lost along the way. Serious stuff that, to me, requires a good dose of solemnity. There is an almost spiritual quality to those final hours of the year, when all is dark and quiet and it feels as though the whole world is holding its breath. It’s a holy time, one nearly on par with that grand morning seven days prior when I woke to magic and joy.

I tried the New Year’s Eve party idea exactly once, as a senior in high school. It was all fine until the hands of the antique clock on the mantle neared their union. Drinks were poured and toasts raised. Couples clutched one another in anticipation. Those who had come in search of company scrambled to find someone—anyone—to kiss at midnight. The home was an old colonial built well before the Revolution, surrounded by woods and barren cornfields. I ended up in the middle of those fields as the old turned to the new, staring at the stars. To this day, that is the best New Year’s I’ve ever had. It has become the standard by which I have measured all the rest.

That’s what I do now. No parties, no alcohol, no whooping and hollering. Come midnight on the first, I take a walk outside. I look at the stars and I breathe deep, and I ready myself for one more trip through the calendar. Did it this January first, too. I could hear the neighbors celebrating. I wished them well.

For years I thought myself a misfit for preferring quiet to clamor during this time of year. I don’t any longer. I finally figured out that to me every new year is a blank page, and there is nothing that fills me at once with more excitement and fear as that. It’s a chance to write a new story, to begin again, even as I know failure is inevitable. I will stumble through many of my days just as I stumble through many of my words, trying to find the right order and the right tone, all the while understanding that perfection will be impossible.

It’s a tough thing, this living. It hurts and scars. Maybe that’s why so many choose to trade one year for the next by plunging themselves into the nearest party. I know for sure that’s why I choose a little quiet. A little perspective.

When the clock at my house turned from 13 to 14, I was sitting in a lawn chair in my backyard. Above me, the Milky Way stretched in a dull ribbon from one end of the sky to the next. The silence was broken by the boom and shine of fireworks. I watched as they burned bright, only to fade to quiet once more. Just like us, I suppose. Oh, but how they burned. They lit the sky in wonder and daylight and chased the shadows away, and I toasted them with a glass of iced tea.

Maybe I’ll go next year.

New Years with the Devil

January 2, 2012 by Billy Coffey 24 Comments

photo-341 He came to me on New Years Eve as I stood outside gazing up at the stars—not so much a person (and not so much a light, as the Book says he can appear), but as a shadow in my own thoughts. He stood with me there beneath the moon and Venus and Orion, saying nothing at first, letting me speak because he can do no damage unless invited first.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him.

And he answered that he was roaming throughout the earth, going back and forth on it.

“You still do that?”

Oh yes, he answered, oh yes indeed, I have done so for ages and will for ages more. Nothing gives me greater pleasure.

“Not many people believe in you anymore,” I told him. “You know that, right?”

He was well aware of that. In fact, he surprised me by saying that was what he wanted. It made things easier, he said, when it came to his work.

“Guess this is a pretty rough time of the year for you, huh?” I smiled as I said that, not because it was funny but because it was true. “You must hate Christmas more than the ACLU.”

True, he said. Christmas and Easter were not his favorite things. And he confessed that it was not so much the joy and peace that bothered him as it was the hope. He said he hated hope most of all. But tonight was New Years, and there was no better time for him.

“Why’s that?”

Really? he asked, and in my mind I saw him shake his head in wonder. You really don’t know? Why, think about it. How many people this moment are huddled together in bars and at parties with drinks in their hands? How many right now are making their resolutions (he told me he loved resolutions almost as much as our nonbelief) and promising themselves they will do better this time around? As if things could change so easily just with the turning of the calendar!

He chuckled then, and there was a chill in his laugh that even the December wind could not match.

How many people out there want nothing more than to put this year behind them? he asked me. How many want to drink those memories away? And how many think this next year will be everything this year wasn’t? I’ll change, they say. I’ll do better. But in the end it never works, and do you know why?

“Why?”

Because change hurts. Because change won’t come until it hurts more to stay the same than it does to become something different. And that’s where I win. People will endure a plain life even if they want something more, because a plain life is a painless one.

He said something else to me then. It was soft and swallowed by the wind, but I think he said that he will always win so long as we believe we are ordinary. I’m almost positive that’s what he said.

He left me then under the stars. Midnight came and went, bringing with it another year—365 days that promise the same hope and fear and longing that every year before it has held.

I hope he doesn’t come back, even though I know he will. He comes to us all sooner or later, whether we believe in him or not.

This I know: the hope I long for and the change I want in myself won’t come as easy as the turning of a calendar page. It will be hard for me. For you, too. It will often hurt and sometimes seem impossible. But I think that’s how it should be.

None of us should want a plain life.

Because none of us are ordinary.

The second biggest lie

July 13, 2009 by Billy Coffey 39 Comments

Being a parent of young children is all about deciding which parts of the world you let in now and which you keep out as long as possible.

For instance.

News? Out. There is no good news. News is meant to depress people. But Sunday morning comics is in. Comics are meant to make you laugh.

Hannah Montana? No. Phineas and Ferb? Yes.

Pro wrestling? Not hardly. But baseball can always provide both quality entertainment and much education.

You get the idea.

This applies to all things spiritual as well. God and Jesus and angels are definitely in, but the darker side of theology goes unmentioned. My kids don’t know what hell is. Or demons. They don’t understand that there are some people in this world who hate their faith and them for having it. The world is a nasty place. I figure part of my job for now is to do all I can to keep that nastiness away. They’ll find out about it all sooner or later.

And maybe sooner.

Our nighttime routine was interrupted yesterday evening by this inquiry from my daughter: “Daddy, who’s Satan?”

The question caught me by surprise. If hell and demons were temporarily off limits, then certainly Satan was, too. Seven-year-olds have fantastic imaginations. Having the thought of a horned and pitchfork-tailed demon rolling around in her mind would make for some long nights.

But what could I tell her? That Satan is the embodiment of evil? That he is darkness so thick that you had to brush it away with a hand? That he is a fallen angel who prowls the earth in search of souls to murder?

No way.

“Daddy?” she said again.

“Um…” I said. “Well, Satan is (someone? something?) bad.”

“The baddest?”

“Yes, the baddest.”

She thought about that and said, “What makes him the baddest?”

“The Bible says he’s a liar,” I told her.

“Daddy, everybody lies,” she retorted. “Even me.”

I decided not to pursue that last little bit of information and instead file it away for later. I really wanted to know what she had lied about.

“But he’s the worst liar ever,” I said.

More thinking. “What’s the worst lie he tells?”

“That God doesn’t love you.”

“I know God loves me, Daddy,” she said.

“That’s good. But maybe one day you’ll start thinking that isn’t true. If that happens, then you just remember that’s just a big, fat lie.”

She nodded and then asked, “What’s the second?”

“The second what?”

“What’s the second biggest lie he tells?”

I opened my mouth to answer, and then closed it. What’s the second biggest lie? I had no idea. I’d never really thought about it. To me, there had always been the first and then the rest. Ranking them beyond that seemed a little unnecessary.

But as I sat there and stared into her eyes, I thought about my life and all the lies I had been told. And then I thought about the lies we’ve all been told.

The best falsehoods are the ones that aren’t told to us as much as they are felt by us. One we accept as truth because that’s what the evidence states.

Those we fall for every time.

It’s easy to lose sight of who we are. Our mistakes and regrets are piled upon one another as a monument to our failure. Stacked high up, blocking the sun. And the Son. It’s hard to see the light when you’re standing in your own shadow.

We carry so much, don’t we? So much knowledge of not only what we’ve done, but what we’re capable of doing. That bad in us is so much easier to see than the good. We dwell upon the depths to which we can plumb but never give thought to the heights to which we can ascend.

There is a holy spark within us all. The thumbprint of the Almighty is stamped upon our hearts. There is a righteous power within us all to rise above where and who we are to become better and more. Too often we limp through our days when we should walk upright, all because we deny the great truth of our existence—we are more than we appear.

“Daddy,” my daughter said again, “what’s the second biggest lie?”

I tucked her beneath the blankets and kissed her forehead.

“That we are all ordinary,” I said.