Knowing God

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love,
I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.
If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love,
I am nothing.
If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love,
I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind.
It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails.

But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.




I feel most at home in empty auditoriums. Something about the stillness, the barren deadness after a show, the anticipation for the next show, the oddness of it being vacant after being filled with so much life...it draws me into a transcendent peace and contentment. Laying on the floor of a dark stage after hours, I feel as if I'm every age I'll ever be all at once.

"All the world's a stage," Shakespeare put it, and he's right. Sitting alone in an empty theatre is humbling. You remove yourself from the normal functionality of the thing (action, excitement, adventure) and reflect on it. When the curtain's down and the people are gone, things look really different.

Same with life. When you draw away from the activity and let yourself be still--look long out a window--embrace the quiet--invite back all the memories you suppressed--you see it all from a different angle.

Today I was thinking about the whirlwind of the past three years I've lived in New York. New Yorkers look at people from the country like they're stupid because they don't "know things."

What is knowledge? My head grew large in New York, but my heart and spirit might have suffered. Maybe they weren't fed well enough--ironically--in all of the excess information about ideas, concepts, God, politics, religion, the world. I thought thinking about those things brought me closer to the truth (and they can), but none of it matters if I don't know God. Know as in love.

God is love. Knowing him is knowing love, and without it, there's no meaning.