scattered thoughts... DOGMA (1999)

seclusion is never the antidote for any kind of remorse. when one's soul quietens, one either goes to a place of light to await ecstacy in joy of knowing God... or it goes to a dark place. a very dark place. and time does not heal such wounds... the darkness sears at the gaping flesh until it festers. "it is not good for man to be alone." Gen 2:18a

but how does a human "know" God? is that something any person can say with certainty? yes, we have the fruits. we have 5 CS's (from the Alpha programme). we have priests to confess our doubts to. we have... quite a bit of logic and reasoning to work things out really. but what is hardest to obtain is that certainty which comes from self-control (Gal 5:22). a certain discipline which, at some point, means giving up the freedom to sin, the freedom to eat that expressly forbidden fruit, the freedom to cave in to that emotion which courses through the flesh like a tsunami bent on knocking everything over.

order. the one simple value which has become so rare today. the one indulgence which could prove our similarity with the Creator. yet... order has become compulsive - a disorder in itself - or it has become antithetical to our existence: synonymous with bureaucracy, rationality to the point of irrationality, an iron cage of oppressive mania.

but chaos... cannot be good, can it? chaos is the mark of the hypocrite, the hopeless, the hedonistic, the hesitant, those filled with hubris, hatred, and hardness of heart. chaos cannot be ideal... for it has no type? and yet... chaos theory predicts well. there is randomness everywhere... and that has actually allowed things to work in some form of order!

God is not dogmatic - religion is. so Kevin Smith got a few details wrong (plenary indulgences are never obtained via simple actions: the penitent has to receive the sacraments of reconciliation and communion on top of it), but he captures quite a good angle with the eclectic mix really. the many fantastic/ludicrous questions (why do angels have no free will? how can these 2 get kicked out of heaven then? is God gendered?) cheapen the premise for bringing up good ones (can an abortionist still be a practicing Catholic? why are we here? is God mad?) but ultimately it strikes the fundamentalist hardest (NT God became nice because the angel of death resigned... Jesus had blood siblings... Catholics are really just hypocrites...) which leaves it with little wiggle room in reality, really. not that the incessant swearing or the awkward juxtapositioning of the sacred with the sexual matters.

many things are going on underneath even when the surface appears serenely calm. beneath the layered pretenses of words, meanings, and symbols, the soul struggles to eke out an existence. every action, every thought, every interconnectible morsel of non-nothingness... is evidence of so much more - if only we knew how to look, how to listen, how to interpret. yet we hardly even try. all we think of is the doing, not the being. and even then... we forget to thank God for the gift of existence.

we dream... of nothingness.