devotional sentences

Have you ever found yourself going down a street at night, anytime between 11 and 3 (which are really the same time as people are going to and out of the music clubs - I'm assuming a college town ambiance), and caught yourself, "what am I doing out here?" And you don't even feel like a human being, but you feel like an animal: a wolf, for instance. Perhaps you've "become wolf" in some Deleuzean way, and you don't even know who Deleuze is. That's all right: you'll figure it out, when you've time to study and reflect. But you ask yourself, "what am I doing out here?" And you have the uncomfortable realization that "normal" people are in bed, at home, and,  if up at all, reading a volume of literature or philosophy, sipping scotch. You are aware of people being normal as you pass the houses: most without lights but some with a dim light on - testifying to what you've just thought. There's normal life to be had - or quiet life to be had. Right now, that is not the life you're exemplifying - not as your walk down the street in the dark and the street lamp above you times out. Suddenly it's very dark. And you think, "I need to get back. I need to turn around." Is it already too late. Afraid of meeting a stranger in the dark; you are that stranger. You're suddenly strange to yourself. 

When you get back to your room and your bed, you marvel at how cool and wet your skin is. The days are hot but the night is cooler but very humid. You are covered in dampness. Your heart is beating loud and its sounds fills your ears. "What have I just done," you ask yourself. You look for reassurance: your books and music testify that you are a serious person. Finally your pulse slows down. Your clothes and skin dry out. Was it really that important? Putting yourself in such a state. What did you hope to encounter? Did you think you'd find some answer or get an answer? But you are left with the same desperate questions. Are they really that desperate? Is there nothing in your past that you can't think back on and ponder how it is now different?  That you've already survived this crisis. 

Now you are back in your room and you are safe. You have time to consider how emotions dominate even the coolest thinker. You had been a wolf. At the same time people were out who were birds or rabbits. Some of them, like you, have encountered the uncanny sense of meeting themselves. Fearing strangers, they realize that they are the strangest people that they know. In the past people would sit atop pillars or hide away in hermit caves for this experience. Now the hermit caves and pillars are inside of us. Now the loneliness wraps around us, clothes us, like dampness in the night.

In the past people might open a Bible, hoping to reread a passage of comfort. Now the Bible seems strange. Passages that once comforted seem like wolves or birds or rabbits let loose upon the world. Or else people open a Bible and it is like they opened an out of date cookbook. No one prepares this anymore - this recipe is for a wood stove! Or else they pull a volume down and read, Hegel for instance. And they find a Bible - the story of David and Jonathan, Deborah and Barak, Elijah and Gehazi, Jesus and Paul. I should have used a cookbook as my example, of course, because that would make a fine idea to bracket this concept. It is no matter. The question is how, having summoned your strangeness, what you will do with it. 

Our strangeness is like the Golem - a creature from the clay of our souls. On its forehead Truth and Death - depending on where we strike out from here.