The world is a harsh and horrible place.
Our new neighbor is old and hates telephone wires. “They’re ugly,” she says, “and they block out the sky.” We have just moved from a fresh suburb in Colorado to a worn street in Maryland. Out west there are no telephone poles; they figured out how to bury wires underground when the world went forward, so poles don’t clutter the crisp lines of new condos. Back east the world has rushed forward, too, but the poles are still watching over it, leaning now with age, like weathered trees holding creeping vines.
In general, our neighbor tells us, she hates progress. She has lived in Frederick for many decades. “Has anything changed for the better in that time?” I ask her, half joking. She gives the question a fair chance. She can’t think of a thing.
The world is a harsh and horrible place.
Charlie Kirk was murdered. I did not want to write about it. To be perfectly (perhaps unwisely) honest, I would have been happy never to have heard of Charlie Kirk, wreathed as he was in politics. I don’t like knowing the news. But the news likes knowing me, so I find myself mourning his death and worrying at the sadness of it all.
I worry about the world: its warped frustration, its frantic, rabbit-hole despair. Particularly I worry about the church: I have read that Charlie Kirk was a martyr, but it seems to me he was killed more for his alignment with Trump than with Jesus, less for Christ crucified than for guns carried. What is the gospel if we wrap those things together heavily like telephone wires?
“They should rip it all down.” Our neighbor points at the tangle of electrical cables above our house, at the wires swinging into and out of their crooked metal nest. All of it is easy to miss if you don’t think about it, but now that she has called it to the front of the world it’s all I can see: wicked, unnecessary, angry dirt on a clean page.
The world is a harsh and horrible place.
I agree, I think, as I follow the line of our neighbor’s finger to the wire. But just then a squirrel dances across it and leaps to the pole, laughs at us, scurries up and away again. And somehow, from beyond the far edge of the world, silver light has threaded through cold space to meet us here. Through the telephone wires, the moon is rising.
