Have you looked at the flesh of a nonagenarian lately? It looks like lifeless suet, full of bumps and scars, and stains. It’s not attractive, nor was it meant to be. When someone young – someone of mating age – looks at such flaccid and discolored flesh, the bio-message sent is DO NOT MATE! When muscle tone has turned to flab and smooth young skin devolves to lumps and cracks and liver spots, their net effect is not to give the sweet young thing next door the heavy hots. Instinctively, we know that if the outer husk is shot, the working parts within are also likely full of rot.
My friends and I were joking just the other day about something we’d all experienced in yoga class while doing shoulder stands and downward dog. Our ancient flesh, amorphous now, hung limp from upper arms and baggy thighs. It looked bizarre, grotesque and unfamiliar, all at once. You think that I exaggerate, but trust me, this is true: It takes a moment to deduce that what you see before your eyes – the lifeless mass of stuff just hanging there – is really you.
My wife had a few colleagues up to the house for a meeting last week, but I was pleased not to attend. I took my laptop, smartphone, and a beer across the way, and hung out in my so-called studio. It was cooler in there than outside, but still hot. I took off my shirt and sat down at the desk. Thank God I kept my lederhosen on.
About an hour later, when the meeting had adjourned, a woman friend of Kathryn’s, whom I knew, but not real well, came over to say ‘Hi’ before she left. Having knocked on the door, she just let herself in. I had stood up but didn’t have time to get my shirt back on – so, suddenly, well, there she was, face to face with a hairy old man with a pendulous paunch, semi-nude, whose sagging flesh had clearly lost the war with gravity. At first, I thought I was more shocked than she, but then she simply turned around, without a word, and left. Yet, even as this shocking / shaming sitcom scene unfurled, I had a huge epiphany about God and The World.
In many ancient systems of belief, including The Old Testament, it’s said that if you chance to see The Lord with naked eyes, you’ll be struck blind, or even die. I’ve always taken that to mean, symbolically at least, that normally we see the world through many layers of protective distortion. Fear, superstition, rationalization, culturally-shared belief systems are defense mechanisms which shield us from a mystery that’s too intense to bear with naked eyes. But what I understood that day as Daisy Mae lurched, seasick, out the door, was something more.
The ancient myth of dropping dead if you come face to face with God was something God, Herself, or at the very modest least, her P.R. team, invented to discourage prying eyes. She would like us to think that a person who sees her will die, because she’s embarrassed and even more timeworn than I. I’m in my latter seventies. The cosmos, we are told, is now 14 billion years old. The Lord is very clearly, thus, 200 million times as old as I. The big blue cover-up she wears to hide her wrinkled hide is called The Sky. Now you know why.