Darkness II

I've doing a lot of thinking about the way I see life. I am very much surprised on what I have found so far.
It seems that my lenses, the color in which I see things is always in the perspective of pain, darkness and brokenness as a way to redeem the unfairness in this world. I've been observing more and more the way I react to things and mostly the way I interpret them, and I have come to the conclusion that I am fascinated by the dark side of our hearts.
We all have one. We all are born with it. Sin is the unpleasant companion of our hearts and with it, death marks us as seal that we desperately long to get rid of. How could we not be full of sorrow and despair, feeling all so lonely and lost, hurt ever wondering if our wounds will ever heal, if even while not being phisically there, we lost our first and true home to a sneaky, brilliant liar, and ever since we are lost.
Two nights ago I had the privilege of having dinner with a friend of mine. This place is particularly biased. They say it isn't clean that the food isn't that great; I like it because it's open late but mostly because it brings back memories of a place where I found rest once upon a time.
There we talked about our jobs and the people we know, and behind us a man found us fascinating he told us and he joined our conversation. We talked about God and creation, about theories about the universe, and he raised incredibly smart questions based on very accute observations leaving room for mystery and myth, presumptions and guesses. He said he was 59 and it's not that he was implacable in his arguments or that he was trying to convince us of anything.. it's just that he had so many valid questions and even more answers, yet he seemed to me so helpless and lost, so unsatisfied with the rigidity of the science he devotes his mind to, and mostly so full of wonder if anything that he believes could be true.
As my friend talked to him back and forth about the Bible, evidences for it and against it, certain interpretations of some verses in Scripture, I spent probably more than 30 minutes observing this fascinating man who sat next to me.
I guess I started to profile. No ring in his finger or a mark of it. Probably divorced or a widower, perhaps never married.. scientists as smart as he is tend to have poor social skills and be terrible romance creators, and very few women ever dare or have the capacity to see through all the facts and laws and see the true heart inside of science.
I saw this man, and I saw loneliness and hope. I saw this man, and with every glass of tea that he served himself from a half a gallon jar, I understood that this was not the first time he was there. That he had spent many nights before in this place, alone, late at night, not wanting to go home because it is so cold and damp, enjoying the simple meaningless talk with her server, still grateful that he gets some attention, even if it is part of her job.
I saw this man and I knew this was probably the high of his week and that although somewhat dead, just talking to us he felt less numb.
The conversation with my friend reached a slow point and then I had to talk to him.
I told him the truth. That he striked me as a man who is incredibly smart and insightful. A man who knows a lot of science and is able to understand it, and a man who knows the Bible extremely well, probably even better than me. I saw a man who had many great questions and amazing answers, yet I perceived that he was unsatisfied with all of it.
He asked what I meant. I told him that I thought he seemed unsatisfied because although he has many answers, he longs desperately for certainty. He is a scientist after all. Science's ultimate goal is to get certainty. However, in his endevor or rigidity of validating all answers simply because they are theoretically possible, plausible, he believed tons of possible answers might be true, yet this, paradoxically, still left uncertainty.
To be certain, to be sure about something means that one has found a truth that is beyond all doubt. That although there might be other options that might seem just as valid, one has found that that truth satisfies all his questions and nothing else matters. I told him he lacked that.
He told me that he had spent a lot of time studying this current.. I don't remember the name but basically it follows that all religions are true. He started to talk more and more and going astray on the topic not really knowing, but then he came back and asked me again to elaborate further on why I thought he wasn't satisfied. I knew I had hit a nerve there.
I told him that all men long for the eternal. That the quesiton of what happens after we die is there for all of us because we are afraid of the end. We are afraid to think that we live 70 or 80 years and that's it, there is nothing more. Some poeple may say they accept it but truth is they are terrified and live in denial. I told him that all his quesitons although valid and excellent, in the end didn't make a difference. Is hell a physical place? Does the spirit have a form? Can it be confined to a body? what is a body? What is hell? Is God's presence is Hell? It doesn't matter, I said, in the end what matters is what happens with us afterwards.
If all religions were true we go back to the same problem of uncertainty. We really have no security in thinking that all could be true, because just the same, it follows that all could be wrong or only one or a couple could be right. Since it is impossible to follow all religions, since all of them are exclusive of each other in their core beliefs, than one has to be chosen. And it is very convenient to choose one that is consistent and not out there. Recently scientology showed us its core values. That this alien Xenu had an overpopulated sector of the universe so he tossed them all into earths volcanos and then their spirits came to us and infected us with their presence and along with these hidrogen bombs we are cursed like that. That is why, they say, we get sick. HOwever, there is a way out and that is to go back in our minds and find our true self, the very first oen of us who was clean and uninfected so we accomplish immortality. That every time we exude any bodily fluids or gas we are getting rid of these spirits. Everytime we cry, yawn, sneeze, pick our noses and fart we become more immortal. That the reason why we beleive in God is because these aliens took us to a movie theater to watch over and over a movie of their lies so that we believed these things and never found the truth.... enough of this.

We said our goodbyes promising to meet again. We exchanged numbers and email addresses and off we went by midnight.
I will never forget this man. I will never forget how much in peace he made me feel. I will never forget his loneliness and despair to be relevant and to be touched. A movie that I loved, Crash has this line in the very beginning: "It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something."

Darkness makes us relevant. Are we to leave it behind? At least not for now. How could we? This is a broken world and we are all broken people. We've all been abused somehow. We all have traumas, moments that marked our lives forever. Betrayal, passion, brokenhearts, tears that we cried and were never washed away, insecurities, fear, death, loneliness and sorrow.
It is a dreadful place to be in touch with our darkness inside, but only then can we understand who we truly are.
I learned more from this man than I have learned in a lot of time I've been here, and I will never forget.