(K)

So here's one of my favorite book excerpts from the last year, because it sounds like a fine description of my life's trajectory:

K (kay) verb, K'ed, K'ing. 1. baseball: to strike out. 2. to fail, to flunk, to fuck up, to fizzle, or 3. to fall short, fall apart, fall flat, fall by the wayside, or on deaf ears, or hard times, or into disrepute or disrepair, or 4. to come unglued, come to grief, come to blows, come to nothing, or 5. go to the dogs, to through the roof, go home in a casket, go to hell in a hand basket, or 6. to blow your cover, blow your chances, blow your cool, blow your stack, shoot your wad, bitch the deal, buy the farm, bite the dust, only 7. to recollect an oddball notion you first heard as a crimeless and un-K'ed child but found so nonsensically paradoxical that you had to ignore it or defy it or betray it for decades before you could begin to believe that it might possibly be true, which is that 8. to lose your money, your virginity, your teeth, health or hair, 9. to lose your home, your innocence, your balance, your friends, 10. to lose your happiness, your hopes, your leisure, your looks, and, yea, even your memories, your vision, your mind, your way, 11. in short, (and as Jesus K. Rist once so uncompromisingly put it) to lose your very self, 12. for the sake of another, is 13. sweet irony, the only way you're every going to save it.
(David James Duncan, The Brothers K)

Over the past couple months I have become more acutely aware than ever before that so many of my struggles with faith and God are at the root a result of my misconceptions of how God is and what Christianity is rather than genuine struggles with God as such (an idea analogous, I suppose, to Kant's distinction between phenomena, or things as we perceive them, and noumena, or things as they in fact are). Which isn't to say that God and I (assuming He exists . . . ahemm) don't have it out frequently enough as well. But this life of (tenuous) faith seems to be about having my perspective on the gospel being continually reshaped by the harsh reality (and of course utter beauty) of life as it is. With that, if you haven't read either of Duncan's novels ("The River Why" or "The Brothers K"), do so soon.