Can a man carry fire next to his chest and his clothes not be burned?
Proverbs 6:27
They gather in the wasteland, some seventy thousand strong. Drawn to the Nevada desert by an impulse they do not fully understand, the great multitude encamps, like ancient Israel, on the wide, arid plain. Here on the dusty playa, tricked out in garments of radical self-expression, they wander amid sporadic ecstasies, choreographed rituals, scattered contraptions, and ramshackle monuments seeking transcendence.
And at the center of the ethereal city, a towering effigy. This is the Axis Mundi, the fixed point where heaven and earth connect. On the last and greatest night of the festival—after the staged enlightenments, after the dust storms, after the hard reckoning with finitude—the celebrants will gather together to watch their god burn. And for a fleeting moment, their faces shining in the roiling illumination, they will know something. They will absolutely know it.
Indeed, for a brief moment, in the light of the flaming figure, they will know what we acolytes of another god, and of a different effigy, have forgotten. No—not forgotten. Fled.
When the people saw the thunder and lightning and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled with fear. They stayed at a distance and said to Moses, “Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die.”
We sanctified ones also gather. But our god has been tamed by the horsewhip of dogma. We have doused the burning cross with the blood of the Lamb, scraped off the char, and mounted it, polished and pristine, above a benign altar. It suits us.
how grand it is to worship
in polite society
dressed in robes of etiquette
and sipping deity
noshing on redemption
in the parlor of the saved
as the world looks on in wonder
at a god so well behaved
But the children in the desert cannot hear us. We can no longer hear ourselves. Our bullet points are caught by dust devils and flung, inert, out into the desolation. In their chimerical city the whispered precepts of the civilized god hiss as unintelligible as windblown sand. Desert does not speak doctrine. Playa knows nothing of pew.
What do the wasteland pilgrims comprehend that terrifies the sanctified? That what they seek is born of fire. That annihilation is the one true desire. That joy is the plunder of catastrophe, an ecstasy whose roots are buried deep in disaster.
This is the revelation: in order to live, you must burn.
For our God is a consuming fire.
Hebrews 12:29
