I read a book recently. It was an honest book. A beautiful book. And like one of my good friends said, there was so much truth in it. The pages were driiipping with truth. And the whole thing spun up silken strands of nature, mountain hikes, vitality cool as a river and the freshest zeal for life, and wove them all into words so poetic they floated off the pages like a song. It was so beautiful it rang with sadness.
Jack Kerouac wrote this little book, The Dharma Bums, detailing the poetic abandonment of a few guys, self-proclaimed Zen Buddhist lunatics, the Dharma Bums, in search of life, real life, and the meaning and value of everything, against the conviction that nothing is real and nothing truly matters because nothing truly exists.
Let me clear this up, I’m not a Zen Buddhist. My heart aches for these guys because they were missing it and they knew it. Life isn’t beautiful because it is devoid of ultimate meaning; it is beautiful because meaning is bursting at the seams because of and only because of the life, death, resurrection, and glory of Jesus Christ.
I wish he got that. I wish Kerouac got it so badly. And he might have eventually. He might have because he knew he didn’t have the full picture, just a piece of it. He was still hunting, still seeking for ultimate truth. But the characters he wrote about, gulping down life like a pitcher of water, rolling in it filthy and raw, leaping down mountains and shouting haikus back and forth over the wind, reading foreign philosophy books, living on nothing, hitch hiking across the country and believing with all their hearts in their prayers for all sentient beings, words that aren’t words but are necessary in his descriptions simply because no real words are good enough.
Japhy was his name, one of these characters. And these characters were real, and they’re still real. People fed up with the system, the everyday American, typical life 9-5 work day system that can’t be truth because it doesn’t mean anything in the long run. People running after dreams – characters running after dreams, running after truth, running after beauty and loving life with everything they have because otherwise it hardly seems worth it.
I’ma pray for those people every day of my life, because they’re sooooo close. They’re SO close. Just answer every one of their questions with Jesus, and put him at the end of every trail they’ve sprinted so hard down – that’s what I want for these people, for the ‘Japhys’ of the world.
And after I’ve prayed for them, that’s who I want to be. I want my life to bleed so much zeal and vitality and reckless abandonment and beauty and truth in the name of Jesus that I’m swimming in it, and my feet never touch the ground again. I want my life to be marked by so much honesty and humility that Jesus is written in every single thing I do and say. I want to taste the fullness of the reality of life every waking second and never taste anything else.
I want to go on this Race, and when I come back, I don’t want to be returning TO normal life but FROM it. I want my life to be so radically transformed by Jesus that Race mode becomes my ‘real life’. And when I come back, it won’t be coming back and settling down, it will be a restless interlude, so uncomfortable that I can’t do anything but dive back into the fullness of the truth of World Evangelism.
Though I could quote the whole book, here are two, one slightly altered and one straight up.
I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics Jesus Bums who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures with the glorious liberating Gospel of Jesus Christ.
And for real…
Down on the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared, and I said, "God, I love you" and looked up to the sky and really meant it. "I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or another."
Real life.
That’s what I want.
Love,
-Danny
