Absurdity

Gun’s Quote-of-the-Week:

“Even though you can't expect to defeat the absurdity of the world, you must make that attempt. That's morality, that's religion. That's art. That's life.”

-Phil Ochs

This weekend, I hosted 23 members of my family for a pre-Christmas dinner since we all have Christmas plans that do not involve our being together. I was hosting because I asked to.

Why would I do such a thing? In order to motivate myself to clean my house. You see, having so many people over meant that I would finally have to take care of the huge piles of paper everywhere. It meant organizing my bedroom… at least a little. It meant going through the boxes of stuff that were just sitting in my living room. This is my motivation; put yourself in a situation where action MUST be required, or else I simply will not perform the action.

Nothing was done Saturday morning. My reasoning suddenly seemed, uh, flawed.

Then mom came to the rescue. It was as if she knew that I wasn’t going to be ready. (It was if she knew that I was absurd enough to try to pull this off.)  In a matter of two hours, the bedroom, the desk, the living room were all in order. We could start cooking after that, and, of course, she did the cooking, too. The absurdity of me planning a family event to get me to clean my house was counter-balanced by the absurdity of my mother doing it for me. I’m 28 years old and my mom cleaned my house.

We all had a great time and it was fun to be able to get everyone in one place, if even cramped. Apples to Apples was hilarious and the food was fantastic.

Then again, the whole reason for the Christmas season was because of an absurd mother. A 14-year-old virgin, engaged, no less, got pregnant. Her pregnancy was not the result of her boyfriend at the time. She rode on the back of a donkey – a DONKEY – to a town several miles away while she was nine-months pregnant. When she got there, she was refused at an inn. She instead decided to stay in the stables where she gave birth, and to top it all off hid her kid for years afterwards because of a nightmare she had where the king of her country wanted to kill the baby. Let’s not forget about the fact that this whole baby-before-marriage scenario would have mandated her stoning at the time. Minor detail.

Our world would be very different if that mother decided not to accept the above absurd proposition from an angel that just happened to show up and explain the whole ordeal. It would seem I am not the first first-born son to cause a great deal of angst and anxiety among his mom.

I love the end of this quote: “That’s life.” Yes, it is. Apple was absurd for dreaming up the iPod. The Wright brothers were absurd for thinking they could invent a flying machine. Our parents are absurd for having children that will endlessly consume them for dozens of years of their life. Through their respective absurdity, we push our world forwards, leaving the next day better than the first. Sometimes it means pulling off a family dinner.

Sometimes it means bearing the Savior of the world.

Merry Christmas.

…and that’s why it’s a Gun’s Quote!