Notes From the Tilt-a-Whirl

While talking about our Resurrection Series, Matt Kruse from SMR Boston described N.D. Wilson’s Notes From the Tilt-a-Whirlas a must read. So I dropped everything, ordered the Kindle version, and started reading (indications of how much I value Matt’s advice and how badly I want to do this series well).

The book was different from anything I’ve read before. In the pages, Wilson was letting you in on a conversation in his head. Stream-of-consciousness-like. And the stream flowed from philosophy to art to nature to God effortlessly. The book feels like art more than literature. Someone described the book like a painting. You don’t read this book line by line any more than you look at a painting brush stroke by brush stroke. You stand back and take it in.

You can find plenty of good reviews online, but to give you a flavor of the book, here were my three favorite sections:

1. Probabilities. They are the prophets of a mechanical god. Assume that the ultimate overseer of this reality is someone named Chance (with highlighted hair and poor management skills), and assume that everything in existence happens randomly (thanks to him), without any consideration for the artistry of it. Let us explore the general unlikelihood of anything ever happening, ever. Rumor has it that most normal men send at least eight million “forward swimming” sperm looking for an egg every sexual act. Don’t even bother adding in egg variation, or the total number of sperm that may have had a fighting chance during your mother’s days of fertility when you were conceived (or the possibility that she might have taken her friends’ advice and shunned your father). Keep it simple and wildly conservative. Your chances of being here were about one out of eight million. Funny. Those were my odds too. The chances of us both being here? One out of sixty-four trillion…We are a world of lottery winners. For every one of us here right now, in every begetting, there were at least 7,999,999 losers. They don’t even know how almost they were. “I wish I’d never been born,” the adolescent moans. “Shut up, Randy. There are eight million other kids who would be wishing they could be here right now if only they were here to wish.”

2. On that day, sitting on my log in the early stirrings of spring, the stream overwhelmed me…I wanted to know how many molecules were sliding past me per minute. I wanted to know where they had spent their lives, lives that stretched back to the beginning of the world. Most of them had probably been snow, recently delicate, now reveling in the rough and tumble world of a fast mountain stream. Before the snow, where had they been? Steam coming off a cow’s back? Evaporation from a kiddie pool? Most were probably oceanic. Formerly waves. But before then? How many times had each of these molecules fallen from the sky, contributing some little corner to a snowflake? How many times divorced into lonely hydrogen and oxygen, how many times remarried? These things had traveled, no doubt. These things had even been around when Moses did his business with the Red Sea. Had they been there? Had they heard about it from friends? There is water somewhere in the world that ran down the body of the Word Himself as John, His cousin, baptized Him. No doubt it is water still, uncherished by man, known only by the Author of this story. Drops were chosen to serve as His tears beside Jerusalem, more were chosen to wait in His side for the tip of a Roman spear. They burst forth and completed their poetic calling, a flourish in the story, a picture within a picture. But did that water retire? Does it no longer have a task? Has God made sure it never entered a toilet tank or moistened the parched lips of a liar? Why would He? He has never treated Himself as sacred.

3. There is water in the world that once flew out of the mouths of guards and flecked the face of the Word Himself. There is iron that once tore at His back and iron that once coursed in His blood before it fell to the stones, left for the small animals to feed on in the night. Animals were born and spent a lifetime before being slaughtered, having their hides tanned and cut into strips, interwoven with stone and glass and lashing the skin off the One Poet’s back, baring ribs full of calcium. There are proteins still, somewhere in this world, that were used in His beard before soldiers clutched, not knowing how close their fingers came to the Infinite, and tore hard.

But there is nothing now made from His flesh decomposed. That seed sprouted long ago, the firstborn, sprung from the womb of death on the first real day of Spring.