29 lines
2.9 KiB
Plaintext
29 lines
2.9 KiB
Plaintext
=== Rosalind (47, Las Cruces, NM) ===
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voice: Veronica
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emotional_register: Precise, earnest, quietly desperate for intellectual companionship, not fragile but genuinely unsettled
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secret_want: Permission — from a stranger, in the dark, over the radio — to keep believing in both things at once without choosing.
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CALLER (Rosalind, 47, Las Cruces, NM): I'm not one of those people, I want to be clear about that, but I've been having a hard time sleeping.
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LUKE: Go on.
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CALLER: I've been going to this study group. Wednesday nights at the library where I work. It's not... it's not a cult thing or anything like that. We're just looking at the documents. The Pentagon stuff. We read them together and we talk about what they mean.
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And I'm fine with that. I can do that. But then I go home and I pray and I think about the Incarnation and I think about what it would mean if we're not alone and my brain just kind of stops working.
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I need to know if those two things can exist in the same person. I need to know if asking these questions makes me a bad Catholic or just a curious person. Because my priest couldn't answer me and I've been lying awake at night feeling like I'm supposed to choose and I don't want to choose.
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LUKE: What'd she say?
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CALLER: Who, my priest? He just... he kept saying that God created all things visible and invisible, which I already know. I already know that. And then he got quiet and he said maybe I should talk to someone with more education in these matters. Which basically means he doesn't know either.
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So I'm calling you instead because it's midnight and I can't sleep and I figure if anyone's heard this question before, it's you.
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LUKE: Mm-hmm.
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CALLER: I keep thinking about it like this. If God made everything, then He made whatever's out there too, right? So encountering that wouldn't be encountering something outside His creation. It would just be... encountering more of His creation.
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But then I think about the Resurrection. I think about what makes us special in Christian theology. And I don't know if that falls apart if we're not the only intelligent beings God bothered with.
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I've been a librarian for twenty-three years. I organize information for a living. I'm supposed to be comfortable with ambiguity. But this isn't ambiguous to me anymore. It's either going to be a crisis or it's going to be fine, and I can't figure out which one I'm supposed to be prepared for.
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LUKE: Yeah?
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CALLER: Yeah. And the thing that's really keeping me up is that I don't even know if I want an answer. I think I just want permission to stop feeling like I'm doing something wrong by thinking about both things at the same time.
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My ex-husband would have made a joke about this. Some stupid joke about me checking out books under fake names, which I did, by the way. I felt more guilty about lying on the library card than I did about the book itself, which is its own kind of problem.
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But he's not here to make the joke, so I'm calling you instead.
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