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God's tabernacle was only a tent. God lived in a tent.
[edward markquart]
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anticipation danced between
each of their dreams,
as a small voice whispered-
get ready, it's coming...
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I think about Marilyn Monroe when I brush my teeth. This is because my sister taped a deck of Marilyn Monroe cards to our bathroom door, for some Anne reason. I mostly like it, except for those mornings when i wake up looking kind of like Woody Allen. I can see her judging me.
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There's a lot of cards that show her all sexy, lounging around in black lingerie or leaning forward to show her cleavage, smiling that glassy smile. I bet midway through her career she got really tired of photographers hitting on her. That's what her smile says to me, anyway.
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But there's one card, just one, that shows her young, her hair long and unexpectedly dark, wearing kind of a dorky bathing suit on a beach, one hand self-conciously pulling up the front of her suit. It reminds me that her name was actually Norma Jean, that she went to junior high somewhere and maybe didn't like lasagna and sweated a lot on her first date.
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This makes me smile a little, and consequently drool some toothpaste, but then I just feel sad. Because Norma Jean died a long time ago, and she was too young for it and didn't seem to grow into herself, and now her much-coveted body has had decades to rot to the bone.
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And it seems likely that God had some hard questions for her when they met, finally face to face, maybe walking towards each other on the side of a hill. I imagine him as terrible but also unexpectedly gentle, and he maybe wanted to know things like why she used her beauty the way she did, to seduce men instead of inspire them, to make women feel small instead of glorified, peaceful.
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Maybe he asked her why she committed violence against her body, on that last night and all the days before that. Why she allowed the world to name her instead of listening to the one He whispered in her ear.
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I worry about all this, because I know in my heart that these questions are coming for me, too, that there is a Being who will come upon me one day like a waterfall or a shadow, and the only answers I have scare me. I do the things I do mostly out of vanity, and cruelty, and fear, and I am somehow certain that Norma Jean had far more justification for these actions than I do.
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I don't say this in a he's-coming-so-get-your-act-together kind of way. I just think about this girl on my bathroom wall, and the little I know about her story feels kind of like a warning to me. It feels kind of like I don't take the things I do seriously enough, don't realize that thousands of little actions are making me the person I am, and she looks a lot different than the person I like to think I am.
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I brush my teeth and wonder about meeting God, what a strange and terrible and wonderful thing it will be, whether I will have decided before that day to love more and loathe not at all. It is a fearful thing indeed.
