Pulverize
Photo by Frans Van Heerden from Pexels
pul·ver·ize /ˈpəlvəˌrīz/
verb
reduce to fine particles.
Before you scroll on by, take a minute and look at the picture. Look at that camel. He’s so cute, what a good camel. I never thought camels could be so loveable. I’ve seen them at the zoo but never up close like this.
Let’s give him a name. How about Charlie? Charlie the camel, that’s a good name…
Poor Charlie, he’s going to have to die for this blog post. Actually, we’re going to kill Charlie. Not just that, after he’s dead we’re going to chop Charlie up into a billion tiny pieces. And when I say tiny, I mean TINY! They won’t even be meat chunks the size you would put in a stew, not that camel meat is normally used in the crock pots around here, but maybe somewhere in the world. Anyhow.
Charlie is going to be dead and he’s going to get PULVERIZED. He’ll be totally unrecognizable when we’re done with him. You’ll be able to tell that something died, obviously. It’ll be a huge mess of blood and fur, bone and cartilage (granted those pieces will be so small as to be unrecognizable as well). You’ll guess that a large animal died, but you’ll have no clue that it was our friend Charlie or even that it was a camel.
When he’s finally done being ground down, we’ll take the time to put each miniscule piece of him through the eye of a needle. And we’re not stopping until all of Charlie has gone through that tiny eye. It’ll be a drawn out and excruciating process. Clearly not something that we’ll be able to finish in a day or a week or even a year. We’ll have to carve out time from our busy schedules to put Charlie’s remains through the eye of the needle. We won’t have the time, but as they say “if something is important you make the time.”
This grotesque hobby will be our #1 priority and people around will start to wonder where we’ve been and what we’ve been up to. It’s kind of embarrassing to admit that we’ve been spending so much time with these camel remains. Friends and family, for good reason, we’ll think we’ve lost our minds when we tell them about this bloody pastime of ours. They may act concerned or act like it’s not happening. They may be angry or sad, or tell us how stupid it is. It makes people uncomfortable to put dead animal parts through a needle eye.
There’s no way to make the work go faster. Because the needle eye is so small, you’re the only one that can be putting Charlie through it at a time. There’s no way to force dead Charlie through it, in fact the harder you push the slower it goes. It requires dexterity, patience, faith (what many call delusion) in the importance of the task. It is a long, drawn out, meticulous process, but after a lifetime of these nimble movements, you’ll have passed all of what remains of Charlie through the eye of a tiny needle. By that point you’ll be older and maybe unrecognizable as well. You definitely won’t be the zealous sturdy youth who began this strange mission.
There was a movie that recently came out called “Worth”, which tells the story of the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund. They were trying to compensate the families of the thousands of people who lost their lives in the Twin Towers terrorist attack. Some who had died in the towers were janitors making barely above minimum wage, others were CEOs, millionaires, the wealthy. The rich victims believed themselves to be worth more and entitled to a higher compensation due to lost earning potential. The entire movie seems to center around a central question: how much is a human life worth?
It reminded me of a story, perhaps one of the most well known in the gospels. A rich man runs up to Jesus, kneels before him and asks the question “What do I need to do to inherit eternal life?” (which is just another way of saying ‘how can I be a part of what you’re doing in the world?’)
Christ reminds him of the ten commandments – do not lie, murder, commit adultery, etc.
The man affirms that he has been keeping all of these for a long time. But Jesus tells him, “One more thing you lack, leave behind all your wealth and possessions then come follow me.”
The man was heartbroken, because he had a high “worth”. He had a dream to become a disciple, but his wealth killed his dream. How many of our dreams are also killed by wealth and possessions?
Though they had low worth in the eyes of their society, we all know the names of those women and men who went on to become foremothers and forefathers of the Christian church. But sadly no one remembers this rich man’s name. (Maybe it was Charlie.)
To this heartbreaking scene Jesus comments, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the Kingdom of God!... In fact, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God!”
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The more a person’s worth, the more is working against them to becoming spiritually liberated. Don’t we attach our sense of identity and safety to our wealth, our houses, our cars, our phones? Don’t our bodies and reputations and professions give us a sense of meaning? What would we possibly be without these?
I used to think that the camel through the needle eye process was like the transporters on Star Trek. Beam me up God. One moment I’m a whole camel to the left of the needle and almost instantaneously I’m transported to the right of the needle, body still intact.
That would be super convenient: shot with a space ray and all the spiritual downside that comes with being a middle class American evaporates in an instant.
But perhaps it’s more like a mystical version of the carnage I described above. Our ego is ripped apart, our false identities are torn to shreds. We put in the time it takes to disregard our worth and wealth for a higher reality. We are incapable of maintaining ourselves during this lifelong journey, but with God all things are possible. Like Charlie the camel you start out one thing and by the end of it all you’re unrecognizable.
For those of us with wealth and power, privilege and reputation, the realities of discipleship are far less glamourous than advertised. We use phrases like “make us more like you”, but then balk at how the sausage is actually made.