There is a light and it never goes out

Back in the days of yore (a yore being anywhere from
an epoch and two thirds at the high end down to a
Canadian Thanksgiving, half a Boxing Day and two
Kwanzaas), homes were equipped with shrines. In these
shrines, the household Gods lived conveniently so that
we could worship them as we came in from the fields or
went out to the fields or just stayed in one day and
looked at the fields through a knothole.
Shrines could hold any number of household gods, minor
deities, heroes, saints, wood sprites or dog-headed,
multi-tentacled, blue-specked Lovecraftian spacesquids
for that matter. Who was important, but even more so
was that attention was paid to that which was truly
important. Life’s hard. It helps to have someone who
can influence events on your side.
Today, most homes still have shrines, but they have
names like Sony and Magnavox and Phillips. They have
wide-screens, plasma screens and flat screens. They’re
cable-ready, remote-controlled and in hi-fi surround.
Mine is a 13-inch Zenith from the 20th century, a
personal failing. Inside these shrines live sit-com
stars and soap opera actors, daytime talk show hosts
and cable news presenters. We turn them on when we
walk in the front door and shut them off just as we
are leaving. But we know they will still be there when
we get back.
Blow back the mists of time with the box fan of too
much time on your hands and you find a lot of things
you thought were different never really changed at
all.
Ecstasy is one of those words we tend to use when we
want to say something felt good, but want to sound
more into it than that, i.e. “I was ecstatic when I
found out Hy-Vee had rotisserie chicken on special.”
But as good a word as ecstasy is, its meaning goes far
beyond such base pleasures of the chicken flesh; juicy
and crispy though it is.
The Greeks invented ecstasy … the word, any way. It
was some time after gyros and right before wrestling,
which historians think had something to do with gyros,
too. Ekstasis was a rapturous delight beyond reason or
self control marked by overwhelming emotions of a
mystic or prophetic nature. You don’t see that much
these days because we medicate for it.
Ecstasy is a side product of intense devotion, if by
intense one means wiggy. If we had a snapshot of the
unmedicated religious ecstatic from yore (between 15
and 5,000 years ago), we would notice a great many
points in common between the mystic and anyone who
watched the final episode of “Friends” in a bar full
of shrieking, weeping fans. This is no coincidence.
Words change in their commonly accepted meanings.
Literal usage changes a little bit over time, but our
love for hyperbole and metaphorical speech is bigger
than a really big bull elephant on steroids wearing a
zoot suit standing on top of another slightly smaller
elephant who is still pretty big in his own right.
If shoe sales put you in a state of ecstasy, you are
probably speaking figuratively and you know it. But if
you said seeing Tom Jones in concert did the same
thing, you might be speaking more literally than you
realize … especially if you threw anything on stage
that you wouldn’t tell your mother about.
No one’s judging these things and this isn’t a test.
But just out of curiosity, when was the last time you
laughed or cried in ecstasy? Was it as church? Were
you at home reading the latest John Grisham potboiler?
Was Rachel saying she got off the plane? Maybe you
were in a delivery room somewhere, your first kid
taking its sweet time, “Lightning Crashes” in your
head.
Life is ecstasy if you can handle it.