Reflections from a Casino

May 12, 2005 - Kansas City

No one needs a person to come in here and judge others. After all, what they do is one of those potentially addictive activities that is always counted a part of "sin lists" - well, the sin lists of those who devise such lists (people like Paul, and Focus on the Family). They may be right - I'm not really interested in whether gambling is a sin or not. I have my own views on these things, and nobody asked to hear them. But what does compel me to write is the people that are here. Ordinary people with everyday lives. I'm interested in who they are - the way their hearts look right now, the way their souls feel. What draws them here? Or is it that something "out there" repels or frightens them? What loneliness do they know - did they know it before walking in the doors of this grandiose casino, or was the loneliness forged and intensified here? What brokenheartedness or pain? More than these, maybe, what emptiness? If there is such a thing as the depth of emptiness, the total lack of feeling or meaning, then I speculate some here feel that painful depth. Is it like an abyss? I would venture to say it's more like numbness. When things - experiences, people, thoughts, feelings, dreams - lose their meaning somehow, it's not so much that you writhe in pain and need the bright casino lights and stress-inducing video game noises to help you through that. It's more like this is just... it. And that's it! It's that frighteningly simple: this is life. Now it may seem that I am reading more despair and desensitization into people's lives than really exists. But I know there are hundreds of cars in the parking lot, and it's midday on a Thursday. In fact, the parking capacity of this money palace is easily upwards of 5 to 10 thousand. There's no shortage of business. There's no entertainment that Americans will refuse - when they have the freedom of time and resources to indulge.

But is this it? God help us.

I'm not against entertainment, or even gambling. But I will rage against the numbing repetitive music and blindening lights. They're all artificial. Everything about this environment - manufactured, controlled, conditioned to set a stage. This is not real life. Souls, embodied, wander aimlessly. Hope presents itself, but a false hope. Not even a jackpot will give us what we need, not even what we want. It is simply to know and be known, to love and be loved. This place is nearly incapable of providing that. [I say nearly because sometimes elderly men help their wives sit down. Sometimes people smile and you know they're really smiling.]

Oh, that lost children would start thinking of home again. The memory is faint, but there's a lingering, barely-there familiarity, a likeness that tells us things could be different. Kindle our hope, oh Lord, and lead us all home to you. From our many, many places where we run to hide from loneliness, emptiness, numbness, fear - where we find that all these and even more darknesses intensified in our supposed refuge. You alone are our hope, our true refuge. You are not escape from life - you are vivid, loving, joyful life itself. You are it. And that is as frightening as it is relieving.