Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Sun Setting on Sanity

Our words emit through the same opening with which we ingest sustenance. It is a holy passage. The future progressed through the primordial. The transcendent through the disgustingly elemental. And yet it is one, and it is good.

This is not dissimilar to (at least from the male perspective) the concept of reproduction. Males expel their liquid wastes from the same opening through which they provide their contribution of spermatozoon. The sperm itself is little but an optimistic and random attempt at initiating the creation of life. And the cell itself results not from any but the most carnal of activities. Once the ovum is penetrated, development commences, generally requiring nine months to incubate a healthy specimen, and the end result being only the messiest and fleshy of outcomes.

Yet, from the opening of waste and the crevice of a womb comes forth that which is most capable of learning. First to understand kinetics, and then noise, and then words, and then ideas. Suddenly it is a mind empowered, and even ruminates on the notions of God and eternity. It is from the earth, made from the dust, and raised from the mud, and yet in its very design, destined to become metaphysically enlightened.

This is good.


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I do not understand the environment within which I have been born. My life has been subject to so much pain and embarrassment and fruitless episodes. I am a collected mess of skin and thoughts. This afternoon I am without any notion of direction, and wonder if my labors are even worth these fleeting moments. Why was I born with such enormous aspirations only to toil in the ordinary?

I do not subscribe to the belief that God finds within the end a justification for the means. Did the lepers cry out in pain as Christ healed them of leprosy? Did the blind man scream in agony as Christ removed his blindness? Healing came without pain. Creation, but in a breath. Whole planets turn without a sound. If only the means to my end could be gentler!

When the creator God saw what It had created, God said that "it was good." God is omniscient. All of creation, existence, the beginning and end laid before God. Still, God called it good.

I struggle to find comfort in this thought.

Starting with the tiniest of atoms, pitted in fatal contests, evolving in a cutthroat system, humans arose as the most capable and clever of species, and God chose them among all of creation to be endowed a gift of revelation.

God must have foreseen all the years of destruction and war. On a micro level, evolution is war. It was built into human nature from the beginning. When God chose humans, God must have seen all the shadows of humanity's darkest desires; every child murdered in Herod's quest to kill Jesus of Nazareth; every Muslim and Jew slaughtered at the hands of greatly misled crusaders.

But God said "it was good!"

I was recently told that one cannot possess faith without hope. But I have long struggled to have faith, and only now am losing hope.

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