A child’s flip-flop
on the sidewalk
never missed

Not a friend to discomfort
yet she doesn’t feel the loss

Arms hold her
above the grime and grit
a shoulder
assumed, expected, accepted

No fears
just sweet surrender
to the joy
to the safety
to the love

Is this what grace
feels like?

“For me, making peace with God is about remembering that God isn’t about salvation or damnation, reward or punishment. God is about reality for God is reality. I make peace with God by realizing that life is wild, unpredictable, often horrifying, and yet always hopeful.I remind myself to not expect things to be other than they are, and to be thankful for all that they are. With this act of radical acceptance comes radical forgiveness, and, for me, this is what Yom Kippur is all about.”   http://rabbirami.blogspot.com/

“Often horrifying, and yet always hopeful.” These words of Rabbi Rami cause discomfort tonight. Can horror and hope co-exist?  Don’t we have to separate them…some moments being aware only of the horror, other moments only of the hope? Can we accept them as parts of the same reality, not the antitheses of each other?

This indeed requires radical acceptance. And also radical courage, I feel. I am reminded of Viktor Frankl standing inside the fence of a concentration camp urging his fellow inmates to look up at the sky and recognize the beauty in that moment. Beauty! There indeed horror and hope co-existed. They had to. The horror was too real, the hope too necessary.  Perhaps hope is easier to recognize when we are mired in the darkness.  Kurtz’s last words in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness  were “The horror, the horror.”  Many graduate essays have been written attempting to explain their meaning. Today, I am wondering if in dying Kurtz was faced with Beauty, Hope, God, and suddenly the contrast of the person he had become to what he was facing became utterly and excrutiatingly clear to him for the first time.

When I think about death, and life after death, I think that perhaps in the moment of our dying, an eternity in that one moment, we are faced like Kurtz with the stark truth of our lives.  We feel the impact of all the pain we have caused, in contrast to the Absolute Goodness, Absolute Beauty, Absolute Love that we are exposed to as we die. Our eternity will be that moment, and in that moment we will become one with the Source of all. The pain of that union will be greatest for those who have caused the greatest pain and whose nature/spirit has grown furthest away from the Source.  There would be justice in that.  But also hope. Because our spirit, refined in the fire of that union, that confrontation, could then pass on into the One Spirit, into the Source.

Or not!

Thus the issue which must be discussed first is not belief, ritual, or the religious experience, but the source of all these phenomena: the total situation of man; not how he experiences the supernatural, but why he experiences and accepts it.  

God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism,  Abraham Joseph Heschel

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel has been described as one the foremost American religious leaders of the 2oth century.  His writings and his commitment to social action, through his support of Martin Luther King for example, have inspired Jews and Christians alike. What Heschel wanted to do through his writing was re-awaken people to the spiritual dimension of life - their experience of the transcendent. He believed that we experience the transcendent in three ways but perhaps do not recognise these experiences for what they are.

More later.

But can we maintain a hopeful outlook in a universe that doesn’t offer the security of a Divine Designer, Author of the Great Plan, Architect of History, The Great Decider? Is this concept of The Holy, The Ground of All Being enough for us to anchor ourselves to, to have faith in?

And what about the millions who still cling to the Cosmic Santa Claus,  the Genie with unlimited wishes – just recite the Chaplet of Mercy or go to mass eight Fridays in a row and your wish will be granted or at the every least you will go straight to heaven when you die. Not a bad deal!

Surely it is the duty of the enlightened cynics among us to break the  rose-colored faith spectacles of the religiously naive, a past-time many  college philosophy professors take delight in. Surely we are doing these pious  idealists a favor: they need to see how awful, how truly terrible life is.

No! No one has the right to attack another person’s faith and religious naïveté. If someone’s faith provides a structure of meaning that makes life do-able, then they have a gift we cynics are jealous of. No one has the right to debase another’s view of God or to impose their own – whether atheist, or Pentecostal fundamentalist. Those who try to do so are being spiritually violent; we all have our own spiritual path to walk and deserve to do so in our own time.

And the cynics can no more prove the non-existence of God and ultimate futility of life than religious believers can prove the existence of God and the ultimate purposefulness of life.

And then there is the issue of the “One Theory.”  Scientists have been trying to reconcile the theory we have used with great success to explain how things work on the large-scale – The Theory of General Relativity – with  another theory that explains how things work on a sub-molecular level – Quantum Mechanics. And so far they have been unable to reconcile the two. That is no small matter (pardon the pun).

Is it our age or our stage in life that keeps us too busy or makes us too ready to criticize? Are we too easily disillusioned now, having been around long enough to personally know corrupt members of the clergy? Or do we have a hard time hearing “wisdom” preached to us by someone younger than our own children?

I found the relationship between Clint Eastwood’s character and his pastor in the movie Gran Torino a very real portrayal of this latter dilemma.

But then sometimes when I read the newspaper the idea of God just doesn’t make sense. A woman cut the arms off her eleven month-old baby. A child of three was sodomized by her Grandfather. How can there be a God if this is the world God created?

Yet again, how can there not be? High school boys got up at 5am to go shopping to feed needy families for Thanksgiving. High school girls collected thousands of dollars in an impromptu drive to help hurricane victims receive water. A father takes on a second job over the holidays to finance his children’s Christmas. A mother works double overtime to buy her daughter’s Prom dress.

Evil or goodness; mindless violence or self-sacrifice. Which is the Truth? Whichever we choose! God or no God, it’s up to us what kind of world we believe in; it’s up to us what kind of world we create. God doesn’t require our permission in order to exist, rather God has given us permission to reject God’s very existence. But isn’t the world an easier reality to live in if one believes that there is ultimately some positive meaning and purpose, some worthy goal for the whole project? Isn’t it easier to get up in the morning if one believes that Good truly will conquer Evil, that Light will ultimately vanquish the Darkness, that Love is indeed everlasting? It is for me!