What if the idea that gods are the embodiments of ideals is correct, except there is only One, and the only ideal is Love? We might have hints of such an idea from the Bible, where the God of the Hebrews identifies Himself as “I AM”. No other god is so named: what this is actually saying is, no other god “is”, at all, none other exists. None other can have that name, for He claims it. Then there is one Jesus Christ, who is identified as “Immanuel”, and that is another clue: it means “God with us” — so in other words, He is the literal Son of God. And if one can see, one notices that if we can declare that the Son is good, then God the Father, who is of one substance with the Son, must be good, too. And what exactly is this God? God is love, of course. Jesus Christ makes this point by showing us, not just telling us what we must do to be called His children.

So then, the explanation for everything: the foundation of all things lies in a Creator who is Love. And as Oscar Wilde once said, “the mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.” That which both everyone understands and no one does. The Creator is then revealed in His creation — not as a capricious entity who does things of whim, but a God of mysterious order. For whim cannot build a universe, not like the one we see. And this is the final clue: when love has been traced down into its constituent particles, and everything about how and what it does has been completely figured out, it will still be a mystery. Because the infinite will always be a mystery to those who are finite, and the transcendent always a mystery to earthly beings such as we.

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.
– Arthur Schopenhauer

Only a few people are awake and they live in a state of constant total amazement.
– Joe Vs. the Volcano

When we hit our lowest point, we are open to the greatest change.
– Avatar Aang

To err is human; to forgive, infrequent.
– Franklin P. Adams

It is good a philosopher should remind himself, now and then, that he is a particle pontificating on infinity.
– Ariel Durant

Sometimes you can solve things by breathing.

The symbol of the New Testament and the Christian Church is a cross, which stands for a love faithful despite physical agony and rejection by the world. No amount of air-conditioning and pew-cushioning in the suburban church can cover over the hard truth that the Christian life… is a narrow way of suffering; that discipleship is costly: that, for the faithful, there is always a cross to be carried. No one can understand Christianity to its depths who comes to it to enjoy it as a pleasant weekend diversion.

what it is like to partake in a miracle:
when is laid bare every path ever taken
and whispers whittle at the stuff of your heart
in geometric beauty starlight dances on the water
all symmetries to bloom from our footprints
and in the heat of the sound, wings furious:
the dawn in the mind of a horizon drawn near
fashioned where there was the darkness of doubt
a cut of light, a newly born and dizzying logic
where the Wheel turned within your know
and left imprinted the sacred name of Love

Joan Miró: Still Life with Old Shoe

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There comes over some of us, sometimes, a notion that perhaps should always be shared, if one is so fortunate to experience it. It is the idea that everything is going to be all right — that somehow, beyond the reach of all mortal hopes, everything will at the end, end well. Though those who have religion have more form to these feelings, a spelled-out prophecy or some kind of formulation that actually describes how things will work out, I don’t believe one has to believe in anything to believe this. I imagine it is somewhat more easily done for those who have faith in a higher order to believe that there is a larger good that circumscribes the most terrible of tragedies, but hope is not monopolized by such faith. There shall always be those who have a kind of trust in the better side of humankind, no matter that they can only look forward to new generations to make amends for those past (and those present) and think not that some great power will create the ultimate justice. Not an impossible thing to hold.

It is, to put it in today’s parlance, the ultimate meme. We can see that it’s been put in songs more than once (Bob Marley’s “No Woman No Cry” says it, for one; do a search for “everything’s gonna be alright” on Google, and you get more than twenty million hits). And it probably shall be put into songs as long as there are songs being written. To those who don’t feel it, perhaps have never felt it, the idea may be shrugged off as lighthearted wish-fulfillment whimsy, made by those who have no grasp of how grave the situation of the world truly is. But that it exists in such forms as the Book of Revelations, I think says differently. It is perhaps to be as in the spirit of a quote by Oscar Wilde, “The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.” That to fight the good fight is ultimately not in vain, however much the evil seems victorious. It is the idea of turning the other cheek: they cannot defeat us by their violence; we are better than that. It is a sign that says, “This way up.” Everything is going to be all right.

The cross is a challenge: not to love your life more than the purpose your life was for.

The most critical issue facing Christians is not abortion, pornography, the disintegration of the family, moral absolutes, MTV, drugs, racism, sexuality, or school prayer. The critical issue today is dullness. We have lost our astonishment. The Good News is no longer good news, it is okay news. Christianity is no longer life changing, it is life enhancing. Jesus doesn’t change people into wild-eyed radicals anymore. He changes them into “nice people”.

i am the jack of speed
i sing in the blur
as the jaws of distance yawn
and now from now is born
no constant so priceless
nor bought with idle change
as scenery unfurls
things liquid when fast
the future pouring in
for now from now is born
mysterious is beginning
for now is suddenly not now…
into this universe:
where comes the new idea?
a new thing is merely pattern
a rearrangement, a mutation
as everything decays
and enough time blurs it all
a thousand years in a day
how the eternal and slow
is like the instant quick
as i sing in forever’s tune
traveling nowhere, rapidly
yet with all ceremony
arriving yesterday, tomorrow
i am nothing if not change
i am the jack of speed

It boils down to the two commandments: love God, and love one another as Christ loved us: even his reproofs came out of his love for us, not anger, certainly none of hate. His righteousness came only from love, not from any kind of thinking that one might construe oneself better than anyone else, but instead in the spirit of what one needs to do to do the other good. We are only better than anyone else if we set ourselves lower than them. And if we are to be of his ilk, we are to give people the benefit of the doubt, not having the all of knowledge as he did as to what a person’s motives are. The first instinct should always be to be to forgive, not to judge. Whatever is required of us to love, nothing else. He told us to do nothing else.

They never fail who die
In a great cause: the block may soak their gore:
Their heads may sodden in the sun; their limbs
Be strung to city gates and castle walls—
But still their Spirit walks abroad. Though years
Elapse, and others share as dark a doom,
They but augment the deep and sweeping thoughts
Which overpower all others, and conduct
The world at last to Freedom.

– Lord Byron

Egon Schiele: Four trees

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I am numb as the day pours over me and solidifies into the past. While I am still soft and pliable, still able to change, I sit as if waiting for the end of the world, as if all action were meaningless. Thought is too heavy: the wheels of my perception are thick and made of lead, too much inertia to move. Thought is too light: it floats off before I can make sense of any pattern. Time is a messenger whose tongue I do not understand, only to realize so much later that something important was being said. I only wait. While somewhere, at any given time, someone’s heart is being broken, I have only a dream that love ever was — and I envy those who have felt enough that its lack is painful. I imagine I am a fool. And I guess, in the end, no one ever promised me a future — it’s just that I look around and there is all this present going to waste, with nothing to wrap it up in and bring it home.

the heart knows its own, watching for the rose that materializes in full bloom
the action is immediate, the consequences permanent
halfway to heaven the wind turns into shifting harmonies of assembled voices
i have dreamed of the music to cast me aloft in the moonlight pale
to return to earth smelling of starlight
not to lose whatever believing has given me up to the voices, forever knowing
night to ascend as dawn presses up from the deeps

As the word “unreasonable” is open to misunderstanding, the matter may be more accurately put by saying that each one of these Christian or mystical virtues involves a paradox in its own nature, and that this is not true of any of the typically pagan or rationalist virtues. Justice consists in finding out a certain thing due to a certain man and giving it to him. Temperance consists in finding out the proper limit of a particular indulgence and adhering to that. But charity means pardoning what is unpardonable, or it is no virtue at all. Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. And faith means believing the incredible, or it is no virtue at all.

I am not one who has ever traveled the straight course, always to the road. I am a wanderer. I am often carried by the wind to places I did not know were there. I think sometimes that I am very little responsible for much of my life’s courses; it is like I am a feather blown by the breezes. I am thankful that I have come this far, blind as I am to where my foot will land the next step I take — I am fortune’s meager pawn. And the sum of the good in myself, any of the good I have done, somehow I think it is an accident — that if I were to have tried to do the right thing, it would have turned afoul. Accidental virtue, I recognize, is perhaps very little credit to a soul.

Has control always been an illusion? I would like to believe that, I think, seeing as I seem to have so little command of my life. We take whatever situation presented us and make do — we wander astray unaware that the road we travel is not the one we believe we’re on. We are each of us only human; we are small and the world is large; the universe is little changed if we exist or are not. I find I must put my trust in a higher voice — that I must acknowledge my smallness and my frailty. I cannot be left to myself; I have faltered and fallen before, and I will always find some way to fail if I go it alone.

I remember, now, what it was to lie on my back and face the sky midnight blue, myriad stars scattered throughout the canopy of night — to face it alone. How much the larger I was, back then, the whole world at my grasp. But however great I thought I was, those salad days when I was yet strong and unbroken, it was much the lesser treasure than what I have now: the courage to be as small as I am, in a world so much larger.

What is the nature of God? It is merely as the nature of the humblest love, which makes much of the smallest good thing. We might sense why the cruel world is as it is. Why there is toil, why there is pain. There is wisdom in the very air we breathe that we most probably will never fathom — not because it is so grand and complex, but because it is so simple, and plain. We must verily seek that humble nature within ourselves, to properly understand the way things are, and how we should be. Why it is that the soul of being itself, that love supreme would have it there is so much pain and wrong in the world: we cannot learn all there is to know if all we have are toys. We cannot understand the greatness of good, not beyond a casual thought, if we have not fought with all our might for it. And then, even if we fail, to survive with a soul that has known the truth of fire.