Tuesday, October 3, 2006

Sometimes I wonder...

Everyone has a thing or two that make them wonder.

Recently, and that means within the past few years, something has stuck in my thoughts like a missed fish bone. Something about the finite nature of humanity and the infinity of God.

The world has always been a kind of insanity and the present is certainly no less than the past. Its what you get when limited beings, and the longer I live the more limited people (myself included) seem, are in charge of anything. In the cosmic state of things we are, even the best of us, amoebas swimming about in a sea of emotion, sin, illogic, and animal instincts while charged with the task of caring for this blue dot in space and finding a way to share a common existence.

Frankly, we've screwed it up and the whole of human history is a chain of mistakes strung together with a moment or two of where the soulish beauty of our design shines through. All the poetry on the exalted state of man is a dream at best, a dream that tortures us with the reality of our actual state, and a deceit at worst.

And God knows it.

The Psalmist says of God "He knows our frame, he remembers that we are dust..." (Psalm 103). And it is there that I wonder about things.

I wonder why we humans, who are the scourge of this planet and so very mortal and limited, have been allowed to sink this far this fast. Our leaders and all who follow seem demented on a primal level. We are violent and brutish and given to things that even the animals, who are often our moral superiors, cannot comprehend. What kind of being decapitates another on television or builds a bomb capable of snuffing out all existence?

And I wonder why God doesn't stop all of this, an act requiring a twitch of his will. We need to be protected from ourselves, from the cesspool of our imaginations and the will to evil that pervades our lives. We tiny, finite, beings, so small and yet so filled with darkness are helpless in the face of ourselves. Why does God not choose to keep us from that in the same way a humane person seeks to ease the suffering of an incomprehending animal?

They say it is all about choice and freedom, the desire of God to be in loving relationship with beings capable of deciding for that union. But when is it enough? When will this power, this freedom, have done so much damage that God has to intervene in the same way a parent tries to keep thier addled child from continuously pulling the boiling water on the stove over thier head?

Sometimes I wonder.

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