"Streaked with immortal blasphemies, betwixt His twin eternities the Shaper of    mortal destinies stirs in that limbo of endless sleep, some nothing that hath shadows deep.

    "The world is only a small pool in the meadows of Eternity, and men like fishes lying cool; and the wise man and the fool in its depths like fishes lie.  When an angel drops a rod and he draws you to the sky will you bear to meet your God you have streaked with blasphemy?"

    This poem, "Blind God," was written by Isaac Rosenberg amidst the depths of the tragedy of World War One.  From his vantage point in the awful conditions of the trenches in which millions of men were forced to fight, Rosenberg struggled mightily to reconcile God's sovereignty with human mortality.

    In short, if people are but mere wisps of mortal existence, wisps who didn't ask to be born, who didn't ask to live in nations at war, people whose lives are frightfully and painfully brief, why must they be punished for challenging the unilaterally determined dictates of an omnipotent God?

    It's a very hard question.

    By the way, I'll be traveling for the next week or more.  I'll catch up upon return.  Thanks for reading!

 

     Simone de Beauvoir, the famous French feminist and long time companion of the existentialist Jean Paul Sartre devoted much of a book, Force and Circumstance, to this very thing.  In one passage, she writes, "I loathe the thought of annihilating myself quite as much now as I ever did.  I think with sadness of all the books I've read, all the places I've seen, all the knowledge I've amassed and that will be no more [she then recounts a few of the remarkable things and places she has seen] . . . all of the things I've talked about, others I have left unspoken--there is no place where it will all live again."

    It's a rather sober reflection on the futility of existence, n'est pas?  But it's real.  One day, everything we know will end.  Though I'm not trying to be morbid, I am seeking to open us to thinking anew about what life means.  Because we are spiritual beings, beings fashioned by a creator God, however we wish to understand this, we ought to view and experience life as more than what we see at the moment.

    Memory is more compelling than a categorical end.

 

      July:  the month for celebrating independence.  Yesterday, July 1, Canada celebrated its Independence Day.  in two days, the U.S. will celebrate its Independence Day.  And on July 14, France will remember Bastille Day, its Independence Day.

    As I contemplate America's independence day, however, I am filled with fear and trepidation.  A U.S. Supreme Court decision yesterday leads me to conclude that, in the same way that Germany in 1932 made Adolf Hitler chancellor without shedding a drop of blood, so does America stand on the cusp of anointing and creating a dictator through entirely democratic means.  It's enormously frightening.

    And it reminds me of former president Richard Nixon's statement, which he made at the height of the debacle of Watergate, that, "If the president does it, it's not illegal."

    From a political standpoint, more unnerving words have rarely been said.

    To every would be dictator:  we're free, yes, but we're not free to be free.