Why WOULD You?

Certain highly successful and influential persons of our time (who may or may not be narcissists): 

"It's all quite simple, really: I want what I want what I want. And I also happen to be extremely good at getting it."

But that's just it: Why would you?

Why on earth would you have such confidence in the judgment of your own will as to believe you'd actually be happier, or better off, by getting everything (or even most of what) you want? Or even by getting most everything you've rationally determined that you should want? Why would you ever have such overarching confidence in the judgment and powers of your own mind, as to believe that getting what you think you want will make you happier? 

Or if you like, never mind about being happier. Especially since - as I think by now our more globally-minded rulers have amply demonstrated - this Great Global World is not about happiness, whether their own or anyone else's. So here's a suggestion: Let's do our best to leave behind, once and for all, the unedifying, unproductive, hedonistic 1960s, '70s and '80s. At least as I recall them here in America. (par. 3) And then let us proceed to be as primly, austerely altruistic as we 21st-centurily can. So - to rephrase my question: Why would you imagine that getting even what you most rationally want would somehow make you "better," or wiser? Or more righteous, or productive? Or nobler or grander or more heroic? Or even more superior?

Alright, I take that last part back. Because the truth is, getting more or less exactly what we think everyone should want has been known to make some of us vastly superior, in certain altogether measurable and quantifiable ways (wealth, votes, grants and subsidies, promotions, both occupational and sexual opportunities) over all other visible creatures of this earth. Including sometimes our fellow humans. Even if for this earthly life only.

My final question, then, is why anyone in his right mind and will would ever want that "dream come true"? That degree of, let us say, overweening advantage over practically everything else in the visible creation. Yes, that may be your dream. But in that case, perhaps you might want to take a lesson or two from the invisible creation. I mean, consider the wonderful job Satan has made of his utterly unprecedented - and unrepeatable - creaturely superiority over everything the Lord God had made. Can you honestly say you're pleased with the results? More to the point, do you honestly think you could go him one better?

Some Right-side Bearings

I don't say that this is something guaranteed to make everybody happy. 

But what I think I've learned, these past 15 or so years, is that there is no human satisfaction quite like moral superiority. Especially when you know -  I mean, you know that you know that you know - you're doing your very best to be right. Whereas, if only you could be half-as-sure about the guy next to you . . .

Except that having and holding the moral high ground these days can be quite a challenging feat. If not positively acrobatic. And all the more so, of course, when it is the politically* moral high ground you're after.

*And, seriously, is there anything authentically moral that isn't also political?

In brief, how can you be sure that the political position you held last week, and in complete good faith, will have the same morally unassailable credentials a week from now? Or next month, or next year? Indeed, if I may venture to say: If there's one safe bet anyone can make, it is that our moral progress is only sure to get more complicated with time. And Progress. 

At the same time, either there have been - across the political and geopolitical West - certain recognizable patterns and consistencies these past 20-odd years, or else I've grown completely psychotic (no comments please). And so, for all you tender souls who'd like nothing better than a map for staying on the Right Side of History, of course I don't have one. But here, I think, are some pretty solid ground rules all but guaranteed to please eve the purest, most globally-enlightened bien-pensants. But especially those of this Most Enlightened Point in All of Human Time:

1) Russia, in all she does, is never provoked by anyone (and when she is, you'd better believe she roundly deserves it); (bottom of par. 2)

2) Islam - and in particular those revanchist supremacist anti-Western modes of Sunni Islam that have grown exponentially under the favor of the US global security establishment - is never unprovoked in anything it does; plus the provocations it suffers are always unmerited (meaning even its seemingly most disproportionate  acts of retaliation are always understandable, if not completely defensible);

3) Israel, by her mere existence, is a standing and heinous act of provocation to all properly sensitive, right-thinking, rightly-discerning people (and not just to all righteous Muslims); 

4) China (aka Beijing) is the world's ultimate wise and benign provocateur, apart from whose unceasing innovations, provocations, challenges, dynamism, bio-warfare researches, etc, mankind would still be living in the 21st-century equivalent of mud huts and caves.

The Bloodiness of Knowing Too Soon

If this recent Christmas season has convinced me of anything, it is that it is possible to know too much all at once - or much too soon - for anyone's good,  including our own. And especially in the matter of doing God's will. For instance, you or I might be a veritable Saul of Tarsus of holy-and-righteous determination. To say nothing of bloody-minded indignation. Yet even then, it sometimes behooves us to be at least as patient with God, and with His time and manner of unfolding, as He is with us, and ours. Even though that Divine patience might consist, at least initially, of knocking us off a high horse or two. 

In contrast, I wonder if there are any limits to the ways in which our Maker can re-make and re-direct a soul properly teachable. As a case in point, consider the main characters of the Christmas story. Note how, unlike with our hero Saul, God never once uses a violent means to dissuade Joseph, on the return from exile in Egypt, from re-settling the Holy Family in Judaea instead of Galilee. Nor, for that matter, does He have to knock heads to discourage the Wise Men from returning to their home countries via Herod's all-welcoming Jersualem. In the same way, although Joseph was likely none too happy about the brute (and often ugly) fact of Roman occupation, he never once considered it his calling to execute judgment or revenge upon his country's occupiers - any more than the Magi regarded the assassination or other conspiratorial undermining of Herod as part of their mission. What each of them did, rather, was to understand just where his part in the execution of the Divine plan began, and where it ended. They were not out to save the world singlehanded, or even to speed up the pace and progress of the world's salvation, but merely to be its instruments.

Of course we can all be, and all have been, very different from Joseph, Mary and Jesus. We can have what we think is the completest blueprint, or game plan, or ultimate goal or end in view. So that all we have to do, having just been passed the ball, is to take and run with it. Yet notice how soon does our pending success become hostage to something we've got in our possession, yes - but that we dare not let go of. And how sometimes that Something - that all-consuming Action - in order to achieve its all-devouring object, has literally got to hack its way through thickets and jungles, not of foliage, but of human innocents of every age and description. And not just the occupier's innocents, but our own.

Again, this was not Jesus,' or Mary's, or Joseph's Way. But if you like, by way of direct contrast, picture if you can a very different Holy Family. One that was always confidently demanding to know everything up front. Imagine them being overbriefed on every minutest point and detail of an itinerary already bursting at the seams: a mission pregnant, not just with the future of Judaea or Rome or the whole world of antiquity, but with the fate of all mankind. Think of Joseph knowing all that in advance. And then wrestling with, or being tempted by, the knowledge that this mission, if done right, would in fullness of time result in the expulsion of the hated occupier (in this case not Jewish but Roman) from Palestine! Picture his anxiety, his fear of failure, the temptation to self-importance, the pressure of performance "required" to bring the Child safely back to Nazareth. The sense, in short, that pretty much everything depended on him. And then consider how that might have goaded him on towards, if not a violent, surely a more forceful acceleration and consummation of a goal known in its fullness only to his God and Father: and known by Him, not just from start to finish, but in every detail and segment and manner of unfolding. How else, indeed, except by leaning in as close as they could to Him, should the Holy Family have escaped a planned, orchestrated massacre of epic proportions - and that, again, of innocents?

The point here being, I believe, that sometimes it is enough to wait, and watch, and trust, and act trustfully and expectantly. As opposed to being sure of knowing everything right up to the end result, and then, why, simply following through. Except that, in the latter case, as you try to "rush project to completion," you very quickly find out that it's up to you to fill in the details, to try anything ("whatever works"), to probe every opening and opportunity,  in the ever more frantic effort to bring your devoutly wished consummation to pass. And in the meantime, watch - as your "progress" becomes steadily more protracted, more grueling, and far more stress- than grace-filled - how the bodies and the blood keep piling up. 

But if I may to return to the Holy Family, with its simple, stark, uncluttered faith. Ask yourself: Was there really anybody else, up to that point in time (or even up till now), who could have understood and entered into, not just the will or the command, but the very heart and longing, the inmost desire and good pleasure of the Father, and more fully - more closely and intimately - than this strange, humanly impossible human trinity? See again and again how they choose to trust in, and so experience the very presence of, the Father's unfolding heart. Rather than having to know every stage of it in advance, as if it were a mere project to be executed. God rarely speaks in blueprints. And even if He should come up with one for so wise an Age as ours, somehow I don't think even the most god-submitted Hamas, or our most globally-wise US security establishment, is likely to be stumbling on it anytime soon.

The Things One Can Never Forgive

It's taken me rather a long time (as usual) to figure this out. But sometimes history doesn't seem to cooperate very well with us. Sometimes history in a given place - like, say, the Middle East - instead of moving properly forward, can seem to close round itself in a kind of loop: a loop that suggests that its God - assuming history has a god - is either sorely unimaginative, or suffering from one degree or another of incompetence, or simply one who rather desperately needs our help. And in particular our help in breaking that history out of whatever holding pattern, or pattern of unprogressive recurrence, it's somehow stupidly got itself into. But all the more so if our religion happens to be a once and final, never-to-be-replaced-or-revised monotheism, whose advanced purity and austerity are such as to make pretty much all its predecessors (e.g., Judaism, Christianity) retrograde and redundant. If not positively harmful.

So now imagine such a loop, if you can: A blatantly lesser monotheistic people (however ingeniously cunning and conniving) with a most primitive and unspiritual notion, both of God and of their own relation to God, who somehow manage to return to a place from which they'd been most disgracefully (not to mention deservedly) expelled many centuries ago. And most troubling of all - at least from the standpoint of your own rightful deserts - they somehow manage to make a go, and even a kind of success, of it. To the point where not only their own numbers, but those of your own people keep increasing as it were inexorably. And however much they may want to ensure for you the exact opposite result.

Then again, someone else might argue, what difference should it make even if they were to to do the exact reverse - to try to increase and prosper your people, as well as theirs - given that they have absolutely NO business being there in the first place?

Consider, then, what it is even to share that same sacred space - the second holiest place on earth, in fact, and so surely the sole rightful possession of the world's holiest religion? - with a manifestly unworthy nation, and faith. Think what it is to have to concede the lion's share of it to a people you don't just morally object to, but despise, loathe, perhaps even abominate. Isn't it true, that sometimes the hardest of such a people's offenses to forgive, among all the myriad inconsiderations, degradations, gross injustices they inflict, are not so much their cruelties as their kindnesses, not their failures (of course), but their successes, not their hardness and miserliness of heart so much as their bounty and generosity. Think what a triumph of self-vindication it would be, if only you could mark just the former to their credit, and not the latter! Indeed, given their larger, indeed their prior and comprehensive unworthiness - which of course can only testify to the gross insincerity and untrustworthiness of even their "worthiest" present acts - sometimes it isn't enough to "cancel," to bring into disrepute their physical presence in the sacred space. Sometimes the only thing that will relieve your humiliation - the disgrace of their continued prosperity, and your ongoing misery (even as you - or some of you - partake of and benefit from their good fortune?) - is to cancel, undo, eradicate even the memory of their physical existence in that space. Or if, for the time being, their physical annihilation eludes you, surely you can bring about a moral annihilation like no other in the history of the world? Surely, armed as you are with the right side of that history, you can enlist on your side such an overwhelming preponderance of world opinion as will make it just a matter of time before the entire globe vomits them out . . . 

I can't pretend to know how far this is an accurate picture of the basic moral assumptions/quandaries of most Palestinians living in Gaza or elsewhere. But something tells me it's a pretty accurate, if broad-stroked, summary of the world-view of that infestation we call Hamas. And of those Palestinians, along with their apparently growing masses of supporters throughout the world, who have become more or less Hamasified. And as anyone, I suspect, who really knows the leadership of Hamas - whether pro or con, or from the inside or out - will tell you: It can never, ever be satisfied with even the most thorough and irrevocable extirpation of the Jewish state. Consider for a moment your fervently devout Hamas militant. As distinct from some more politically opportunistic supporter. For the true believer, Israel together with her allies, defenders, tolerators has arguably committed the great capital, and possibly unforgivable, sin against the (real) People of God. But even assuming the Jewish state's complete eradication, there remain those residual pockets of support and tolerance throughout the world to be dealt with. And even then, speaking just territorially, why stop there? Do not he and his comrades, or at any rate their closest co-religionists, have at least as good a claim to Cyprus and Crete and Greece and the greater part of the Balkans, to Sicily and Sardinia and most if not all of Spain? And those just for breakfast? 

Yet even apart from questions of territory, why should your devoutly Hamas militant make Jews/Israelis the most blameworthy of his enemies? They almost can't help it: being who they are, and so far as they intend to remain Jews, they really have no choice but to fight to the death those who seek (at very least) their collective amnesia. In short, as unrepentant Jews bent on their own survival, they're all but congenitally incorrigible. But what about the rest of us, who sympathize with, or aren't wholly convinced of the blasphemous absurdity of Israel's right to exist? Don't at least we have free will? And doesn't that make us at least criminally complicit with, and so even more culpable and deplorable than, Jews themselves? 

That is why I find myself more and more convinced that, whether we know it (yet) or not, under the self-appointedly "divine" judgment of Hamas we are all Jews nowadays. And above all those of us who have no intention of becoming even remotely Hamasified. In effect we are either with them or against them: either we are Jews in effect, or else we are those who, whether purposefully or not, have become complicit in the desire for (at very minimum) Jewish collective amnesia. Or other collective suicide. As indeed I frankly wonder if I haven't myself been complicit (and, yes, to my inestimable shame), because of my delayed response to October 7. 

But now recall what I hinted at earlier, regarding both Jerusalem and Israel as a whole. As some might argue, surely it's only right that the holiest place on earth (or even the second holiest?) should be the exclusive possession of the holiest and most progressive monotheistic religion. In short, by rights it both belongs to and should be mainly inhabited by Sunni Muslims.* Yet within such a tight, uncompromising moral framework, it is hard to see how there could ever be room, much less legitimacy, for any Israel, any Jewish state, or even province or reservation or autonomous region, no matter how small or "humbled," compliant or acquiescent. And once again, why stop there - assuming the tables have been sufficiently and irreversibly turned? After all, now you're on a roll, and feeling more than ever unstoppable. "We have them on the run," as I believe one Hamas militant put it some years ago. And let no one underestimate the sheer momentum of outraged world opinion.

*I suspect Iran even in its Machiavellian stupidity will learn that soon enough.

Given, then, that iron framework of moral assumptions, along with its accompanying momentum, the real question as I see it becomes very simple. Even with respect to a "repentant," restitution-offering Israel: once you, her sworn enemy, are possessed of that degree of moral certitude and contempt, of that sense of almost cosmic injustice and outrage, may I suggest, it is no longer a matter of what vengeance, what sadism, what otherwise diabolic cruelty and atrocity you become (rightly) capable of. And against those who are, after all, Allah's own personal enemies. The question rather is what vengeance, etc, do you believe you're not entitled to?

Travails of a (sadly un-salesmanlike) Church Mouse

So what am I doing wrong?

Why am I having so much trouble getting volunteers for even a single (minor festival) day, involving at most an hour or two? And that requiring nothing more strenuous than keeping the church open? Just when did so many unselfish, caring, conscientious people - and most of them comfortably retired - become so unbreathably busy?

But here's a disturbing thought. The fact that the ministry isn't all that strenuous or challenging - might that be the problem?

My late father used to talk about certain things in life - however many or few - that were simply "more trouble than they're worth." In other words, not everything is worth doing merely because it's intrinsically difficult. Even in a church. And if even those ministries of the largest inherent worth can somehow be made easier, more approachable, more humanly breathable, then surely - in most cases - some measure of net gain will be secured?

Which to me only suggests, why, how far we've progressed from - what? ignorance? inefficiency? barbarism? God? - since 1970. 

My point is that, in today's operational world, I suspect my father's dictum would be all but incomprehensible. And not just in corporate venues, but perhaps even more so among busy church people. No doubt our modern rejoinder should be best rephrased as a question. As in: "Wait a minute: if it's not troublesome, then what's it worth?" Or, more to the immediate point: If I'm not contantly multiplying and accelerating the amount of trouble I'm enduring on your behalf, how on earth are you - much less anyone else - ever going to know how much I love you?

More and more it occurs to me that Love Today (even - or especially? - in its most giving modes) is not nearly so much a matter of relying and trusting - in God or anyone else - as it is of proving and demonstrating: proving our worthiness, our dedication, our willingness to sacrifice, our up-to-the-challengeness. And so, of course, the more visibly dramatic or even excruciating the challenge the better: the better to cover ourselves in . . . credit? respect? or even glory? 

And why not? I mean, how else does one distinguish oneself in any organization - much more that of the Church - than by taking on more and more and more? Again, you do want to distinguish yourself, right? I mean, if you're not willing to take yourself seriously, why should I? And if nobody takes you seriously, how are you ever going to be given anything really important to do, and so accomplish real and significant good? And on the largest possible scale? (Which is where everything really counts, you know.) Finally, if these are precisely the incentives that have made us most effective in the World, shouldn't we of the Church be able to at least triple their effectiveness? Or what's an omnipotent God for, anyway???

And then simpletons like me marvel at how our Modern Acts of Charity have become so grim . . . and tense . . . and strained . . . and (dare I say it again?) competitive.

Now remember, the point of competing is to win. By winning, we at very least demonstrate our competence, possibly even our fitness to exercise authority. Or even to wield power? Indeed, what good is virtue - necessary as it is - apart from the power and authority required to make it effective, and authoritative? 

The real question, I suspect, is whether and how far the most effective - i.e., the most loving - kinds of power are primarily external. Does our Maker more convictingly demonstrate His might by changing governments, or systems, or technologies? Or by changing hearts? 

Which latter is, of course, an immeasurably more gentle, osmotic, insinuative power than anything we mere humans have so far achieved. Yes, even with those we profess - and strain - to love. 

My final point, then, concerns the nature of power at its most inward. The kind of power that, before it does anything of a mere external nature, somehow actually manages to reach into, and enter deeply the silence of, and therefore change, our hearts. Why, if I'm not mistaken, there's even some fairly solid Scriptural evidence for it. Indeed, as the present Church liturgical season - now called Ordinary Time, but which some used to call Pentecost - ought to remind us: Power at at its most love-full (awful phrase, I know) should not be understood as something taken at all. It is not something that you win, or gather, or amass, or earn or summon or conjure. Power at its most godly, and thus humble, and thereby effective, is above all something you receive.

Some Post-Covidity Realizations

Oh yeah, and one more prayer (remember, I'm nothing if not monotonous):

God save us from what I like to call a morbidly global globe. God deliver us from a world so morbidly intent on its pre-set, sacred agendas - whether of Life As Radically Reset, or of Business-As-Rigidly-Usual - that it becomes unable to see a genuine interruption clearly. Like, for instance, Covid. Imagine having been able to see even Covid clearly. Which is to say, prayerfully, trustfully, proportionately for what it is. And not merely for what we can make of it, according to your, or my, preferred political narratives. God heal us, too, from a world that, in its twisted obsession with global scale, finds it even harder to see how the proportionateness, the fitness of a given pandemic response both can and often should vary - from country to country, region to region, locale to locale, etc.

A little late for all that, I know. 

And of course you and I can debate till our Lord comes home about how the whole mess was prearranged, more or less conspiratorially. My point is that even the most brutally unexpected interruptions can be exploited to death, once we crafty humans get our bearings. Worse yet, they can be brazenly orchestrated and manipulated - yes, sometimes even towards the death of Freedom As We Know It. Which does not exactly prove that some omnicompetent Blofeld had it all planned from the start. On the other hand if, as in this case, the ground zero of interruption - our very own corporately most holy and godlike Beijing (to whose wisest precautions how could we all not defer?) - if even the Mighty Interrupter Itself was, shall we say, hardly prepared for pandemic, how much less the rest of us mere mortals?

Our Strange Pan-human Journey

Just some bizarre, rambling and (to some) possibly incoherent thoughts as one might expect from me following another ridiculously long - nearly four-month? - sabbatical. Or if you prefer, consider it a further exploration of certain points and themes raised in my last post but one. Anyhow: 

As I understand the Scriptures, we humans one and all come from one God, whether we like Him or not, who also made all the other creatures of our common universe, whether we like them or not. (And we humans can be quite finicky about these things). Neither does the story just go on from there, forever and ever - open-endedly, as it were - as if our Point of Origin, did we so choose, might be one to which we will never return, even as we continue to move onwards and upwards, to bigger and better (yet strangely God-free?) things. 

Rather, the point is that, just as we've all come from God, so one day we shall all return to Him, whether for mercy or for judgment. Please note, then, that the bounds of this whole cycle - its starting- and end-points - are not just one and the same God, but are both quite involuntary: we did not choose them, and again, we may not even much like them. We may indeed wish we could go much farther - or even infinitely far - to places supposedly unbounded by God. And the whole time doing it pretty much on our own: with our Maker barely a memory, or having left Him once and for all "in the dust," as they say. But we have no choice in the matter.

On the other hand, I've been told, on good authority, that as we become reconciled to what we can in no wise change - when we choose to embrace, with love, That over which we have least power or control - we sometimes encounter a kind of blessedness altogether unique: one containing a core of rapture, indeed, so not of this earth as to be both "boundless," and boundlessly satisfying.

But if that be so, then clearly our human problem lies not with our start or finish - our Alpha and Omega, so to speak - but with what happens, and what we choose, in the meantime. I.e., between our birth and our death. In a nutshell, our common problem is this: In our various highly individual journeys of return to the God who made us, we often run into other gods along the way, many of whom represent themselves as being either the real terminus of our journey, or as some genuine if not indispensable help in getting there. Almost as if the God were using them as tentative-yet-necessary intermediaries, or guideposts, or way-stations of refreshment and renewal, to help and speed us along. And yet we know, quite to the contrary, that His Word is altogether adamant in its warnings against precisely that: against following, not just gods other than the Creator and Redeemer of Genesis and John, but even "an angel from heaven" (if such a thing were possible) come down to preach to us some other gospel of supposed redemption.

Right now, though, I'd like to draw your attention to one very specific and distinct "other god." I would like to pray with all my heart our Maker's protection - for all of us - against one kind of very familiar, most ingratiating, and possibly ubiquitous deity. One so familiar as to be, as often as not, some version of our own "best," or most sacred, or heroic, or productive or progressive Self . Plus - as if all that weren't enough - one who very generously bothers to meet us half-way, as it were. And all for no other reason than to hasten us on down the right Path. As the saying goes, what could possibly go wrong?

So what is my prayer?

God save us, I pray, from the kind of god who, no matter how well-intentioned and compassionate he may be - and however much real, tangible power he may be able to gain over maybe the better part of the universe -  nonetheless did not create it. And so is not really capable of understanding it. At least not in what we might call its real depths: those strange, often hidden deeps of meaning, resonance and longing ("secret as the soul") in which it too both desires, and finds its only satisfaction in, its Maker. God save us, in other words, from that god in relation to whom the Universe itself, just because it is powerful, yet rarely if ever seems benevolent or compassionate, can only be one degree or another of obstacle. Or competitor. Or enemy. Indeed, one suspects that the relation between them - between this god and this universe - can only be one of the most hardened enmity, and that for two reasons. First, because on the one hand, again, this god did not create this world, and so has no hope of really getting inside it - getting to know it "from within itself," so to speak. Yet on the other hand, he clearly is (or at any rate seems to be) the hands-down moral superior of this most cruel, uncompassionate creation. 

At the same time, precisely because this same god, no matter how he may love or want to help us, did not create us either - any more than he created the world - neither can he really get inside of us; his life cannot flow through us, because our own life hinders it. We can never be his vessels, or his members, but at best only his partners or his instruments. Or at worst (some would argue) his puppets. Indeed, it may be contended that - even if one assumes him to be completely "outside of" us* - still, he depends no less on us than we on him, and possibly more so. As powerful as he is or is able to become, his power shall always be limited by what he did not create, and so cannot ever really know the heart and soul of. Neither can he ever be secure and without fear in his relation to the universe, in the way that, say, its Maker is; indeed, precisely because he can neither satisfy its desire nor gain its trust, there is but one way he can "overcome" the creation's enmity: it is through power, and ever more power, control, and ever more control.

*Never a safe assumption in any circumstances.

But while this god's power is clearly limited, we humans can, if we wish, extend it. We may have no more hope than he does of understanding this creation - at least not apart from the grace of its God. But we can nonetheless be partners with him in his project of taming and subuing it. Or failing that (and remember this is - at least from one standpoint - a most unruly, wicked creation), we can terrorize, eviscerate and beat it into submission. Much as you would any rudely obstinate and dangerous monster. After all, it may be argued, since when has want of real understanding - of anything - ever really interfered with Man's ability to control it, to utilize it, to turn it to good, sound, productive purpose. Oh, granted it has sometimes. But not, surely, when that purpose is comprehensively, technologically rational, unpoetic, unromantic, unsentimental, and above all, soundly utilitarian? Which is to say, when Rational Utilitarian Man is the One most utterly in control, both of himself and of his surroundings. On the other hand, if even our most rational purposes sometimes turn us to violent methods - due, again, to the obstinacy/unruliness/wickedness of the universe - or seem unduly harsh or cruel even to ourselves and to our neighbor: honestly, what else are we resourceful humans supposed to do? Be oppressed, so as not to oppress? And who is to blame us? or stop us?

The problem, as I see it, with this kind of god is that he cannot stop. He seems to be humble enough, because of his poignant awareness of his own insufficiency, and because he's forever imploring us to go beyond him. In a sense he's a very American sort of god; his first, his foremost, perhaps his only commandment is threefold: "Impress me. Surprise me. Surpass me." The implicit point being that just as he is not enough, but needs us to complete and go beyond and make him redundant, so do we in our turn need other things, that we in a very real sense have made (or at least much more than he can be said to have made us), to complete and go beyond and make us redundant. 

Are you with me so far?

But here to me is the most galling thing: The more has-been, obsolescent, redundant we all become - this modish yet all-too-soon-outmoded progression of gods - somehow the less we seem able to subdue, or pacify, or control, or even conciliate (much less be reconciled with) this growingly obstinate universe. Or even just this earth. Which latter no doubt will become the very soul of compliance and cooperation once we mere unenhanced humans - or most of us - have been duly superseded, and its new overlords are free to take our progress-so-far to the legendary "next level."

Now you can make of that likelihood whatever you like. For my part (and to return to my original prayer) I say: God save us from any intermediate, transitioning, ever-so-kindly-tentative god or series of gods. Yes, even when they all boil down to nothing more than our "very best" selves doing their best - or to that "sacred self" in each of us which most longs to please, or be closest to, or even "most like" God. God save us from that zealous deity who, however much he may strive or presume to love both God and man, cannot ever really (which is to say, lovingly) understand us humans: can never know us as me, but only as I; never as passive, or receptive, or contemplative, but only active; never as creation, but only as creating; can never know that inmost wellspring of need and longing, in you and me and every creature, which is all that waters and irrigates, solaces, refreshes and renews even our seemingly most independent creative acts. And just because he cannot know that in any creature which only its Creator knows best - cannot know its peace, but only its fear, defiance, ambition, aggression - so naturally he looks out on all nature, whether human or subhuman, and sees only a war of all against all. Hence, too, his own strange peace, which somehow always seems to resolve itself into one or another degree of violence, suppression, distortion, disfigurement: both of "nature," and of our own nature. Even as this same god proceeds, with the "very best" aims and intentions, to wreak or expedite the sort of havoc - climatic, economic, geopolitical, thermonuclear, what have you - which comes every month, every day* closer to the doorsteps of each one of us.  

*Or am I once again grossly overreacting? After all (as I've been told more than once), one singularly brutal and ugly global summer does not a climate-crisis make.

In short, God save us from that god who, as often as not - at least when he's not your and my most bravely self-transgressing, self-transcending Egos in disguise - is really the Devil. Which is to say, that One who, while he's not inaptly termed the god of this world, nonetheless did not create it, and so can never redeem it. 

On which note, once again, if I may: 

Pray for the peace and sanity of Kyiv. And the return to sanity of Moscow.

But above all, 

God deliver, cleanse and and heal America.