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| Wait for it, wait for it . . . |
It’s odd. When you’re in church and you’re singing How Great Thou Art, and the preacher’s
expounding on the Beatitudes and the
choir is singing . . . and the
glory of the Lord shall be revealed, it’s easy to see everything that was,
is and will be through the window of those words, those emotions, those
harmonies.
And
then you go home and you listen to the news of what politicians, kings and
armies, and corporations are doing to the world, and that becomes reality and you bristle in disappointment that the
world is so material and crass, that it’s all competitive and heartless and
grasping and nothing like the Kingdom of
God.
And maybe
you pick up Stephen Hawking and read a conceptualization of the universe to
which our planet and all that’s in it are integral, where distance is measured
in millions of light years and the earth as we know it is a speck, a wart on
the leg of a flea on a dog’s back in some incomprehensibly massive
“everything” and . . . the glory of the
Lord shall be revealed seems like a long-forgotten page in a child’s book
of rhymes.
Or you
take a walk in the woods, see the stars as poets have seen them for centuries,
lose yourself in a Manet landscape and the whole idea of belief falls away and the universe—you realize—is inside you, a
something in your brief soul that is, in the end, the only reality there may ever
be. It’s joy, it’s discovery, it’s art, it’s music. For a moment, sheer
exhilaration casts off all those other “truths” like spent, dried shells.
Is it
any wonder that the concept of believing
is being rethought by anyone who is well-off enough to own access to many
different windows: television, radio, newspapers, the internet, books,
lectures, schools, galleries, etc. Unless one is able to hold competing
“beliefs” without too much dissonance, life becomes a game of accepting this,
rejecting that or the other way ‘round. Not that that won’t always be the case
to some extent, but it seems to me that the “everything” has to be—in the end—one thing, and that the apparent worlds
have to be—logically—one world. In other words, the “everything” is a unity, no
matter which window opens upon it at any given time.
For
most of us, most of the time, living actively in the idea of a unified
“everything” is just not possible; it’s a case of trying to force a litre of
water into a teacup; there just isn’t room. Lately, I’ve been finding some
solace in exercising what is called in German, Gelassenheit, most closely translated into English as
“yieldedness,” a sentiment that’s familiar to us in the proverb illustrated
above and translated: “God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot
change, courage to change the things we can, and wisdom to know the difference
(generally attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr).” By all means, enjoy studying the
“everything” through all the windows available to you, but yield to the
knowledge that in all time to this date, no one has been found who is able to
gaze through all the windows at once with the sense of the completeness for
which we long so desperately.
There
are plenty of witnesses around who will gladly draw the blinds for you on all
the windows but the one that is their view of choice. Gelassenheit, to Niebuhr, never meant settling for ignorance, for
the single-window understanding of the world. To that, I would guess, Niebuhr
would say that choosing to explore a broader—as opposed to a manageable—range of possibilities
falls into the category of “changing the things we can,”
. . . and that takes courage.
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