It happens that I sometimes find myself in a dialogue with someone who seems to be utterly — and willingly — ignorant of life’s subtleties. Of its… permutations. Of how a thing is different here than it is there. Of how a word shifts meanings as it shifts contexts.

There are so few things that exist as stone cold fact. Those that are remain precious, peculiar in their rarity: they scream, “Are we not breathtaking?”

The rest are immersed in the muddy process of simply being alive. As if these things can be wrestled into the strictures of a particular set of chains or made to move along a certain track! As if to say, life is my film and must follow my script; or, life is my model train set and must follow my carefully-thought-out tracks.

Have you ever thought about how much there is to think about? Have you? Take a moment and gather as many different areas of thought into the hand of your mind and count them. Go deeper: dissect each area into smaller areas and each smaller area into yet smaller areas. Have you begun to understand the sheer complexity of all the things there are to discover, or to decide, or to dissect, or to differentiate, or to delve into?

If you cannot begin to grasp the immensity of the number of things you could think about if you so wished, what makes you think you can effortlessly boil them down and extract the pith? That you can find the over-riding principles that under-gird all things? If the below is endlessly complex, the product of a dazzling intellect far grander than your own, what makes you think you can begin to bundle together the above, as if that magnificent, ponderous intellect would make it that easy?

There’s no easier way to proclaim oneself God than to act as if you are not simply a mute puppet in the hands of all things, including the True God. Or to put a different way: what comes before determines what comes after. And a man can never truly come before himself, or even fully determine the thing that comes before.

You are not the prime mover, or even a major in the myriad minor movers. You, simply, do not deserve your pride. And when you have finally grown old in the midst of trying to grasp the thread of God in everything, when you have finally shouted out at a baffling world, “Look how much I understand!” might the world not shout back, “But do you understand yourself?”

If it did, would you even hear it?

Tags: misc