Meditate with me on this promise, this hope, this possibility: Food for all. When there is food for all, then there will be no more war, no more greed, no more racism, no more mean streets, no more mass incarceration, no more border police, no more deportation, no more joblessness, no more fracking the foundations of the earth, no more lousy education, no more lousy housing, no more . . .
Of all the figures in this story, only one is so anxious and un-trusting and hurt that he cannot do any good. It is the king of Israel. He is you. He is me. This king represents every old thought we have about how things work. He stands for that forlorn wish we have for a leader to swoop in and save us from disaster. The king is in our every anxious thought that it will all turn out wrong if we make a wrong turn now . . .
Did the dead really come to life at the touch of Elisha? I don’t know. But I know this. If my faith hung on whether these stories are facts, faith would not be faith. If these stories just had to be scientifically so, else I lose my trust in God, then my religion would be thin and brittle and ideological and small. We have these stories not because we know they happened but because, in their extremity of need, people said, Tell us that one again, master . . .
These stories are master/disciple stories. They tell of that moment of decision for possibility in the crisis the learner is facing. These stories are about you and me.
The quest that has animated all our forebears is to understand the cause and the meaning of our existence. The philosophers of ancient Greece peeled back the multitude of sensations trying to comprehend physics through the four elements earth, air, fire, and water. They invented the word “atom” . . .
A long long time ago, I stayed two months with a commune in Copenhagen whose members aspired to hold all things in common and to decide all matters together, much like the practice in the earliest church. Holding things in common in Copenhagen meant that one morning, my belt and jeans showed up on someone else’s body.
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