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.
Have you ever had to reinvent yourself? The phrase has a peculiarly American flavor, but the experience to which it refers has always belonged to the human predicament. Of such is the story of Arjuna—Odysseus—Jacob—Job—Jesus in the wilderness—Jesus before the Cross. Re-invention comes to this. . .
We have been working with the great challenge of our times, the news that climate change will bring no more normal now—that everything will change, and we must change. Our species has no experience with demands so implacable. Our whole world view evolved on a hospitable planet and presumes its continuance . . .
A film from Danish director Lars von Trier received little notice in 2010, but I hear of it more and more now. It is called Melancholia. A heavenly body—far bigger than an asteroid—has appeared in the night sky. Is it moving? How? Will it fly by Earth? Will it . . . ?
We say we seek unity, community, love, peace—a new heaven and a new earth. But we cannot get to unity through our longings. We are too disordered by our own worries. Therefore, profound experiences of joined humanity usually come only in the face of mortal danger. . . . Still, sometimes there is a shift in how we see . . .
In the last hundred years, humans have so altered the earth that ours is no longer the same stable planet upon which civilization took root ten thousand years ago. A different world is coming.
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