The Test of Faith

For reasons beyond my understanding, I have had faith my whole life that this world is a beautiful place and we are meant to participate in that loveliness, preserve it, add to it, praise it, express undying gratitude for it all. We also have the blessed obligation to reveal it to others and to reveal to others their own forgotten beauty. As a teacher and an artist, that is certainly what I have attempted and occasionally accomplished. 

 

But I’m not naïve. I can see clearly how we’ve squandered our incarnation as human beings, fed our brutality over our beauty, soiled our own bed, chased after the wrong things that bring nothing but more pain and sorrow and emptiness, stood by silently while others have pillaged and raped and trashed and thrashed and beaten and bullied the innocent and the vulnerable. 

 

So it takes a great leap of faith to come to terms with humanity’s capacity for extraordinary kindness and tenderness and courage and love mixed with our equal capacity for bottomless greed and cruelty and stupidity and hatred. How much of that is a mirror to Nature’s cycle of Creation and Destruction and how much is a thing entirely to the side, not to be casually accepted as the cycle of life and death? 

 

Every year I revel in the plum blossoms in February, the reminder that life endlessly re-generates itself and from the bare branches of Winter come the fragrant blossoms of Spring. In both my personal life and cultural life, I see some cycles of extraordinary creativity and hopeful signs that we will finally learn how to co-habit peacefully and joyfully together alternating with both personal and cultural betrayals where the whole show crashes to the ground. Whereas the plums are reliable and on a timetable, these other deaths and re-births are unpredictable and at the whim of forces none of us understand. We can’t just grit our teeth through the December and January of our lives knowing that the February blooms (at least in San Francisco!) are on their way. 

 

So today’s Mary Oliver’s “poem-d’jour” both gives me a crumb of comfort and makes me wonder if indeed the human cycle will follow the natural one. My faith that this might be so is certainly being tested in this moment. 

 

What do you think?