Especially this year, when the commitments are things like thinking positively and staying focused and clear of distractions. (On reaching out to help others, perhaps I haven't done as badly.) But in falling down, I learn about my deeply held beliefs and where I stand with respect to them. For example, I believe that God wants the best for each of us. He wants us to be happy and fulfilled according to our potentials.
When I stop thinking positively and indulge in nostalgia, I learn something about the purpose of memory, and I've made the following observations:
I wonder whether God, being perfect and not being able to act incorrectly, created us so that he could understand free will and failure. And He incarnated in order to understand our struggle and suffering.
God also needed a way to record events. Living things record events, whether consciously or not. Trees record fires and volcanic eruptions in the rings of their trunks. And we have a superb ability to store far more complex memories. We record through our senses, and God helps us bumble our way through, with all the attendant messy emotions.
I have been working through a family crisis, where many memories come crashing over me, and do not allow much respite. It is hard not to be overwhelmed by grief. Certainly, God is silent. The work of His hand may be apparent in all things, but God often seems very distant.
We have to accept that bad things are going to happen, terrible things. It has been asked over and over again why this continues, and the answer is that God doesn't break his own rules. The universe was created as an ordered system; like Dharma, if a physical law were violated, there would be no law, and chaos would reign.
This is not to say that we simply accept tragedy and misfortune--this is why we struggle--we're expected to work through our travails. I'm working through my own. Elie Wiesel said that human problems are like an ideal gas that expands to fill each person's psychic space. This is why each person's problems seem to be the greatest problem in the world--for that person. Keeping this absurdity in mind, I look around and wonder at the grand scale of disaster, economic and geologic, of the recent past. Why it is all happening now, we don't know. We do know that catastrophes tend to cluster. Whatever the reason, I cannot fathom the depth of suffering--I only perceive that I don't have real problems. Everything I have and love was not wiped out by a tsunami, for example. I simply have challenges.
Even though I keep saying it, I keep forgetting that God ultimately wants us to turn to joy, and probably wonders why we don't seize on His compassion when it's offered freely. Though I believe in it, I have to say, the compassion is a silent one. It often seems indifferent and severe. The silence is a great mystery; it can break one's heart.
Well written.
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