Too much time on my hands, I guess, as I sit here under the River Tree looking up at the evolving summer clouds, clouds I saw from 12,500 ft. just three weeks back. I had the privilege of a brief journey through the heavens, but it occurs to me that we’re all on our brief journeys, where would seem to be the operative question.
I’m thinking about the writings of noted theologians Father Robert Barron and Paul Tillich that if we just focus on what our five senses perceive or even what our crude “science” reveals, what they would call our “finitude of awareness” we can only be overwhelmed individually and collectively with an ever traumatizing anxiety and fear of that unavoidable unknown surrounding us, however much we pitifully strut our “power” and “control” over it.
Barron defines our status by conjuring St. Thomas Aquinas, that we are merely “contingent” beings in an infinite unknown. What?? We incredibly briefly exist in time and space, dependent on what is always beyond our comprehension.
Think about it. Barron describes it as being “thrown into being” in that immeasurable, frightening infinity around us and notes that we are inevitably quickly “thrown out of being” whatever we do. The result can only be that our infinitesimal finite lives must therefore constantly be filled with “fear and trembling”, unless we embrace that which encompasses all existence: unimaginable, indefinable, and miraculous in that it is unknowable.
When our founding fathers chose to embrace the moral precepts of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as conjured, not by the resolve of fallible, fear filled men, but by an omniscient, omnipotent creator, whatever we label it, which embraces all creation and all those beings within it, they held up a standard which embraced what is not contingent but infinite, immutable and irrefutable.
We’ve struggled to meet that standard, often failing miserably, but, over the tumultuous decades of our existence as a nation, we’ve reached up from our pitiful human finitude, inconsequentiality and fear and struggled to gaze hopefully into the immeasurable, unknowable and awe-inducing infinite.
We’ve fought to reach for the north star, which is justice and equality for all, not all “men,” not all Caucasians, Anglo-Saxons, protestants, or Catholics, but all His children; men and women of all races, creeds and religious beliefs striving and struggling in their “contingency” and “finitude.” But, if in our dark and morality-numbing fear of death and the unknown, we turn aside from an embrace of miraculous grace, where must we find ourselves?
Over the course of human history, we have a stark answer. Power, embraced for its own sake and driven by our dysfunctional fear of the infinite unknown, must always fall victim to our flailing greed, envy and hubris as we hopelessly seek some minuscule level of purpose in our finitude. Babylon, the Pharaohs, the empires of ancient China and the Indian subcontinent, Kubla Kahn to Greece, to Rome, Charlemagne to Louis the XIV, Napolean to Mussolini, to Hitler, to Tojo, to Stalin, to Pol Pot, to Putin, to (??) …: insatiable human greed driven by underlying, abject fear, craves what can never be achieved in our pitiful lives; any type of real power to “push” against a morality measuring infinity.
The result: inevitable, absolute self-destruction. The proof is lying beneath our feet in the dust and ashes of innumerable tinily contingent and pitifully strutting and inconsequential “civilizations” and cultures. Endlessly throughout our existence, we’ve gazed about us fearfully and climbed inside our little hamster wheels of moral vacuity and spun ourselves into oblivion because we refused to embrace an infinite moral certitude and trust centered on respect, trust, learning and loving commitment to our fellow brothers and sisters, His children and His infinite, immaculate creation.
Looking up at those eternally evolving clouds, a question comes to mind. Where are we headed now individually and collectively on this brief but eternally consequential journey?
