There are moments when I wonder how any of us go on! How do we stave off despair when suffering bombards us daily in the news? The earthquakes and mudslides, the wars, massacres, butchery and beatings, discord and dissension, the genocides and suicides, the fractured lives and crushed, lost hopes. And this doesn’t count the ordinary anguish of people living, in the words of Thoreau, “lives of quiet desperation.”
Yet all around us bloom other signs of how the world is burning up with joy, hope, beauty, generosity and the wild, magnificent, creative urges of love.
This is the mystic’s view. For if indeed there is no death—the soul lives on—then isn’t this earthly period just a state of playfulness, God adoring us, and joyfully placing us into different experiences, so that we too may take the same pleasure as He in reaching out to one another, offering compassion, hope, a helping hand, our abundant love?
Or inviting us to heal our wounds by acting differently the second time around?
O angels, everywhere!
