Cosmic Miracles in Contradiction

“Perhaps,” [Nachman] was saying, “people wish life to end. They have polluted it. Courage, honor, frankness, friendship, duty, all made filthy. Sullied. So that we loathe the daily bread that prolongs useless existence. There was a time when men were born, lived, and died. But do you call these men? We are only creatures. Death himself must be tired of us. I can see Death coming before God to say ‘What shall I do? There is no more grandeur in being Death. Release me, God, from this meanness.’ ”

“It isn’t as bad as you make out, Nachman,” Moses remembered answering. “Most people are unpoetical, and you consider this a betrayal.”

― Saul Bellow, Nobel laureate in Literature, Herzog

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Dear Kate,

So far into this pandemic, what have you learned about yourself?  Something that...I wouldn't say you have never learned about yourself before, but probably more manifestly forced upon you as a life lesson?

Or nothing has been manifested, magnified to you so far?

To put things more pseudoscientifically (as we have learned to do more, if not better, during this pandemic), you could ask yourself: What more have I learned about myself? my body and mind? how I handle stress? face adversity and diversity, the struggles within and the battles without, how I speak to myself to calm the storms and speak to others whom I believe are causing the storms?

The classical way to put forth these questions is leaner but must less linear: What have you learned about human nature?

To answer it is to face a question at once most personal and universal, much latitude needed and given in between.  Everything you (think you) know about science, economics, politics, cultures and religions will need to be called out of their graves and given a fresh chance to make life whole, as their mandate was purportedly so by our professors, politicians, professionals and preachers.

Then, of course, you see how during this pandemic your professors, politicians, professionals and preachers all going up with whatever they are smoking and hitting the fan just like the rest of them shits, and now wonder, How are we going to pick up the pieces?  (If the pieces are worth picking up at all.)

This pandemic will one day be over, not a matter of if but when.  "But another will come," the back of our head though is saying to the front, sabotaging its lifelong effort to keep death off the top of our mind.

What we know about ourselves we should have learned already, if we claim to have a cranium properly closed.  What we haven't learned, in a pandemic or not, is what we refuse to and shall never learn.  There is no more that we are seeking in our self-understanding, only how much less we can get away with.

There is a "sustained recalcitrance intrinsic to creation that resists the purpose of God and that recurringly places the world in jeopardy," as Walter Brueggemann puts it in his reading of Genesis 1-11.

Life is a miracle--that there is any life at all on Earth is a series of cosmic miracles, being played out against the backdrop of human contempt and contradiction.  And, that, is the oldest lesson of all we have yet to learn.

Yours, Alex