Sadness, Salvation
The world seems sad.
"Probably no more so than any other period," I often hear, and true enough, I suppose. But still, after morning headlines, after checking the usual media portals, and after conversations with friends new and old, I find myself returning to a basic question: how do we keep faith in these grieving times? It's not that we don't want to keep faith...we do. But the earthquake's here--the big one, feels like--and the ground of the world keeps shifting. There is sand beneath our feet, and steps have never been more unsure.
The political season raises this sensation (at least in me) to a fever pitch, each candidate desperately selling, selling, selling their party's moral features and benefits, promising righteous action in spot ads and sound bytes. And all the while, as the material gap grows between rich and poor, the spiritual gap between the heart of God and the craving of the world remains constant, the one common possession of aristocracy, bourgeoisie, and beggar alike.
I don't need to list the litany of grief in the paper--you see it every day just like I do.
Are we stuck with this sadness, this loss, this suffering that often seems random, or worse, a deity gone maniacal?
Thomas Merton once said that the answer to the question of salvation is much more than the answer to a question about how to get an eternal reward rather than an eternal punishment. In a time of peril, to be saved is to be caught back up into living, snatched from the very edge of death."Back up into living" means far more than your heart beating and your lungs filling and refilling--it means being brought back into the vast potential of aliveness, with all its triumph and disaster. In those moments (I conjecture here, not having scraped that close to death yet, except spiritually), joy and relief is the natural result, the sheer thrill of getting another day of life, another chance to see and touch what you love, another chance to join in the creation of things.
Maybe the sadness is no more acute than it's ever been. Perhaps the challenge to keep faith is constant in its difficulty, the war against far more than flesh and blood. I suppose its no more than needing to be saved, profoundly, as always.
We rejoice in our sufferings...?
Romans 5
12:17:30 PM 
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