Dear God,
I don’t ask to become a model for the ages. I don’t hope any more to do anything that will be admired and rewarded; I’m at a point where I just enjoy doing some things because I like doing them. Such as my singing: I’ve never had good pitch. When I try to harmonize I’m led astray by the voice next to me. Nobody has ever stopped whatever they’re doing in order to listen to my voice. But I just like to sing. I’d like to keep playing music too, in a similar vein. We’ll let sports go by. I’d like to keep on walking, though. And enjoying food. Oh, and I’d like to limit nightly wake-ups to two or three.
About the world though. I mean the world you made and put us in—all the globes and glowing things and even the colossus of nothing between one and another—that fabulous Big Empty. But our globe in particular, that cocoa skin of a few miles that wraps the roundness, the container of everything that lives—that “world” is getting pretty stressed. A frightening amount of the life here is going extinct, and there’s a frightening volume of substances made by us here getting into everything. And there are changes right now happening that have developed over a long time—in our limited outlook that is (we think two or three hundred years is a huge amount of time. Ha-ha, silly us, I know.) Some people think you wouldn’t let us screw up the whole deal, that we’re not nearly big enough to do that. Help us get on each others’ wavelengths, please. Let it be recognized that that you live in the boundless variety of each person and each day, and evil makes nothing. Evil can only destroy.
At this point, I see that humanity is not going to jell into an entente in which people all live together without strife. My outlook on life has been corroded and charred time after time, comparing that hope against current world or political situations. Yet I’m supposed to have hope, which means hope for a better future doesn’t it?—but I keep having my face pushed into the cold mud of reality. Every time, some cadre of cads rises to the top, where they grab more than any reasonable person could want—and they keep on grabbing, just to sit on the biggest pile of jewels, or gold, or glory. Or else they go nuts on power or they’ve played The Game so much with each other they think The Game is the ONLY thing, winning and wars, Number One.
Or—and this is really maddening—people go nuts on the idea of Freedom (their own) or wrapped so tight in Order (theirs) they burn the unfamiliar, the new, the different, while still alive.
I know also there are always people sprinkled among us who have no feeling of soul, in others or even themselves. I don’t get that. Their existence almost negates all my ideas about good. So I have work to do. But all the ugliness of the world as it is and has been, all the cynicism and hate, though they foul the picture, can’t blot what I see beyond. It’s brilliance overcomes all “reality”. It coruscates somehow with peace.
I will try to stop asking you for something better, and get on with the job of coping with the nuts and grabbers, heap big strong guys and me-me-me freaks. I will work on keeping my balance as I make my way through all the tilted rooms and twacked gravities. Your help on that is much appreciated.
Also, I’ll try to keep in mind that it’s available.
Amen.