On Hapless Humanity

Daniel Meeter lights a fire of love in this post. Burn it again, while self-righteous people rip each other to shreds about how to save the world. We're going down with this ship, even while we're obliged to try to save it, the question is, will we go down with contempt or affection and generosity? We cannot escape the insecurity and vulnerability that are our best and worst aspects even as people butcher each other emotionally or physically for impossible resolutions to suffering and unattainable epistemological certitude. I would love to see the pastor's fire of acceptance for miserable, disastrous humanity spread and engulf even the anger that so many of us feel towards each other and ourselves for being a part of sinking this ship. I've only seen a similar fire in the writings of Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron.

Maybe it has something to do with ideas that surface in the following passage from Walter Otto's Dionysus.

He who begets something which is alive must dive down into the primeval depths in which the forces of life dwell. And when he rises to the surface, there is a gleam of madness in his eyes because in those depths death lives cheek by jowl with life. The primal mystery is itself mad–the matrix of the duality, the unity of the disunity, ..The more alive this life becomes, the nearer death draws, until the supreme moment when something new is created–when death and life meet in an embrace of mad ecstasy. The rapture and terror of life are so profound because they are intoxicated with death. As often as life engenders itself anew the wall which separates it from death is momentarily destroyed...Life which has become sterile totters to meet its end, but love and death have welcomed and clung to one another passionately from the beginning.