Friday, August 17, 2012

Hope

I desperately need to publish my thoughts, not out of any societal need for my thoughts, but for my own sanity. Yet, I find that words, though powerful, no mere speech can express the breadth of turmoil and wonder going on in my head and my heart. The thinness of a written account seems bitterly profane to any persons thought. Words, when given in truth  signify realities, allowing someone to possibly understand a reality never experienced prior. Yet reality seems so rich that words are a pitiful offering.

I apologize for the exalted langauge, but I can't bring myself to try and be concise, nor colloquial.

I cant but help feeling a little exalted when letting myself get lost a beautiful melody, or emotionally captured in the rapture of song. I have been losing the galaxies of my thought in the midst of a pitiful attempt to comprehend the cosmological gyre I behold in the night sky. I am finding my mind and thought carried by every breeze of reality and experience no matter how sweet, or how bitter.

I have almost been hedonistic in my thought of late, but I have been experiencing a peculiar dosage of reality. I find myself in the sweet pain of rejection and the present rapture of happiness, I find myself in both good and bad circumstance praising some (un)known higher power. I have recently been most miserable when I feel that I no longer have some hope. Hope is some thing that I can take solace in knowing will come, or in something I know will be accomplished in light of present misery, apathy, or even hapless happiness.

I have realized that hope has given me security in my times of joy, and has given me a brilliant doorway out of crushing darkness. We all hope in things. Some hope in stuff, some merely hope they will be happy. Some hope in sex, drugs, money... All hope for love, acceptance, affirmation.

Personally, I hope in beauty, that in appreciating beauty and helping others see beauty, that I, in-turn, will become beautiful, and people will want me and appreciate and need me as I want, appreciate and need beauty.

Yet I have been asking myself lately, why do I hope in what I hope in? Why do all people need to hope?

It seems to me that this hope is in many ways a hope in something greater than the individual and greater even than the corporate. Hope is something that we must deposit in something greater than our enemies, greater than our hurts, greater than our darkness, and even greater than our own weakness.

I hope that it is no secret that I believe in God. Yet, I have seriosuly been evaluating why I believe in God. The more I study, the more I realize that the debate is not closed on the existence of God. I would daresay that it will never be closed (unless there is a God who reveals themself some day).

I have been finding that there is always room and reason to believe for one and against one (I suppose that it comes down to why people believe what they believe [i.e. why you want or need to believe in something]).

A walk with God is not easy.
A walk with God surrounded by people who don't believe and assume there is no God is tough.

I have been going back and forth with this for months now.Yet the one thing that keeps me believing, the one thing that keeps me going is that people are very small.

In terms of egregious over-simplification, we are either a greatly treasured creation of a deity, or hopelessly small in a universe of titanic power and flux. Anyway that one may look at it humans are tiny, yet we try to reduce such a dynamic universe and categorize human lives and experience with such crispness, precision, and presumption that no matter how true or beneficial scientific observation or religious pontification may be, it would be arrogant for humanity to say that we can fully master and or understand this great story of what is. We can hardly understand such small phenomena as human consciousness, felt needs, and (you guessed it) our need to hope.

In the midst of our smallness, I see at least one reason why we have such a need for something larger. I suppose part of the reason that I hope in God is that I need to hope in soemthing greater than myself and greater than all. What is greater than my circumstance than the creator of what is? If I am going to believe in somethign bigger than me, I going to believe in the biggest one of all, plus, He wont let me go, He keeps giving reasons to believe.