The Believing Agnostic

The table is glass. The reflections of two lamps, one lit, the other dark, decorate the setting for my laptop computer. It is late by my body clock: 11:30 PM. The only sound is the air of the furnace breathing steadily through the vent on the wall near my feet.

I am glad for the heat, and lament that so many people in this world are exposed to the weather. Feelings of lament pulse within me. My heart, like a drummer keeping cadence with taps beats beyond foul weather and its victims. I feel the poverty that exposes most to the cruelties of humanity. Is poverty in itself an expression of inhuman cruelty?
Inhuman abuses of our own and other living beings must be legendary in this universe (that is, if there is anyone watching, from near or far). There are days when abused children and brutalized women, the mentally ill and … I had better halt this downward cascade before I drown, and just call the point well-made. For those who are willing to see the world as it is, pain must jar our journey.

And yes, I am aware that I have just made an audacious claim: that a human may know the world as it is. It “seems” – note the irony – that there are experiences that are so nearly universal, and observations so widely affirmed that they are like a hard bump of the head against a cabinet door. One bump is that humans suffer and die (“Ashes to ashes we all fall down is a macabre point too thinly spread for a children’s rhyme). Another is that the choices humans make, which make movers and instruments of all, are the only sources of real evil in this world.

Even though these conditions, so ubiquitous that Noah’s Ark seems believable – almost; even though we are creative in the hells we make, I am not a pessimist. I have another feeling that wrestles with the downward plunge and begins to cleanse the ashes: More can be done to alleviate natural and willful suffering, natural and willful cruelty. The feeling is not inspired by faith, nor by the conviction that “all will turn out for the good,” but by hope that stands before the abyss of overwhelming odds and perseveres to approximate the ideals that point to a greater reality than our own. The lamp on the left, the one that is lit, catches my attention.