I experience both good and evil as real, and see them as necessary opposites; but while evil can, goodness knows, locally overwhelm good, it cannot subsume good into itself. The goodness of love can embrace its opposite; the evil of hate cannot. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)
i have been rereading Reclaiming the Sacred by Jeff Golden… i have reached the place i originally felt was a little over-the-top “woo-woo”… a kind of new age mysticism of love is the answer, we are stardust, and so forth… i struggle with this kind of message… it seems naive… it seems to ignore the calamities that unfold in the universe and the pure evil that humankind too often manifests … it seems to ignore hate…
in the quote above from The Matter With Things, i am offered a framing that allows me to believe love is the answer, even as i understand love can lose locally… greed, hate, arrogance, covetousness, etc., which are centered in the materialist-capitalist world, can overwhelm it…
in The Ballad of Love and Hate, by the Avett Brothers, a similar belief in the largeness of love is expressed…
Love has been waiting, patient and kind
Just wanting a phone call or some kind of sign
That the one that she cares for who’s out of his mind
Will make it back safe to her arms
Hate stumbles forward and leans in the door
Weary head hung down, eyes to the floor
He says, “Love, I’m sorry” and she says, “What for?”
“I’m yours and that’s it, whatever”
“I should not have been gone for so long”
“I’m yours and that’s it, forever”
“Your mine and that’s it, forever”
the power of forgiveness…
this is in tune with statements like, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice”… Dr. Martin Luther King favored a non-violent approach to resistance, is this love embracing hate?…
when the current physical universe began, cosmologists tell us that…
… The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the early universe. But today, everything we see from the smallest life forms on Earth to the largest stellar objects is made almost entirely of matter. Comparatively, there is not much antimatter to be found. Something must have happened to tip the balance. One of the greatest challenges in physics is to figure out what happened to the antimatter, or why we see an asymmetry between matter and antimatter.1
metaphorically, this feels like the imbalance suggested between love and hate above… there is enough love in the world to subsume hate… creative existence wins over annihilation…
The Matter With Things is a long argument that we have lost our way… a long argument for the existence and necessity of God… McGilchrist is Christian… his concept of god, while grounded in Christianity, is expansive in ways i have not encountered before… his God is not all knowing, all powerful, or vengeful… his God is a co-creative consciousness with us of all that can be experienced… this God is the creative imbalance that leads to something, not nothing… love embracing hate… the long moral arc bending towards justice…
Jeff Golden writes:
Yet these saints and sages are pointing to something quite different: the divine as dynamically (beautifully, wondrously) transformed, expanded, recreated in every moment, through each of us and our experiences—through you. (Reclaiming the Sacred: Healing Our Relationships with Ourselves and the World by Jeff Golden)
as McGilchrist noted, locally, hate can overwhelm love and wreaks havoc… we have no right to expect immunity from havoc, which has been my fortunate experience for most of my life…
there were dark ages once…
an empire fell and it took five hundred years to recover, if that’s what we did… the hard truth of the moment may be that we are witnessing the collapse of the Western Euro-American empire… we may be embarking on hundreds of years of something utterly different…
i wish we could fast forward however many hundreds of years it will take to move through this collapse, if that is what is happening, to something better… i know we can’t… but i refuse to allow the darkness i believe is coming to overwhelm my joy… i choose to embrace hate with a straight jacket of love of community…
what do you think is going on and how will you meet the moment?…
