One million Americans will no longer share this world with their families. Untold millions face the prospect of abject poverty and starvations. Anxious parents scour store shelves in search of formula while others dread the prospects of shrinking savings in the face of raging inflation. The stock market sinks faster than gravity around a neutron star and turmoil in cryptocurrency destroys the finances of the far right and the tech left alike. Political disengagement rages like a wildfire, as political opportunists from all sides sharpen their knives, preparing to feast on the remnants of the American body-politic, destroyed by the political firestorm that has characterized this new millennium. We are older, and sicker. Safe access to food and water is vanishing. Our weather turns enemy while the skies fill with meteors and sun-bursts. Scientists say a black hole of immense incalculable size that sucks matter into its event horizon, defines our galaxy. Each day brings to light new evidence of our social and religious shelters preying on the most vulnerable as they search for succor from a ravenous predatory world around them.
Are these end times?
Isn’t it all dark?
Where is Hope?
Where is God? Have we been forsaken?
Is the only way Down?
On this cloudy Sunday, named for a sun scrabbling for grip behind the pall of clouds that shroud the firmament, I say that I am Blessed.
I say to you that while there is immense sorrow, sadness and cruelty in a dark dark world, the truth is that darkness and light are defined of each other. As are happiness and sadness, kindness and cruelty, charity and inhumanity.
We cannot choose the world we live in, the families we are born to, the people we are innately or even the weather. The only choice is whether we accept these as a curse or a blessing.
This Blessed day, as I cruise down an expressway in the car of my dreams, married to the woman of my dreams, listening to music with the wind in my hair, I realize that I can choose to suffer the slings and arrows of cruel fortune or revel in them.
Acutely aware of the evanescence of these material things, I know that all of these things that bring me joy in THIS moment will not be there, but I am blessed to have had THIS moment and I celebrate it. Tomorrow may bring poverty, sadness, loss and loneliness, but today and now will leave me a memory of joy that cannot be diluted or changed by a tragedy that lurks in the future.
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