Notes from the Editor’s Desk — 7/21/22
(…)
The idea that I should be killed before my spiritual mission is fulfilled eats away at me. Although the proximate cause was the shooting, that danger being through by the time the holiday expired, its effect has metastasized, and now every remote possibility plays its part in the theater of mortality. In the end, life cannot be otherwise. All the same, there appears to be a condition of the universe where a direct intuition of life’s capriciousness, its terminus, does not lead to the kind of human progress that is recognizable as abiding. Another form of progress is playing out, which remains precious in nature, and that makes the evils visited by an insane mind on the backdrop of my happy state all the more saddening and, in my case, incomprehensible. It is incomprehensible, in my case, in part because I long ago abandoned the notion of the continuity of good souls and the contrary motion of evil, and find suddenly that I require them; moreover that, without them, I fall to panic without a resolution. Still, my vocation has equipped me to contend with the specter and person of the murderer, to operate as a witness and a judge upon the act, in order that I might sustain the necessity of these ideas, with or without their trappings. Goodness does not seem to require a schema of belief. It is, in most, a matter of reflexive doing. To contend with evil, especially when the demand occurs on a personal level, a notion of transcendence feels required as well as baffling. Our spiritual mission is real, more real than was previously clear to me, however much its hints were manifest, and however much I appreciated or ignored them, as I now feel this notion to be the only matter, the matter upon which the principle at issue rests. What am I to do with fear that it should be interrupted, and the grief that it was? I lent those that died under circumstances where they were unable to contend with the moment of their exit from their body and this life a bouquet of lilies and joined a community in lending those souls all possible continuity within my power. That gesture, as with our life’s every gesture, is so far from removed from the trivial as to delineate the profound. Then is there no fear, or fearing is nothing, as its basis is incommensurate with the question forever at hand. All occurs, and interruption is at once decisive and no matter. Our spiritual mission is concluded in every moment, and all the difference is made in our humility before this reality, that if we should love we should see revealed the phenomenon that is always due to us. What else can we call our understanding but that?
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