Dubris Light
“It’s all trickery and ambiguity. A single thread is like a spider web, pull and it’s gone, but try to free yourself and you get even more entangled. And the base and weak rule over the strong.”
— Boris Pasternak, “Doctor Zhivago”
People seem to be waking up. Finally. I hope it is what is needed.
We might get rain today. Precipitation is certainly needed. I want the dust, dirt, and pollen washed away, and the grass out back wants a second chance.
The Book of Ecclesiastes tells us “for everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.” T.S. Eliot adds, “There is a time for the evening under starlight, / A time for the evening under lamplight.” These are dark days, but the story of the light is the one to read.
Russell Kirk explains in Eliot and His Age:
Having been granted a glimpse of the truth of things, that is, we can be redeemed from the “waste sad time”; we can taste eternity in humble acts; it is not too late, however blind and slave to appetite we have been heretofore. Every moment of love counts, and makes up our immortality. Still and still moving, however old we are, exploration of reality through love and the higher dream remains possible for us—even in “the dark cold and empty desolation” of our time, so like Saint Augustine’s time. “In my end is my beginning.” Keep faith in dogma, and faith will set us free from servitude to time. A man’s “end” is his aim, his purpose, his destination—not his destruction.
Every human being longs for lasting happiness, but it is impossible to attain here on earth. So, where do we find it?
Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men (1 Cor. 1:20–25).
The longing, the need, the search would not be hardwired into our very souls if the goal did not exist.
