It was Diwali last week...a festival for Jains, Sikhs, Hindus and many others who might care to use light as an aid to marking the sacred nature of existence.
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| Orion Nebula |
"Faith makes all things possible.
Hope makes all things work.
Love makes all things beautiful."
Sweet. Its a nice little reminder to be faithful, hopeful and loving, because if I do that then - the verse reassures me - all things will work out beautifully.
But what happens if we're feeling a bit low on faith, if we're not able to bring up all that hope or that loving feeling is gone? Does that mean that nothing is possible, that things won't work and that beauty disappears.
That seems a bit harsh really to me, if not even a bit of hubris.
The logic of the (uni)verse
This verse seems work with the premise that the human is the centre of knowing and being. It indicates that its up to us humans to have love, hope and faith and when we do, we almost produce beauty, possibility and working order (love makes all things beautiful, etc.).
I find it odd to think that beauty would disappear because of what we do. That the world would stop working if we lost hope. I can get the idea that if I hope, then things may work. And I know the idea that beauty is in how I look. But this way of looking seems to imply that there is a quite inert, blank world out there and that has no shape or direction of its own and that all that exists is the stuff inside our human head, hearts and bodies.
Are we really happy to say that without these human experiences and ways of being beauty, possibility and working order won't exist?
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| Fool Praying, Cecil Collins |
Of late I've been employing Carl Jung's practice of turning everyday, taken for granted notions on their head, of inverting the logic. I tried it with these three lines, and when I did so, something really interesting showed up:
"All things are possible and this makes faith.All things work and this make makes hope. All things are beautiful and this makes love."
And now, I can read it like this...
- that the universe is one in which all things are possible and this creates, produces or results in the thing you might call faith;
- that the universe is such that all things work and that stunning, elegant, ineffable working order creates the experience and the emotional sense of hope;
- that all things in the cosmos are beautiful and that reality of complete beauty creates the experience of love.
Suddenly, I find this way of looking at these experiences much more intriguing. Much more inviting in fact. I can see that this working, generative beauty is out there already. It exists in the cosmos. Everything (even things that can't manage faith and hope and love - like bad humans and non-humans) can participate in this universe fully because its there. And it doesn't require hope, faith and love in the human way.
A bit of humility?
And if we start with the notion that the reality of this universe is such that all things are possible already, that things work, that beauty just exists, then perhaps we can worry less about whether we are performing properly, whether we've got enough hope, and love and faith. I wonder whether we can then be invited into a humbling process of appreciating this working, beauty of possibility alongside (rather than separated from) the rest of the cosmos?
