“Tales of the Impending Kingdom”

H,

Life is arranged for us as valleys and mountain peaks. The aim of the game is to, generally, have more mountain peaks than valleys. The acquired wisdom is that valleys are for learning and peaks are for living. This is a useful device in getting on with things, surviving disasters and trying to forge a life out of the loose material fate gives you. The problem is that it does not work as a general rule for all life. The general rule must apply to everyone barring a few exceptions. The truth of this present reality is that many are born into cycles of poverty that are as deep as any valley could possibly be. It is not a bumper sticker that will cure this. An epigram cannot lift a single life from this miry clay and in the end soundbites are not enough to feed a starving child or heal the broken or the abused. And we are all along this spectrum of hurts that go deep and cannot be washed away by positive thinking. We can cover up a deep ravine of pain in material progress but the spirit will need tending at some point or we will collapse under the weight of things unexplored and unresolved within our very souls.

This needless dichotomy between the material and the spiritual is what the Kingdom comes to address. It is heaven and earth united, Man-Woman and God face to face and past, present and future resolved in eternity. It is not about weakness but it takes weakness as the foundation for uprooting the human experience from ego and re-planting it on the solid ground of what will forever be. It sounds repetitive because it is true. It has always been true. There is nothing to add to it.

In our present state, we cry out every day for signs of progress and for songs of hope. We are either getting fat on the fantasies (Yeats brilliantly warns us about the consequence of this: “the heart’s grown brutal from the fare”) or we are getting lean on unfulfilled promises. There is a promise that will be fulfilled though. Our faith tells us this yearning will not go on forever. It tells us the material and the spiritual will merge into one reality that answers all our questions. This is yearning and hope. This is faith that keeps us moving forward through the dark nights. And here is love, the answer to every riddle.