Enough

Occasionally, I have this image of a plow. It is hooked to an immense tractor and turning the soil over upon itself and that soil is me. It is, in a sense, a dark image I guess; but strangely comforting for me. It is not that I am in a hurry to be returned to the dust from which we all come. It is just good to know that there will some day be an end to it. All the disappointments, failures and damage that I see being wrought upon the earth and my part in it. I am glad that these things will at some point be finished--everything turned back to dirt. And then used for something new--I hope for something better.

This perhaps reads as reincarnation of some kind. But it doesn't feel that way. Reincarnation tends to focus on the I part in all this. What will become of me and all that... But my interest is more in the end of the me--the end to the us as cruel butchers of beauty and one another. It seems that all that focus on the self is sort of the part of life that I find most distressing. So my interest in the soil is not because I am in a hurry to be something or somewhere else. I just like knowing that there will be something else--something beside all the self-seeking that characterizes so much of this life.

Of course, as a Christian, I am also drawn to the image of eternal life, to the vision of paradise. And for the same reasons. Whatever paradise might be, it must be more than an endless parade of personal consumption. It is not that I don't like things or pleasure; and, again, I am not in a hurry to become fertilize for the next generation of whatver. I'm just getting tired. Or, at least I am tired today. I am tired of disappointment. And I am sick to death of the cruelty of people. It just seems there is no end to the self-seeking and death that we humans can visit on one another.

As I was thinking about this, I remembered something that Jesus said about God's people:
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! Mt. 23:37

Jesus uses that word, brood, in only one other reference.
You brood of vipers! How can you speak good things, when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. Mt. 12:34

Strange isn't it? Snakes and harmless chicks--two pretty different images, indeed. Jesus likens the former to those who imagine themselves to be good and holy when, in fact, they are evil and vile. The latter he uses to name the Father's love for his childrenl.