Life As Performance Art 132

"You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labours and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy. " I remember that a lot of the fundamentalist Christians I was connected to during my career as a teenage Jesus freak used to get their knickers in a knot about this opening line in the stanza. Someone even wrote over a copy of the Desiderata that someone had put up on the wall, instead, that you are a child of God through the blood of Jesus Christ, and to be at peace with God who is your father and the creator of all, or something like that. The corrections did make sense theologically, though I also thought that perhaps my friend was protesting just a little bit too much. Of course, new agey folk have really gone to town on the Universe. They don't want to mention or acknowledge a personal God who created the universe. Instead, for a lot of them, the universe becomes another name for God, an amorphous, beneficent, but ultimately impersonally positive force, I would imagine. Now that I'm older, a lot of it seems like a bunch of useless quibbling. Nose-picking fights, I like to call them. I would also tend to think, now anyway, that we, like the trees and the stars, are children of the universe, not as children to a parent, but children within a place. I am a child of this home where I was raised, for example, and God is my, or our, father, mother, divine parent, or whatever. Quite simply, God has made us, has given us life. We belong. This is so important to remember, especially when you think of how many people feel alienated from the world, from, other people, from the universe, as if they never really belonged. But that is a bunch of post-enlightenment, romantic nonsense. We all belong. We are all made of the same kind of stardust, and we are all living souls infused to life by the breath of the same God whom, no matter how we perceive him or conceive him (and we are each going to do this a little bit differently) There is also, despite all the ugliness around us, much beauty in the world, and I used to think of the ugly as what is real and the beauty as an illusion. I now see this more in reverse. It is the ugliness that is the sham, the illusion. There is beauty everywhere, and it must begin within our own souls if we are to learn to recognize it anywhere else. What this comes down to, for me anyway, is how I have come to see life as a gift, and that God, the source and fount of all life itself, is the giver of life, is the very heart and essence of life. How can we not be happy if we really see this, believe it, know it? It is a matter of letting God enter the heart of our being, where he really is to begin with. Perhaps what we need to do is go in there ourselves, to the very essence of our souls, where we can meet Christ afresh.