Corruption

There is something wrong with our story. What ‘is’ was not meant to be. It was not meant to be like this. Men have dreamed great dreams imagining wonderful and terrible things. We have danced around fires and catapulted ourselves to the moon. We have unlocked many of nature’s great mysteries and slowed the decay and demise of our bodies. We have chased off myths, discredited fairy tales, and snickered at the mysterious. We have reduced our world to mathematical equations and extended weather forecasts. Nothing surprises us. Nothing is beyond our intellectualizing. The flower blooms and a child is born: we are unimpressed. We greatly desire to understand the origin of all things and craft every sort of tale to explain how all of this came into existence. The Epicureans of old decided that no Mind was behind any of this. Plato believed that matter always existed and what is was fashioned from it. Modern science has reduced men to the product of some natural accident or an ancestry of apes, and in all of this we have arrived at this conclusion: there is no God. Such are the notions of men. At the end of the day, the architects, philosophers, religionists, and politicians- all the efforts of humanity- have failed to properly explain what exactly has gone wrong or how to fix this flawed narrative we are muddling through.

The truth is that the old stories simply do not satisfy anymore. They no longer quench the appetites of reason! We have jettisoned the tales of our fathers. We have denounced the drunken lament of poets embracing hopelessness. We see pain to our right and despair on our left. Wrong prevails, injustice rules, and inequity surrounds us. Human affairs are imbalanced and the equilibrium of morality suffers vertigo. Good seems outmatched by bad. We care little for others, gaining all we can for ourselves. The good that we do is tainted. We manipulate our environment and our personal agendas rule the will. However, not all is gloom. We certainly enjoy brief reprieves of alleviation. This world is not without its temporal joys and moments of happiness. Yet instinctively we know something is terribly wrong. Our reality is this, the world is not right and we are not right. This story is playing out in the wrong way. This story is corrupted. But it wasn’t always like this.

Strangely, in the midst of imperfection, we can somehow imagine perfection. Inside our being lies the residue of having known perfection; the faint aftertaste of a great feast we once supped on. The taste of having experienced perfect lingers in our mouths and a dull pang hungering for it roams the halls of our soul. “I have a sense that I was happy once… that all of this- the world, people, you and me- were somewhat different: we were better.” We can so clearly conceive of perfection because it is starkly absent. It is absent in this world, in others, and in us. But how is it that we can conceive of perfection? If we have a memory of perfect does that mean that we once possessed it? Can we remember an embrace that we did not receive? Or a lover’s kiss that never graced our lips? Can we remember the smile of a child we never had? Reason suggests that we must have possessed perfect at one time; held it in our hand; walked with it. We somehow know that what is now flawed was once perfect. We do not desire some new thing. We passionately want what we now possess to be recreated, restored, and made anew!