This I Believe

To live with an awareness of the tears of things; of the participation of all living things in a fellowship of pain, insecurity, anxiety, and death; to live with a bittersweet knowledge that I and all companionable living things are formed out of the same dust of the Earth, and after a night and a day will return to the common dust. In this is the beginning of wisdom.

To feel a steadfast love at the sight of a living creature, an almost unbearable pity for all things that are born and suffer and die. In this is the love of God. To believe that the primary condition of man is to be free to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil; that man is free to choose, though falteringly, to continue God’s creation of the good, the true, and the beautiful; that man is and becomes what he thinks and feels and hopes and does; that man can strive to fashion the city of man into the City of God, or into a Sodom or a Gomorrah. In this is the law of compensation.

With St. Francis of Assisi, to praise the Lord for our brother, the sun, and our sister, the moon, and for the stars and the wind and water and fire; and our mother, the Earth; and for those who pardon one another; and for our sister, the death of the body. With Socrates, to pray for beauty in the inward soul, and of the outward and inward man be at one; to reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and to have such a quantity of gold that only the temperate man can bear and carry it. With Ecclesiastes, to eat bread in gladness and drink wine with joy, and to live joyfully with whom one loves; to love the creativity of one’s work and the re-creativity of rest and fun, and to be at once serene and magnanimous. This I believe.

So to live as to wrestle with one’s angel and to say to Him, “I will not let thee go except thou bless me;” so to live as both to confirm and to deny the “vanity of vanities” which is the portion of a man’s life; so to live is to know that while a “voice of the bird startles and all the daughters of music have been brought low because man goeth to his long home and the mourners goeth about the streets,” if “the morning stars sing together and the sons of God,” even you and I, “shout for Joy.”