Mirror of Justice: Walter Russell Mead on Nature and Nature's God

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October 30, 2012

Walter Russell Mead on Nature and Nature's God

As those of us in the East clean up from Hurricane Sandy and try to bring things back to normal, Walter Russell Mead reflects in a lovely essay here on the fragility of life before nature's power. A short excerpt:

Strangely, that admission of weakness opens the door to a new kind of strength. To acknowledge and accept weakness is to ground our lives more firmly in truth, and it turns out that to be grounded in reality is to become more able and more alive. Denial is hard work; those who try to stifle their awareness of the limits of human life and ambition in the busy rounds of daily life never reach their full potential.

To open your eyes to the fragility of life and to our dependence on that which is infinitely greater than ourselves is to enter more deeply into life. To come to terms with the radical insecurity in which we all live is to find a different and more reliable kind of security. The joys and occupations of ordinary life aren?t all there is to existence, but neither are the great and all-destroying storms. There is a calm beyond the storm, and the same force that sends these storms into our lives offers a peace and security that no storm can destroy. As another one of the psalms puts it, ?Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.? Accepting your limits and your dependence on things you can?t control is the first step on the road toward finding that joy.

Posted by Michael Moreland on October 30, 2012 at 11:04 AM in Moreland, Michael | Permalink

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