Wednesday 21 October 2009

a time for every purpose

With the death of Maybelle, we are all thinking about life, her life and death, our place in the world, and the fact that however hard we, or governments try, life cannot be totally controlled.

I find it amazing that so many people, so much of the time, need to control events. If they have a view they need to impose it. Therein lies the need for a philosophy that enables us to deal with the idiocy of it all. I think that the piece from Ecclesiastes 'there is a time for every purpose', is particularly helpful in considering conflict. My own philosophy is absolutely Taoist in this respect. I believe strongly in the notion of 'yield and overcome'. But of course the problem in that, it is in itself intrinsically a controlling mechanism. Yield would be good, but then overcome is what I object to.

The world order is not really order, it is chaotic because things are run by, we are governed by people who 'know' that they are right. And of course much of the time they are only right in a very limited sense of the word, and only by their own construct of the world. All of this is dangerous. Give a leader,  power, it matters not whether it purports to be democratic, eg America, the UK Europe or where ever, and then give them military power, and  self righteousness and there is a recipe for disaster, for any country where the leaders, not the people have a different paradigm.

If you then add in religion into the political mix then there is conflict of the worst kind. It really does beat me how or why religion can be so destructive of true morality, by which I mean the natural goodness and respect for each other, no matter what colour class or creed we have. It is just a dire world we live in.

It is no wonder therefore that Maybelle, a long time ago gave up on organised religion, when as she saw it, it failed her at her time of need when Harold left her. It is out of respect for her views that we will have a humanist celebrant at her funeral on Friday. And we will do our best to celebrate her life in a way that we believe she would enjoy if she were able to.

The time to cast away our own wishes and value hers. A time to rejoice that she was, in the same we that we celebrated that her daughter Anne was. There was, is and will be sadness of course, but we should face up to the fact that we are all certain of death, we can not generally control these things, and must face the future without Maybelle, and get on, as Maybelle herself would have done, look towards the next thing, and get excited about that.

The time for reflection and the time for new purpose.

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