Hurricane Matthew is wreaking havoc along the Florida coast this morning and I hold in my bundle all those who are in its path as well as those in Haiti, and others, who have already suffered from Matthew’s destructive power. Nature is a powerful force and a contradictory one. It brings the warmth of the sun, spring rains to nourish life, and hurricanes and tornadoes that literally can, and oft times do, destroy life.
Human nature seems to have the same capacity as “Mother” Nature. It has the capacity to love and the capacity to hate. It has the power to heal and the power to destroy. It is as fickle as Nature and in its own way can be just as destructive. The poet Browning pictures this human nature:
“Sadly mixed natures, self-indulgent, yet
Self-sacrificing too; how the love soars,
How the craft, avarice, vanity, and spite
Sink again,”
Forever, he says, “sliding into silly virtue, and slipping into stupid crime,” and another adds to Browning’s analysis, “big and little, good and bad, lovable and selfish, a babble of a hundred contradictories shouting each other down.”
I continue to believe that there is Another who dreams dreams for us, who dreams that we might become so much more than what we are. We are meant to be bigger and better! We may be frail and broken sons of Adam and daughters of Eve, but there is also within us the potential to be sons and daughters of God. There is a piece of divinity in us, “a Presence that disturbs us with elevated thoughts,” “whose dwelling is the mind of man/woman.” In every person, George Fox says, “there is something that is not of dust or earth or flesh or time, but of God.” His instructions were “to walk joyfully over the earth answering to that of God in every man (person).” What a piece of work we are! What a piece of work we could be!
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