It occurs to me…

Photo taken recently from the parking garage at work. A blue sky except for a few short lines like this one just struck me as interesting..

Photo taken on a recent run — but I’m serious about the duct tape.

Photo taken around the most recent full moom.

Another of those accidental photos, likely taken in my pocket.

In furtherance of the Martin Luther King Jr. weekend …

Photo taken recently in Galveston. Text is from Howard Thurman, an early influence on King and his committent to non-violence. King was clearly one of Thurman’s “few…who dare trust their fate in its hands.”

I have always liked Martin Luther King, Jr.’s quote:

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” 

This is King’s statement akin to an 1853 sermon text from abolitionist Theodore Parker, who said:

“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe.  The arc is a long one.  My eye reaches but little ways.  I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight.  I can divine it by conscience.  And from what I see, I am sure it bends toward justice.”

I relate more to Parker’s longer version as it exposes the sentiment as it seems to me less of a certainty, more of a hope.  But of course that sureness is what made King, King.  In the face of George Wallace, Lester Maddox, the Ku Klux Klan, Bull Connor, and what was waiting on the other side of the Pettus Bridge in Selma, King placed absolute trust not only in the existence but also the righteousness of a Higher Power.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” 

Photo taken recently on a run in Austin.

In The Creative Encounter Howard Thurman tells the story of meeting a woman on a train who told him: “’Before I left home today I took all my troubles”  — here she digressed for twenty minutes to fill in the details – “made them into a neat bundle and handed them over to God, but before he could get the bundle unwrapped to take a look, I snatched them back again.’”

Thurman’s moral of the story: “There are many people who would feel cheated if suddenly they were deprived of the ego definition that their suffering gives them.”

That resonates with me.  I enjoy a good wallow at least as much as the next person, perhaps more.  To Thurman’s point, though, giving my troubles to God is of little use unless I allow Him time to “get the bundle unwrapped to take a look.”  But of course I want resolution to be not only instantaneous but also to my liking.   

Oh no!  Here comes the one/two punch of humility and patience?

I read an article recently about a 2020 study in which scientists concluded that hearing is the last human faculty to go. They found that as we approach death, even into unconsciousness, and well after all other human faculties have been lost, our brains still register sounds and spoken words.  That seems like poetic justice to me since I spend so much of my conscious life not listening.  Thankfully, I still have some conscious time left (though one never knows how much) to even the scales a bit.