Psalm 103

In our evening prayer service we read Psalm 103 where King David describes different aspects of the interactions of creation even small details like the springs of water and the habitation of rabbits and goats and sparrows and the order that God has established that allows for all of this.

At first it seemed strange to me that we'd regularly be prescribed this pastoral scripture, almost pagan even.  But then one day I imagined David writing it as he looked around him and marveled at what he saw.  Not only at creation, and not only at his place within it, but even at his ability to ponder it and that it is in fact real and beyond him.

Sometimes I think we get caught up in our minds and amidst the abstract creations of our own imagination.  Our ability to even do this is amazing and unique among creatures, but we can and tend to create entire realities in our heads and can quickly begin to take objective reality for granted, dismissing it completely as an uninteresting given.

Who cares what rabbits and sparrows do when we aren't watching them?  Shouldn't we be articulating and defending the intricacies of the ideology we've chosen to identify with instead?  And we continue to abstract from our place on the earth into our heads to a point that we don't even regard the sun or the moon or the winds or the waters that sustain not only us but every other living thing that we also ignore, even our fellow man.  

And when we do this our world becomes incredibly small, able to fit nicely within our own minds.  (Which in and of itself is an incredible ability, to model a whole little world in our minds.)  But we can't live there, it can't sustain us.  We need to take some time to be reminded of the very big and intricate and amazingly interconnected physical existence that we live in.  And as we see our place it in is both precariously similar to those irrational beasts that instinctively seek the nurturing of nature to survive and at the same time wildly and extraordinarily different from them in almost every regard evidenced plainly by our very ability to consider it.

For me Psalm 103 is a reliable source of grounding as well as a reminder of the paradoxical idea that we are both creatures and made in the image of God and that creation serves to act as a medium in which we are able to exist and commune with God.

"He sendeth forth springs in the valleys; between the mountains will the waters run. They shall give drink to all the beasts of the field; the wild asses will wait to quench their thirst. Beside them will the birds of the heaven lodge, from the midst of the rocks will they give voice. He watereth the mountains from His chambers; the earth shall be satisfied with the fruit of Thy works. He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and green herb for the service of men, To bring forth bread out of the earth; and wine maketh glad the heart of man. To make his face cheerful with oil; and bread strengtheneth man's heart. The trees of the plain shall be satisfied, the cedars of Lebanon, which Thou hast planted. There will the sparrows make their nests; the house of the heron is chief among them. The high mountains are a refuge for the harts, and so is the rock for the hares. He hath made the moon for seasons; the sun knoweth his going down. Thou appointedst the darkness, and there was the night, wherein all the beasts of the forest will go abroad."

I, Irrational

In order to be completely free, an individual must be free from the threat of coercion.  Coercion is ultimately enforced by the threat of death.  One may be able to endure pain and discomfort and frustrate the will of those attempting to coerce you with those methods, but if you cannot endure death, then your advisary need only to be willing to kill you in order to bend you to their will.  For instance, Jesus Christ experiences the fullness of liberty because he can choose to die, and then raise himself up again.  His death on the cross and subsequent resurrection was an example of that choice.  He, being God and immortal, cannot be coerced by threats of death.

If a person can choose to die, then even coercive tactics enforced by death become impotent.  Belief in the resurrection of Christ, and his promise to extend that resurrection to others, enables a person to be liberated from the threat of death.  Whether or not the person, or Jesus Christ actually has the power to resurrect the believer is irrelevant, all that matters is that the person believes that death has been undone.  This effect isn't limited to Christians, however Jesus did exemplify the principle.

It IS an irrational position, but the rational position is subject to death, so it is by its own nature not capable of enabling freedom.  Impending death forces the rational individual to subject themselves to the passions that can be imbibed in while still living as well as to the very maintenance of life itself.  Death stands as an end to the individual, and to meaning itself.  The threat of death either effectively coerces the rational individual, or causes them to accept death to end the suffering of existence.  The "irrational" individual can choose to die and still have hope, and can therefore also choose resist coercion, even unto death, without giving up on life.

One may say "I don't believe in life after death, however I can still choose to die for reasons that give me hope, such as a better world for my children, or a legacy for my own name", but this is simply accepting the irrational position, as death's putting an end to one's existence renders one's hope meaningless and irrational.  

I'm not a mathematician but there seems to be a corollary principle here in irrational and rational numbers.  The irrational position isn't called irrational because it is crazy, but only because it cannot be represented using symbols contained within the context of the rational.  Super natural principles are similar in that they can be described by borrowing terms from the rational world, but their premise has no objective representation there.

So, overcoming coercion requires us to calculate life's meaning using an irrational symbol in order to be able to reason beyond the limits of death, similar to how we calculate the circumference of a circle by using pi.