Nein, too much today already.

Here's something that I was reading today.

"In the States, so much of what we call daily life, human life, is concerned with death in a fashion that's very peculiar. For instance, we have all kinds of "wars" declared against this or that aspect of death. We have a war on poverty, a war on cancer, a war on heart disease. There's even a war on war. These aspects of death around us, within us, are always conceived of as the great enemy which must be overcome so that we can get beyond disease, war, poverty--into what they like to think of as the good life, the real life, the life which has no death within it. And this dream continues. But it's always a kind of troubled and violent dream because it implies (and sometimes says openly) that, in order to make that leap, we have to make war on something or on somebody. To attain anything like the truth of life, or a life with others, somthing is always in our way; and must be done away with, must be overcome.

Of course the fact is that the culture is almost totally bankrupt of a vision of what a good life might be. We're ridden by comsumerism, fear, violence, racism--all these terrible mythologies which forever put off any real vision. I find it interesting in the light of scripture that, while the dream of the good life is forever delayed, death is always magnified: omnipresent, omnivorous, the shadowy other, the enemy. So we never really pay tribute to life at all, and never arrive at life. What we're really doing all the time is paying tribute to death. The eventuality of life is put off and put off and put off, because the obstacles and enemies multiply like piranhas, forever.

Until the end of history we'll be waging a shadow war. The shadows are created by our owh psyche in the image of death. In this itch for beautitude, which has nothing to do with God or our neighbor--in order to get nearer to that, we must kill all the time. In the pursuit of life, we are always dealing out death. War becomes the continual occupation and preoccupation in the minds of people who are purportedly trying to get a better life."

I'll post the rest tomorrow.