Meekness Humbled?

Jesus said the meek shall inherit the earth, not the weak. Christianity is not about weakness. Meekness and weakness are not the same; they don’t even share a narrowly proscribed synonymy.  What this has to do with the notion that one can only act humanly if one acts humanely might be lost on some, but it is revelatory of how I think, and the traditional Christian demands on our character, our choices, or intentions and actions with love are all of them prescriptions and proscriptions for an elevated humanity. I do not refer here to the Christianity that has been managed and mangled by Kingdoms, countries, institutions, churches, congregations and individuals who have mistaken their arrogance for zealous and truer belief, if that is even possible. I can say the same for Muslims and their relationship or misconceived relationship to Holy Qu’ran.

Remember, intention is not everything.  No matter how much justification we have for revising our point of view about historical epochs, the Dark Ages were dimmer than others, and yet people managed to live lives, have some parcel of happiness, remained human so long as they chose to act humanely. Whatever the social conditions that beset a people or a person, humanity is always present as a potential, as choice, something to choose or not to choose, to be humane or not to be humane. Lives dimmed by the vanishing light of an age and the existence of genuine happiness for persons amid the dying light are not mutually exclusive. They can co-exist and often do. This co-existence of general misery and individual happiness was also true for some Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, perhaps even all of them at one moment or another, a string of them for everyone no matter how short. Arabs in Gaza, Tibetans occupied by China, Russians and Jews in the Soviet Union, African-Americans in the Jim Crow South, even those occupied by the Nazis–all of these were subject to the conditions that have become familiar through one or another histories. One or another histories means more specifically, one or another historiographies. I do imagine a history apart from what gets written. History is not the writing, is not the telling. Telling and writing are means to convey some part of history–languages are media for the telling or the writing. This is not an invitation to endless revision–the current trend or trends in revisionist historiography has the visioning again as the principal and even the only intention. That in itself is only creating a substitute dogma. It has nothing to do with little truths or the Truth.

Everyone experiences the human or the failure to achieve the human through choice; you must choose the human to become human in face of your attachment to your animal nature.And this is important to note, the fact that we are not born human, but born Homo-sapiens, a species of animal on the planet with a nature and manner consistent throughout the species, all 7 billion of us. The abyss yawns for everyone so ask not for the whom it opens. To be human, or better, to become human, one must choose to be humane, act humanely, it’s not a passive condition. Only of the humane, by the humane, and for the humane makes the Homo-sapiens a human-being. The Great Human Humane laughs in face of the yawning abyss waiting for its echo. This does not mean we do not suffer; it means we remain human in spite of the suffering. This is not an invitation to suffer as so many misguided Muslims and Christians have believed. Vanity, vanity, vanity is not verity.