Brian’s Reflection: Tuesday, November 13, 2007


If you would only recognize that life is hard,
things would be so much easier for you.

- Justice Louis Brandeis, Associate
Justice of the Supreme Court for 23 years,
born on this day, 1856


Most of us live in a fantasy. We think that Life is going to be perpetually lovely. Without pain, physical or emotional or whatever. We think that every child will be born perfect. We think that doctors will fix everything to our own fantasy….. or God will ….. or prayer will. The highest form of repression and delusion is that, when experience proves all this wrong, we continue to live in a state of childish unreality. The God who has promised to “walk with us through the valley of the shadow of death” becomes the Good Fairy God whose failure to make everything right will be rationalized away with the most appalling stupidity ……. but secretly we harbor deep resentment, and how this makes a mockery of the God who above all things wishes to help us to live Life in its reality.

Life is hard, in a sense. But Life, lived in the context of Its Reality, is also stunningly amazing and fun and hilarious. Making a fantasy of Life only makes Life more difficult! And a fake.

Reality is always easier. Always.

Brian+

p.s. The Justice also said:

To declare that the end justifies the means, to declare that the government may commit crimes, would bring terrible retribution.

And:

We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.

You think this is politics and not about the inner life of the spirit and of America?

Think again.