Qualifications

Often I am kept from acting in important matters because I feel that either I do not have the qualifications to be involved or I wonder what power I have to effect a difference. On this latter point I should reflect on how the smallest ingredient introduced into a situation can eventually produce a significant change. So I should act, even in a small way, on an important matter! As for qualifications, I should work to be as qualified as possible to deal with the matter at hand; and if I cannot be largely qualified, then I can act in a small way according to what qualifications I may have. On the deepest level it is not qualifications that matter, but that God accepts the offering of our action and brings it to completion, for next to God and his purposes we are all, in all matters, severely under-qualified. Yet he uses us, and not just on the side of the scene but in ways that are critical to his purposes.
So I should always act when, by life's funny accidents, I find myself in a position requiring my action or inviting it. I should in a small pure way, detached from how I may look in so acting and my own narrow views of what the outcome should be. I should act, as an offering to God, letting him use my small contribution for bis wondrous purposes.

Quest

As a writer, a poet, and a teacher, here is what I would wish to be able to do: to express a thought or insight, or to describe some thing or person or event, with absolute precision and clarity, and at the same time, and as part of that very expression, to suffuse the whole with the deepest of feeling, with intuition, with a sensitive grasping of the "co-inhering" of all things.
I have this desire (again) after praying before the Blessed Sacrament exposed, and in a long moment I somehow understood with a fair amount of clarity and theological precision the relation between Christ's risen body and his Eucharistic body and the relation of these to all bodies. In one grasp I felt the resolution of many intricate questions, and I know that with time and effort these could be unfolded. But this grasp was likewise suffused with feeling, with emotion that was inextricably part of the thought and which nuanced and guided it. There was adoration, wonder, joy, gratitude.
Only a work of art or only theology of a most beautiful kind could approach an adequate expression of all this. I feel so weak and ill-prepared. I can conceive the task with precision, but I cannot accomplish it. The prayer before the Blessed Sacrament occasioned these reflections, but it is not a goal to be applied only to subjects of so profound a nature. This would be a principle to apply to virtually anything and everything - to think clearly and deeply and to do so with love.

Does Nature feel herself being Nature, or do all the rhythms and cycles, now launched, just continue to rumble dumbly forward? If it is only the latter, then all this might basically be a very brutal story. Take, for example, the flight of a bird - does it delight the bird; or can it only be delightful to us? There are thousands upon thousands of things - like trees, clouds, rivers, cliffs, glens, gorges - which are delightful to us, but are they delightful to themselves and to the other creatures? When a cougar passes a cliff, does it delight in its beauty and in the quality of the clouds beyond? There seems something like delight in many animals who appear at least to enjoy their own kind - lion cubs frolicking with daddy and mommy or puppies playing among themselves. Others seem to exult in what they can do: the leaping fish, the speeding gazelle. But none of these species gives evidence of having a grasp of the whole. They do not reflect on why they do what they do, and they do not think forward to their deaths.
This raises a big question: what is the whole scene of the world for? Why the thousands upon thousands of years of these exchanges and cycles of creatures, beautiful as a whole to none, delightful as a whole to none, except to us human beings in the midst of them? The biblical answer moves in two steps. First, God creates each different creature for its own sake. Each exists because God wills it to exist, and its very existence proclaims his glory. Then in a second dimension, on a different level, the entire scene is for our sake. All these beautiful things were created so that God could lead a different kind of creature into his garden and say, "Look at all this," and this creature, different from all the rest, could take delight in the whole of it, just as God also does.
This explains a lot, even if not all. However, this answer is hardly any longer allowed in the culture as an explanation, and so a person needs real strength of character and even courage to live by it. The dog lobbies and the rock lobbies and other such lobbies think it means we want to cut down all the rain forests. They caricature our belief, though admittedly the biblical doctrine has been badly misused. But when the qualitative difference between human beings and other creatures is banished from the culture as an acceptable explanation and ordering of the world scene, then despair seems a predictable result, coupled with the effort to avoid it by means of cheery distractions. Despair, because without acknowledgement of this qualitative difference, we are only a part of it like all the rest, and we will inevitably drift toward an implicit acceptance of the meaning of our existence as just fitting dumbly into the cycles. If we deny the qualitative difference, we might as well admit that anything like our delight in the flight of a bird is a false human mollifier, a sentiment unworthy of brutal reality.
That said, I do admit to a problem in accepting the biblical explanation. It presents difficulties today unknown to those who were open to it and lived by it in the past. The extent of the space and time of the universe as now measured by science is so vast that explaining all of it as being for the pleasure of human beings seems a bit extravagant, to say the least. I too am stumped before this. Beautiful Umbrian night under all the stars - what for? And the animals around me in the dark what for? What, if anything, do they feel about the stars?