I continue to wend my way
through life trying to find a way live in a miraculous w orld that is often cruel and governed by rules I didn’t make, where compassion sometimes leads only to
greater suffering (try saving every cute chick in the neighborhood and soon you
are overwhelmed and they are starving). As
Joseph
Wood Krutch puts it: “The degree of ‘reverence for
life’ which man or any animal can exhibit is limited by the facts of a world he
never made.”
How do I respond to the rat caught in a flood now lying in the flood debris gasping to breathe, his sides heaving. Do I save him just to trap and kill him later? What about the rooster I find hit by the side of the road, but still very much alive? Or the beautifully-crafted nest in my tree house roof full of baby rats with perfectly formed slender, finger-like toes and so young that their eyes were still closed? What Joseph Wood Krutch describes as “the cruel dilemma with which a contingent universe continually confronts us.”
I find comfort and inspirtion in the words of Albert Schweitzer, who wrote about living with a reverence for life: "...life will become in every aspect more difficult than if he lived for himself., but at the same time it will be richer, more beautiful and happier. It becomes, instead of mere living, a genuine experience of life."
"In the universe, the infinite will to live manifests itself to us as the will to create, and this is filled with dark and painful riddles for us. It manifests in us as the will to love, which resolves that riddle through our action."
