Chance

The beings I love are creatures. They were born by chance. My meeting with them was also chance. They will die. What they think, what they feel, and what they do is limited and mixed with good and evil. To know all this with one's whole soul and to love them no less. To imitate God who infinitely loves finite things as finite things. We wish that everything of value were eternal. But everything of value is the product of an encounter, endures through encounter, and ceases when what had met separates. This is the central thought of Buddhism (a Heraclitean thought). It leads straight to God. Meditation on the chance that brought my father and my mother together is even more salutary than meditation on death. Is there a single thing in me that does not have its origin in that meeting? Only God. And even my thought of God has its origin in that meeting. Stars and fruit trees in blossom. Complete permanence and extreme fragility equally give the feeling of eternity. Theories of progress, of "genius that always breaks through," arise from the fact that it is intolerable to imagine what is most precious in the world delivered over to chance. It is because this is intolerable that it must be contemplated. Creation is precisely this. The only good not subject to chance is the one that lies outside the world. The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence. Destruction of Troy. Falling petals of fruit trees in blossom. To know that what is most precious is not rooted in existence. This is beautiful. Why? It casts the soul out of time. The woman who wishes for a child white as snow, red as blood, obtains him, but she dies and the child is delivered to a stepmother.