Affirmations

(by Robert Fripp, a guitarist)

Affirmation One

The benevolence of the creative impulse is inexpressible.

We cannot know this benevolence, while accepting that Benevolence knows us better than we know ourselves.

Affirmation Two

Love cannot bear that even one soul be denied its place in paradise.

Affirmation Three

In desperate times, a reasonable person might despair;
but hope is unreasonable, and love is greater even than this.

Affirmation Four

Music is our friend, if only we might listen; if only we can listen.

Affirmation Five

The poverty of our nature is no limit to our aspiration.

Affirmation Six

Although I stumble and fall, each time I will rise again.

Affirmation Seven

Not even death can end the process of our becoming.

***

We cannot know this benevolence, while accepting that Benevolence knows us better than we know ourselves. In such words I hear this and this. Goodness finds us, and then we find ourselves. The benevolence of the creative impulse is inexpressible. But it is perceivable. Our moments of self-discovery are indispensable to the continuation of creation.

Love cannot bear that even one soul be denied its place in paradise. How unfortunate, then, that we conspire individually and collectively to deny souls, and whole hosts of souls, their place in paradise, building nightmarish republics of invisible men, women, and children.

We do this, most curiously enough, in the name of justice. Is that justice? Is that what justice warrants?

Those who shrink the circle must beware lest they fall outside the circle themselves.

Must we persist in opposing, fruitlessly, the rights of truth to the rights of persons? One may concede that error has no rights, but to undo persons in order to undo error is the greatest error.

In desperate times, a reasonable person might despair; but hope is unreasonable, and love is greater even than this. In this, perhaps, shades of Kierkegaard, and his meditations on the sacrifice of Isaac. And a touch of Paul.

The poverty of our nature is no limit to our aspiration. We are, to borrow a pregnant phrase, beggars on a beach of gold. We are finite creatures who have the capacity to imagine the infinite. This capacity is the source of our great misery but also the means by which we glimpse and touch glory.

Although I stumble and fall, each time I will rise again. A theology professor of mine once said that she believes there are many resurrections, and they happen all the time. Were this not true, I could not believe in the Resurrection.

Not even death can end the process of our becoming. Amen.