Rumblings of Accord

My lady wife has upset me; she knocked me a bit off kilter.
I am so much used to being ignored by everyone I know - ignored for my opinions, that is - that I am rather stunned when someone says something that sounds like agreement. Of course, the reason that I am ignored might not be the opinions themselves, but the messenger. Having delivered some pronouncement, it would not be unheard of for me to dodge into my Arnold Toynbee persona and start quoting Latin and Greek, French and Arabic, to cite Herodotus or 'Antara, thereby dashing any sympathy which may have germinated.
I tend to focus a bit maniacally on things I am interested in, and I am interested in my opinions. They are how I create the world, and I pay attention to mine and other peoples'.

Yesterday my wife spoke about Christina Taylor Green, the  nine-year old child who was killed in Arizona. Christina had been born on 9/11 and that birth upon that horrible day seemed to have been part of an effort to reverse the awful events of that day by giving the world a bright and vivacious child whose life may well have assuaged pain and promoted well-being.
Here lies the first irony, the first reversal: a turn from killing to new hope in the birth of Christina.

Then most untimely she is killed and her life is wasted, reminding us of the many lives that are similarly wasted each day.
This is the second irony: the abrupt reversal from hope to desperate yearning - a hope that has no visible means as yet of fulfillment. We have not changed from hope to despair, but we have lost the guts of our optimisim: we have lost the  bright and shining children of the future.

This unsettles my lady wife, because she sees a warning within it.

That unsettles me, because I get so used to what I say that I take it for granted: rise up in the morning, get a cup of coffee, then write something nasty about society as a whole.
When people start agreeing with me, I realize that time is getting short, because the outcomes that I have looked at are not pleasant, and I have frequently moaned about being born in a time of trials... but none of us can go back, so we have to tough it out.

The Irony of religion  bears looking into. The Almighty throws the mighty from their thrones and raises the lowly: reversal. Pride goes before a fall - this is not an idle observation of sociology, rather it is a description of life itself: pride contains the seeds of its own destruction.
Joy and Suffering are not necessarily opposites, they are not similar to Hegelian Thesis and Antithesis; they are the elements of the Irony of Life. And it is the very Shock of Irony, the incredible way that a sudden reversal gets our attention, that makes us pay attention in the first place! Without the shock of irony, we would live on dreamily like the lotus-eaters, living a drowsy dolce far niente existence.

And the preceding meditation upon irony is why I have been thinking so much on Quakers and their beliefs recently:

if in the normal course of things the irony of life ensures that each act contains the seeds of its opposite, then should I not be lowly so that I might be raised? Shall I not be not be meek so that I might inherit the kingdom? And should I not be a peace-maker so that I might be a child of God?

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