A little existential discussion to start your holiday.

I am listening to Coast to Coast AM, the last hour of yesterday's program. Linda Moulton Howe is the guest, and the topic of discussion is UFOs/alient visits/angelic visits, etc. Typical spooky stuff. Mostly BS, I have no doubt (currently, they are talking about giant winged humanoids with the heads of hawks that are at war with Reptilians).

Every once in a while, though, something comes up that makes me have to pause and think.

A man called in and told a story. I was wrapping gifts, so I didn't catch all the details, but he spoke of a recurring nightmare he had had and how one night he had this dream where there was a dark figure at the foot of his bed and he felt a great hatred coming from it. Just when he was certain he was about to die, two beings of light--blinding light--came into the room and wrestled the creature away. When he asked them why this had happened to him, they said "Because you can handle it."

That is all setup for this, which is the important part:

The caller said that he had experienced a great deal of tragedy in his life and asked her if she thought that some people had to suffer more so that others would not suffer as much. It is a question of maintaining cosmic balance.

Now, if you never ponder metaphysics, then don't waste your time with this either. But it is a question which intrigues me. I do not--have never--believed that the natural state of the universe is chaos. Mathematics and Chemistry show me otherwise--think of the Golden Ratio which repeats itself in the petals of roses and the chambered shell of the nautilus, and of the way atoms of various elements join together in bonds both ionic and covalent in order to approach a more stable state. Is there a more metaphysic balance necessary in the world as well? The yin/yang, the balance of good and evil, of light and dark?

I wonder.

I do not presume to know, but I wonder.

My best friend Mark's "gay dad", W, died early in the morning of the 23rd. The tragedy is, of course, chiefly A's (or, as Mark calls him, the Great Prince). But Mark is just far enough removed from it all that he is able to step up and handle quite a few details. This is not the first time he has done so. When he was but a wee lad, his adoptive mother passed away, some time after having a stroke. Mark--not even a preteen at the time--wrote her obituary and handled the arrangements for her funeral. And deaths are far from the only thing he has had to deal with--as I've said elsewhere in the past, he was for some time rejected by his family because of being gay, was once asked if he felt the devil at work inside him, has dealt with poverty and rejection and a variety of other things.

Has he dealt with all of this because he can, to take the burden from someone who cannot? Did the Czarina (as W was called) die in middle age because the Great Prince could handle his passing, so that someone with a much more spiritually fragile spouse would not have to endure the same?

Mother Teresa is credited with having said "I know God doesn't give me more than I can handle. I just wish he didn't trust me so much."

I've dealt with my own shit. A great deal of it, from the time I was a very small child. I shall not go into detail with it here. I could write a couple of Lifetime movies just based on my childhood, let us say.

Perhaps it is because of that, and because of my quite human desire for there to be a meaning to it all, that I choose to think the caller was correct. That some of us suffer so that others don't have to. Balance, in the end, is not a neat thing. Though there is an essential balance of day to night, there is virtually never an equal amount in one day. So I will choose to find it comforting to think that someone, somewhere, will live a charmed life to balance out all the shit that's been thrown at me.

With luck, it will be my children.

Merry Christmas, all.
Gloria in excelsis deo.