A Wellspring of All: Tao Te Ching 4
Stacie at a lake in the Colorado Rockies.
4.
The Tao seems like
an empty vessel,
but when you pour it out,
it never ceases to flow.
It is fathomless!
A wellspring of all that exists.
It smooths jagged edges.
It untangles knots.
It diffuses blistering sun rays.
It becomes one with the dust.
Ah how sublime!
It seems eternal.
I don’t know who begat it.
It appears prior
to the heavenly beings.
Jeff has a tattoo of a woman pouring out water, endlessly from an urn. This ancient archetype is found throughout the world. We even saw it in a temple in Foshan, China, dedicated to the goddess of mercy, Guanyin. The point of this symbol is that grace and love are inexhaustible. Unlike other resources—like petroleum or phosphorus—we humans can reach a “peak” after which we find ourselves in a situation of scarcity. The reason Jeff chose this symbol and gave it a permanent place on his arm was he wanted to remind himself that we ought not be stingy about love, and that the more we share, the more love abounds.
Wars are fought over limited resources. They have been raging since the dawn of civilization. The earliest disputes often involved rights to wells and water sources. That’s why Jesus teaching in John 4:13-14 was so profound: “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
Note how, in this chapter, the Tao is separate from the natural world, but is also immanent within it. We think this resonates well with the biblical concept of creation, and also Paul’s citation of a pagan philosopher (Epimenides) in Acts 17:28: “in him we live and move and have our being.” That is, the divine source of all things is both transcendent (other than our material world) and immanent (deeply connected to it). Any spirituality that ignores one or the other is incomplete.
Lao Tzu gives us a straightforward reason to believe that, ultimately at least—and with a bit of patience—everything will work out in the end. Bad people will eventually be ruined by their own false pursuits. Those who have poured love into others will eventually be remembered fondly. The jagged things of this world will be smoothed out, ever so slowly, by the flow of nature itself. For this reason, we can let go of our constant striving to control our world. For those of us who believe in an intelligence behind the world, this means that as random as things may seem, and may in fact be, the fabric of the world is woven in such a way that goodness, truth, and beauty will ultimately prevail.
Perhaps this belief that things are going to work out is the core of what it means to have faith. Sometimes such faith is hard, especially when injustice seems to win so easily and when suffering people are so easily crushed. Perhaps it is even irrational to believe such things, but it seems that Tao Te Ching 4 provides a straightforward assertion of a blessed future for the universe, one that resonates with the following words preached by Theodore Parker, just before the American Civil War:
Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but a little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice. Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Jefferson trembled when he thought of slavery and remembered that God is just. Ere long all America will tremble.
--Theodore Parker, Ten Sermons of Religion (Boston, 1853), 84-5.
Justice will be done one way or the other. Yet there is another teaching as well: that we don’t need to hoard love, forgiveness, mercy, and compassion. By letting go of our need to exact vengeance on others, and by letting nature take its course for those who will reap the rewards of the evil seeds they’ve sown, we can do something even greater: tap into the inexhaustible source of all life. We call this Tao God, the one who showed up in Jesus and declared: “before Abraham was, I am.” (John 8:58)