Reflection for Today ▶️ ⏩ ⏹️
Off Balance, by Gabrielle D'angelo. Installation at Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles California
There is an evil which I have seen under the sun, as an error which proceedeth from the ruler: Folly is set in great dignity, and the rich sit in low place. I have seen servants upon horses, and princes walking as servants upon the earth.
— Ecclesiastes 10:5-7
Given the last sentence of this passage, I'd like to hear it as a revolutionary upending of the status quo, where, as Jesus promises, many that are first shall be last; and the last first.2
Sadly, despite the worker uprisings of the previous few centuries today's political landscape is more aligned with this assessment of the text,
"The Preacher wanted to remind us that not all is fair in this life. Foolish men are promoted or accepted to positions of great leadership. Some lowly men are unwisely exalted while some noblemen are humbled".1
Poorly educated, uninspiring and self-centered men are running the world, and most of the major corporations that prop up the capitalist system are run by megalomaniac sociopaths—a different kind of fool, but each a fool nonetheless. Our princes of reason, noblemen of intellect and wisdom—men like Mohandas Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr, or more recently Edward Snowden and Julian Assange—are exiled, imprisoned, or assassinated. Women are silenced.
The world is imbalanced, tilted towards personal profit, away from distribution of wealth; tilted towards secrecy, away from openness; tilted towards fear, away from love; tilted towards idolatry, away from God.
1 Ecclesiastes 10: Folly and Wisdom by David Guzik, 2018
2 Mark 10:32 (also Matthew 19:30, 20:16; Luke 13:30