All is well, even when it isn’t good

One of the first thing the guys upstairs told Rita and me, nearly two dozen years ago, is that “All is well. All is always well.”

For some people, that’s more than they can swallow. Wars, injustice, environmental catastrophe – even lost elections – convince them that all is far from well. But that is a fundamental misunderstanding. To say “All is well” is not a value judgment about any or all features of a given thing being examined. It is to say, the system is functioning as designed.

There is a big difference between saying “all is well” and saying “all is good.” And it isn’t merely a difference in degree; it is a difference in kind.

Tthe creation story in the book of Genesis has God creating the world in stages, and at each stage observing that it was good. Everything created was good, until –.

Enter the story of the eating of the apple. Adam and Eve ate from the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil, and ever after were unable to escape from the perception of duality. From that point, everything became good or bad to them.

A friend of mine, a former Catholic priest fluent in Hebrew, told me, in answer to my question, that to translate the tree as “the tree of the perception of things as good and evil” was a permissible translation, and that’s what I think the scripture meant. Adam and Eve (that is, humanity) fell into an inability to see things as a unity, and became able to see things only as duality.

Of course, once you are stuck seeing things as good or evil, you are into judging. So we say, “That’s bad,” and we may mean an anything from “I don’t like it” to “This is evil.”  But evil itself, like good itself, is a value judgment, a partial view.

That habit of judging tempts us to think we’re smarter than the universe, more moral than God.  Not very good thinking.

Of course, mostly we can’t help ourselves. But after we have forgotten, and gone into fear or judgment or whatever, it is worthwhile to come back to a saner state of mind, remembering that we don’t have to wait for everything to be good, for all to be well.