Dionysus on a Bike

Job 38:12-21 – 5/29/2026

Have you commanded the morning since your days began and caused the dawn to know its place[?]

Job 38:12 (NRSVue)

The answer to God’s rhetorical question to Job and his companions is obviously no. No one other than God commands the morning dawn to rise, not the righteous nor the unrighteous, not the weak nor the powerful. Whatever one can say about the differences between people, the fundamental limitations of our being as mortal animal creatures are common to each of us. None of us controls the unfolding of history or the cycles of nature. Each of us passively reacts to the turning of the earth, the forming of weather patterns and seasonal change, the unfolding of causality, and the vicissitudes of social change. Even if human beings have free will giving us volitional control of our own choices, those choices run up against the immobile weight of all that is beyond our control, making even our most carefully chosen courses of action streams of becoming outside our control.

There are two types of responses to this lack of control. We can rebel against our powerlessness and beat our head against the wall of causality, or we can let ourselves go and be swept along by the river of causality, accepting with equanimity our inability to alter the flow of time and the events that unfold within time. Rebelling against our powerlessness means not accepting it, not being content with it, acting as though we had more power than we do. This attitude means not accepting one’s fate as fixed and standing in opposition to the iron laws of causality. On the other hand, accepting our fate and our powerlessness means abandoning our conception of ourselves as effective in the world, as in control of our own destiny. This attitude requires renunciation of ambition and desire insofar as we cannot secure the means to fulfill them. If our ambitions and desires are fulfilled, it was not through any striving or directing the course of becoming.

Rebelling against powerlessness seems like the more noble option. Rather than resigning ourselves to having no say in the outcome of our lives, it is better to resist in futility than to passively accept one’s fate. While there may be a certain nobility to resisting, this is not the path to happiness, contentedness, or blessing. Desire and hopes will always come in conflict with the necessity from our perspective of the unfolding of history. Our only hope is to get lucky and have our desires fulfilled despite our lack of control, in which case blessedness is reserved for the fortunate few while everyone else suffers frustrated disappointment.

The other option, to give up all illusion of control and to passively accept one’s fate, has more potential for happiness and blessedness. Composing oneself to the flow of a becoming one does not control is to accept one’s position in the cosmos and make the best of it with equanimity and grace. Blessedness will follow to the extent that we successfully train our desires and ambitions to be compatible with things as they actually are. This attitude in the face of our powerlessness is the happier one, but it forces us to deny ourselves as willing subjects. Even if we do not have free will, we experience ourselves as having some kind of conscious volitional control of our actions in the world in ways that relate to our deepest needs and desires. Passively accepting our fate requires that we deny that part of ourselves that wills and chooses whether we want to or not.

There is a third stance that is neither passive resignation nor stubborn rebelling against our existential situation. Instead of either extreme, we can choose to act in the world in hope that it will make a difference while still knowing that our actions do not make a difference on their own. This is a paradoxical existential attitude where we choose, will, hope, yearn, and strive with expectation and acceptance. This way of living is to inhabit both passive and active attitudes requiring a combination of passionate longing and detached acceptance. Caring fully and letting go of everything at the same time require a single connecting attitude. This mood connecting the two opposing modes of living is hope. Hope can be naivete, but it can also be a rebellion against an unjust world. For us who are caught in the bind of desire without control, hope can be the clear-sighted honest appraisal of our existential situation and an affirmation of what appears to be our biggest flaw, our weakness where we will to be strong and in our passionate desires that yearn for a better world.

We find ourselves thrown into a world that demands that we act and yet we act continually in vain. To accept this paradoxical position and find joy in it in hope is the Christian life. A life that exerts its power as if it were able to change the world or undo fate fails to be honest about human limitation. A life that is lived in passive resignation through the elimination of desire fails to affirm that we are desiring creatures with longings that outpace our ability to attain what is longed for. Striving with acceptance of powerlessness is the only stance that affirms all of life, ourselves and the world, as it is, without pretending it’s something it’s not and so is lying to ourselves.

Further Reading: Coming to terms with and embracing the paradox of being willing, desiring subjects in a world we do not control share themes with Buddhism and Nietzsche’s concept of Amor Fati and life-affirmation.

In this reflection, the relationship between our powerlessness and choice is explored. In a previous reflection, I dealt with the relationship between choice and the weight of that choice in light of our power. Power and powerlessness, one of the many paradoxes of what it is to be a human subject.

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Reflections of a Dionysian Lutheran, comments on the daily readings of the Revised Common Lectionary.