Appearances Are Deceiving

I am continuing to work my way through The Passion of the Western Mind. I must admit that the last few chapters were rather disheartening in their discussion of the decline of the metaphysical and the ascendancy of the empirical. However, finally I reached the point in which the 20th century came along and yanked the rug out from under the empirical. Einstein et al. with the discoveries of relativity and sub-atomic particles etc. have brought about a greater sense of balance between the metaphysical and the empirical.

I think glass is as good a place as any to show why I mean. Glass is, in reality, a liquid - not a true solid...as if true solids really exist thanks to our knowledge of sub-atomic particles. Here in Marquette, in the Peter White Library, on the second floor of the old section, the windows still have their original panes of glass. If you stand back from the windows and look out onto the lower harbor you can see the thickening of the lower portions of each pain and the thinning of the upper portions - the glass is slowly "melting" downward - because it is a liquid. The picture above is from some other building somewhere else, but it gives a sense of what I am describing.

Appearances are very deceiving - they often reflect what the culture wants them to reflect. We continue to live in an age that places an inordinate amount of stock into the heterosexually based nuclear family. That is our standard of measurement - good or bad. To hear tell, this has been the standard of measurement from time immemorial - though that is simply not true.

We look back on the tradition of large families, for example. Married women often spent most of their adult lives pregnant and nursing children and dying young, either in childbirth or soon thereafter. We tend to forget that part of the motivation behind having so many children was the expectation that a fair number of those children would die and not survive to adulthood. The overarching goal of the family was survival of the lineage. In order to ensure a healthy number of heirs, you had to plan on burying a number of children as well.

I can't even wrap my brain around that. The infamous "choice" Meryl Streep's character must make in Sophie's Choice, which of her two children to keep with her in the concentration camp and which to hand over to the Nazi guard for extermination, for example, would have no emotional grounding in this environment. One doesn't get too emotionally attached to one's children until you are certain they will survive.

I struggle with the loss of one of my beloved dogs. I cannot fathom the loss of a child.

Good or bad this is evidence of our sense of individualism in this culture. We value our independent unique selves as much as as or more as our community. We place great importance on the rugged individual, but here too, appearances are deceiving.

Using the metaphor of light or water...we are all part of a greater being. Take water, for example. Step out of ourselves briefly and consider the species of homo sapiens. Like a multitude of raindrops falling onto an elevated plain, our individual lives have gathered to form a stream that has evolved into a mighty river.

If you measure the length of time (a man made concept) of a human life, generous at 75 years, and compare that to the length of time of the life of the planet, billions of years, each individual life is but a spark in the darkness - a flash and then it is gone. Yet as those lives began flashing thousands of years ago, the combined flashes now glow with a holy continuous light.

When our individual lives are over, we return to the source, yet we remain a part of the river or a particle of the light.

Over at Mad Priest's blog, we recently had a cyber discussion on theories that believe that GLBT folk may be part of the plan - part of what has strengthened our species. I made the point that in a paradigm that overemphasizes the individual and passing along one's genetics to one's offspring, the homosexual, the single person, the childless are all aberrations.

Yet if we think in terms of the species and not simply the individual, having a set population of adults who are removed from the rigors of rearing children has allowed for greater creativity, greater security, and better care of community. Over thousands of generations, our species evolved to live in tribal groupings in which a percentage of individuals chose different paths from the others, becoming holy men, shamans, nuns, healers, warriors - what have you.

Modern humanity has found an inordinate number of homosexuals in the priesthood and nunneries, in the military, in the healing professions, in the arts. All of these roles have contributed to the benefit of the tribe.

I can't recall the gospel reading about the various gifts of the members of Christ's body the Church. Some are called to healing, others to prophecy... Perhaps someone can add the reference in the comments section.

We appear to be alone and isolated individuals. Appearances are deceiving. Peace.