A Little Light — But What a Light!

 It seems like such a little act:  lighting a candle.  But I have discovered in that act much to meditate upon.

As the year heads into its last few months, more tiny flames are lit around the world as particular religious festivals arrive:  Diwali, Hanukah, Christmas, even the newcomer Kwanza.  All these celebrations light candles in some form as part of their ceremonies.  Sometimes the wicks being lit are at the tip of hard candles; sometimes in a tiny cup of liquid.  But the visual effect is the same.  And it is beautiful.

In the northern hemisphere, the lighting of candles on those holidays late in the year carries an added spiritual meaning through the warmth the candles bring in cold weather.  But even when those religious holidays are practiced in the southern hemisphere, with days getting longer, candle lights can bring a soft yellow glow to what was darkness.  Although I am not a Roman Catholic, I have (as long as I can remember) found pleasing any pictures of Catholics lighting candles in a sometimes dim sanctuary, often accompanied by private prayers.

Before electricity came to our modern world, candles were used where today we use tiny light bulbs.  I feel nervous when I see pictures of some Europeans lighting candles on the branches of evergreen Christmas trees.  And I know the firefighters at my local fire-department can sleep easier knowing that electric lights decorate our trees in the U.S.  But we still desire to light candles in other ways during these festive months.

Before our petroleum age, the material for candles was wax from bees or tallow from sheep or cattle.  We might do well to recognize the flame as also being a gift from Nature.

Scientists who work in the area of evolutionary psychology try to project their thoughts back upon the path of human evolution.  Certainly a significant step in that story would have been being able to start a fire.  The European cultural heritage expresses how momentous that discovery was with its mythological story of Prometheus, who steals fire from the gods.  In the playwright Aeschylus's adaptation Prometheus Bound, Prometheus is also viewed as being the bringer of civilization.  But the god Zeus knew all too well how dangerous humans could be without bounds.  And so, Prometheus is bound to a rocky mountain as punishment.

That danger of possessing fire is why my reflections upon candle-lighting have led me to see it as an example of behaving in a restrained, respectful manner.  In humankind's use of candles, we have found a way to handle fire in a controlled way. If in mythology fire brings civilization, can lighting a candle be a civilizing act today?  In our religious and spiritual lighting of candles, can we—instead of fanning the flames of anger in ourselves and others—turn our hearts toward worship?

The commonality across faith-traditions of lighting candles (whether in sticks or cups of liquid) might enable us to share in the emotions of Howard Thurman, even if our faith-tradition is non-Christian, or if we have none.  He writes in part:

"I Will Light Candles This Christmas.

Candles of joy despite all sadness,

Candles of hope where despair keeps watch,

Candles of courage for fears ever present,

Candles of peace for tempest-tossed days,

Candles of grace to ease heavy burdens."

~ ~ ~

Do you light candles on particular occasions?  When?  What feelings does it bring?

(The lines from "Candles for Christmas" by Howard Thurman are from Meditations of the Heart, © 1953, used under Fair Use.)
(The painting of Prometheus by Jan Cossiers is in the Public Domain.)

Yearning for Something Better

"We pursue the true, the good, and the beautiful,
even though the false, the nasty, and the messy 

might have been just as useful to our genes."

What was it that attracted me to this statement by the contemporary philosopher Roger Scruton?  In part, it was my knowing that Truth, Goodness, and Beauty have been held by Christianity to be the three classic avenues through which we come to know God.  But something more immediate influenced me, something about human society today.  In a world in which we are told by some people not that there are additional facts but that there are "alternative facts," and told by still others that "truth isn't truth," it can be hard to find our bearings.  Hard to restore our grounding.  Scruton's statement reminded me that there is something within us that yearns for something better.

My responses to Scruton's words began to resonate with the picture on the cover of Scruton's book The Soul of the World.  It was a painting by the great 17th-century master Nicolas Poussin titled "Landscape with a Calm."  That painting (see below) does indeed convey an air of calm, with a herder and animals in the foreground, still water and sheep in mid-ground, and a gentle slope and stable architecture in the background.  A diffused sunlight bonds all the elements together.

Researching in an art book, I found out that although Poussin lived in the era of effusive baroque art, there was in Poussin a "conscious attempt to suppress feeling....[Nevertheless,] his paintings are hardly ever cold or lifeless."  That is because there is in them, even if it is subtle, "an emotional tension -- a tension developed between the imaginative force of the informing idea and the strict discipline of the means used to control and express it."  Poussin sought with his landscape paintings to convey more than a landscape.  He sought to convey not the surface complexity (or possible chaos) of the world but to hint at enduring truths obscured by our human disorders.  Even in his twenties, he had written:

"My nature leads me to seek out and cherish things that are well ordered,
shunning confusion which is as contrary and menacing to me
as dark shadows are to the light of day."

There it was: Echoing down from centuries ago, a statement of Poussin that there was also in his nature a yearning for an orderly, truthful dimension that lies beneath the visible surface of this too-often darkened world.

Moreover, isn't the yearning within us for some stable ground a yearning for more than truth? Isn't it also a yearning for something we can trust?  And for people we can trust?  (The chief cause of broken friendships is betrayal.)  If the yearning is for more than truth, it would be a yearning also for goodness in our relationships to the world.  And a yearning for a kind of beauty that is not always visible to our physical eyes.  Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.

~ ~ ~

Is there a way you try to restore your bearings in a world in which, it seems, "anything goes"?

(The quotes by Scruton are from The Soul of the World, © 2014, pp. 5 & 6.)

(The quotes by and about Poussin are from The Age of Baroque by Michael Kitson
in the series Landmarks of the World’s Art, © 1966 p. 73.)

Supporting Life through Letters

 Describing an often overlooked characteristic of 19th-century biologists, Joseph Kastner writes:  "Naturalists who never laid eyes on each other became intimate friends by virtue of the long and faithful letters they wrote to each other, year in and year out...."  Early British biologists' use of correspondence for research accelerated after the 1840 creation of the Penny Post within England, which set a fixed rate for a letter regardless of the distance it had to travel.  No biologist took greater advantage of the postal service for gathering scientific data than Charles Darwin, who penned over 14,000 letters.  But there is more than science in those early biologists' letters. There are also matters of the heart.

from Hooker's
Himalayan Journals

Appreciating the poignancy of some letters requires knowing about the state of 19th-century medicine.  Because there were virtually no vaccinations nor oral or injected antibiotics, a child was twenty-five times more likely to die before reaching early adolescence than is a child in Britain today.  Despite 19th-century biologists' accelerating knowledge about the natural world, they were not exempt from that statistic.

After the death of Darwin's beloved daughter Annie at the age of ten, the botanist Joseph Hooker, who helped Darwin study plant species, offered his condolences to Darwin.  Several years later, only an hour after Hooker's daughter died, Hooker was writing to Darwin to tell of his own grief.  Darwin wrote back at once.

Thomas Henry Huxley
   

The leading British advocate for Darwin's theory of evolution for natural selection, Thomas Henry Huxley, also lost a child.  After Huxley's son Noel died at the age of three, Darwin drew upon his own experience of grief with Annie to reassure Huxley that grief could soften with time, writing, "I was indeed grieved to receive your news this morning....  I know well how intolerable is the bitterness of such grief.  Yet believe me, that time, and time alone, acts wonderfully....  I cannot think of one child without tears rising in my eyes; but the grief is become tenderer and I can even call up the smile of our lost darling...."

statue of
Jean Henri Fabre

Such personal expressions of grief and condolence, sometimes traveling in envelopes as part of scientific study, also crossed the English Channel.  The most difficult of emotions were sometimes even revealed in the pages of scientific books.  The eminent French entomologist Jean Henri Fabre closed his first volume on insects with a dedication to the memory of his own son, who had died when Fabre was working on the book. Charles Darwin, despite scientific disagreements,  wrote a cordial letter to Fabre, saying,  "Permit me to add, that when I read the last sentence in your book, I sympathised deeply with you."

I was moved even more by the tenderness and cordiality of these letters when I re-read them during the COVID pandemic.  With our own world's death-count increasing, it had become easy to be numbed by the numbers, so familiar had they become.  Even though we have electronic means of communication these 19th-century letter-writers did not have, these biologists' letters, with their warmth, transcended their limited technology.

~ ~ ~

Can you think of any way our communicating with others might become more spiritually supportive?

(The Kastner quote is from A Species of Eternity by Joseph Kastner, © 1977,

and is taken from The Naturalist's Path by Cathy Johnson, © 1991.  p. ix.)

(The Darwin quotes are taken from Annie's Box by Randal Keynes, © 2001.  pp. 221 & 285.)

Stepping In... to Step Deeper into the World

 I have met more than one person who very much likes StoryCorps stories, a brief weekly spot on Public Radio's Friday news programs.  The StoryCorps project traveled around the U.S. for years, recording ordinary Americans as they told about pivotal events in their life journeys. Many of what is shared is poignant.  When I take pen to paper to write my own thoughts about a wider world and reading, there is one particular StoryCorps spot that comes to mind.  As I imagine the experience in my mind, it also has to do with Nature.

A woman explained to StoryCorps how a bookmobile became a life-changing experience for her.  As a little girl, she lived with her family in Native American migrant-worker camp.  Traveling so frequently, the girl was not allowed to have books, because they would have been too heavy to move.  But then one day, when the girl was 12, a traveling library (a bookmobile) stopped on its periodic rounds where the family was currently living.  And the girl was invited to step in.

As the now grown woman explained her childhood experience, when first told she could take home a book from the mobile, she wondered what was the catch.  Being told there was none other than returning the book in two weeks, she began to devour books.  And her having stepped (at first hesitantly) into the bookmobile made it possible for her to step into a whole new world. Or perhaps I should say "worlds," because the girl's selections ranged from volcanoes to dinosaurs.

"The Journey" (1903)
by
Elizabeth Shippen Green

The child's stepping into that vehicle filled with books reminded me how each book can become for us a vehicle by which we step into the mind, and maybe the emotions of the author of that book. By so doing, we expand our world, even bringing hope to some corner of our lives where it previously could not be seen.  As the woman explained to StoryCorps, because of those books, "By the time I was 15, I knew there was a world outside of the camps.... I believed I could find a place in it.  And I did."

I am humbled by this story.  Although the family I grew up in was decidedly middle-class, we had a couple of filled bookcases in our house; and my mother periodically purchased an additional book so that our home library might grow as I grew.  I am also humbled because I know that it is upon the often hard lives of migrant workers that I depend for life when I purchase fruits or vegetables at the grocery store.

This woman's story came back to my mind during the COVID pandemic. Many of us had to step back into our homes in order to protect ourselves or others -- even when we would have preferred to go about freely. We turned to electronic means of communication to try to satisfy that human desire to learn and connect with more than our individual lives. Those methods were less satisfying than the "real thing." Nevertheless, the confinement of our circumstances could make us more aware of how much we needed each other, and how much other people depended upon us..

~~~

How have books widened your world?  Has there been a critical experience in your life that has made your life richer than it otherwise would have been?

(The quotation is from "Once Forbidden, Books Become A Lifeline

 For A Young Migrant Worker," by NPR Staff, May 30, 2014, and is used here under Fair Use.)
(The illustration by Green is in the Public 'Domain.)

A Shawl Wrapped All Around

One of the first things I was taught about God (even before I entered elementary school) was that God loves me and everybody else.  Another of the earliest things I was taught about God (just as early in my life) was that God is everywhere.  I still hold to these two basic principles, even though I admit to the complexity of using that word "God."

But how can I ever imagine that God is everywhere?  (Especially when I have been cautioned against elevating anything in the world into a god, an idol.)  How can I ever imagine that anything is everywhere?

For me, growing up as a child, it was the sky that helped me envision how God could be everywhere at once.  God was invisible, but the sky, which I could see, expressed a kind of "everywhere."  When I stood outside and looked up and around me, the sky seemed to surround everything on the Earth.  As I scanned the sky and guided my sight back down to the Earth, the sky seemed to wrap around the edge of the Earth at the horizon, no matter which direction I was facing.

Today, I know of an open, inclusive church that has in its mission statement in the worship bulletin the phrase "God's all-encompassing love."  Even though I myself struggle with how anybody could actually love every person on this planet (so ornery do we humans often become), I do have a sense of what "all-encompassing" is.  I learned my sense of that from the over-arching, all-surrounding sky I could see when I was a child.

There was a second way, as a child, that the sky gave me a visual experience of "everywhere." For, after all, church-school had also reassured me that this God who loves me is with me no matter where I go.  I got a sense of "no-matter-where-I-go" by watching the sky as I rode in the car at night.  You can experience this yourself the next time you are riding in a vehicle at night (with someone else safely driving).  Look out the side window and notice how the objects here on Earth zip by.  A parked car flashes past the side window of your vehicle.  And there's a tree a little further away from the road, so it moves less quickly -- but even it first comes into view and then is gone!  That's how everything in life is:  Things come, and things go.

But now notice, in contrast, the moon or stars up in the sky.  Notice how they seem to travel with the vehicle you are in as it travels.  Just like God.

My high-school English teacher taught me not to mix metaphors.  But religion loves using multiple metaphors, and so I'm now going to do so.  I'm going to mix metaphors because I think this metaphor of the heavens wrapping all around us resonates with another metaphor used a few times in the Bible (such as Psalm 61:4 & Matthew 23:37).  Namely, the metaphor of God being like a caring mother bird sheltering her tiny chicks under her protective wings. We are like God's chicks.

~~~

Have you ever tried to imagine God "everywhere"?  How?

Cycles and Rhythms

Day and night. That must be the most common cycle we humans experience.  That dramatic contrast between light and dark has also encouraged the evolution of different species of animals to occupy the shifting scenes of day and night.

The next most common natural cycle on Earth is that of the annual seasons as our planet tips back and forth on its axis in relation to the sun.  In some places, that alternation is primarily between dry and wet seasons.  Familiar to more people are the seasons of summer, fall, winter and spring.  It is the plants that primarily mirror that cycle with their dramatic annual changes.

The sun's cycles of days and the Earth's cycle of seasons come together to make our secular calendar of one solar year.  So where did the months come from?  They are derived from the less obvious cycle of the moon -- from new moon, through crescent shapes, and into a full moon.  That cycle takes 29 to 30 days.  People who live their lives at the ocean's edge have been more familiar with that cycle because they have had to adjust to the rhythm of the tides, which are caused primarily by the moon's gravitational pull.  Other cultures have found it valuable in other ways to keep an eye on the moon with its luminous glow, so different than the sun's heat.  One town in Japan has arranged the placement of residential plots so that each house can have an inspiring window-view of the rising, full moon.

So where did those seven-day weeks on our calendar come from?  That number seven is different:  There is no cycle of celestial bodies visible to the naked eye that completes its cycle at the number seven.  Nevertheless, there seems to be a human need to periodically take a break from the mere repetition of day and night, work and sleep.  Having nothing but that daily cycle can get monotonous.  People got a sample of that monotony when the coronavirus pandemic forced people who could work at home to do so.  Gone were the weekly cycles from Monday to Thank-Goodness-it's-Friday.  Also gone was weekend revitalization through sports, eating at a restaurant, and worship services.  Each day became tiringly the same.

Cycles can be comforting, but one rhythm alone in our lives can become oppressive.  In 1930, the dictator Joseph Stalin chopped off the two-day weekend from the Soviet calendar.  He was attempting to increase the nation's productivity by creating a five-day week filled only with work, and with no weekend-break.  How confining that would have been!

Down through history, various numbers have been tried by varying cultures for breaking up life into weeks.  The number of days has ranged from five to ten.  The seven-day week of today's secular calendar was established by Jewish people in ancient times as being six days of work followed by the Sabbath.  On that Sabbath, there was a mandated pause from work, commerce, and trying to get-ahead of other people financially.  As the 20th-century psychoanalyst Erich Fromm put it in the title of one of his books, the Sabbath was aimed at being a shift of mode from "To Have" to "To Be."  Similar to the way that the number seven transcends the natural cycles, the Sabbath was designed to transcend humans' easy habits.  It was an opportunity to bask in the grace of the world, and experience God's grace more deeply.

Not that the Sabbath meant getting away from experiencing Nature.  To the contrary, it can be the opportunity to experience the renewing power of Nature more fully.  Oppressors have known that power too, and have tried to keep the oppressed away from Nature.  In George Bernard Shaw's play Saint Joan, the imprisoned Joan of Arc points to her being separated from Nature as evidence of her captors' evil character.  She says to them:

"It is not the bread and water I fear.... But to shut me from the light of the sky and
 the sight of the fields and flowers... and keep from me everything that brings me back to the love of God....  without these things I cannot live; and by your wanting to take them away from me, or from any human creature, I know that your counsel is of the devil,
 and that mine is of God."

~ ~ ~

(When and how have you found renewal through Nature?)

(The quotation is from Shaw's Saint Joan, Scene IV.)
(The picture of the Earth is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

Bubbles within a Great Bubble

It reads like a modern parable, even though all the details come from newspaper archives.  In September of 1991, eight men and women, outfitted in blue jumpsuits, made an appearance before an excited press.  The small team was about to embark upon an experiment -- not going into space, but entering a human-made ecosystem called Biosphere 2.  Sunlight would enter the glass windows of the 3-acre complex of domes and pyramids.  But other than that solar intervention, Biosphere 2 was designed to grow its own food, create its own oxygen naturally, and filter its wastewater through the soil for purification.  A New York Times headline described it as a "Man-Made World."  An ABC news program held out the hope that the project might "save the world" -- because after all, Biosphere 2 would be sealing out the environmentally damaged, polluted world that the Earth had become.  The team in jumpsuits entered the Biosphere, and the airlock was sealed.

Any sci-fi writers worth their salt would know what should happen next if this were to be made into a Hollywood movie:  Competitiveness, jealousies, and sexual attractions would emerge among members of the team.  One member would turn into a Captain Bligh, fomenting a mutiny among the crew, who had been wanting the bountiful Biosphere to be an enchanted island of Tahiti.

As it turned out, the real Biosphere 2 soon had problems of a more ecological nature.  Even though its sealed world had included a miniature rainforest, coral reefs, and numerous species of animals, growing crops was difficult.  The team had to break into an emergency 3-month food supply they had kept a secret.  Despite that surreptitiousness, reporters discovered that deliveries were being made to the Biosphere twice a month -- seeds, vitamins, and mousetraps.  Mice were not the only pest needing controlling.  There were also cockroaches (no surprise), and nematode worms and mites attacking the crops.  Moreover, the honeybees and hummingbirds that were to have pollinated the crops had died.

Of more immediate danger, a surge of bacteria was reducing the oxygen level to such a point that it was as if the team were living at an altitude of 14,000 feet.  A truckload of liquid oxygen had to be called in and sprayed into the Biosphere.

As the ecologist Rebecca Stewart summarized it, “The Biosphere 2 experiment failed to generate sufficient breathable air, drinkable water and adequate food for just eight humans, despite an expenditure of $200 million.”  The bubble had burst.  Reflecting upon our scientific knowledge, the scientists Joel Cohen and David Tilman wrote:

“No one yet knows how to engineer systems that provide humans with
 the life-supporting services that natural ecosystems produce for free.”

A rare look at a rare planet

A century earlier, it was the idea of a much more immense "bubble" that had initially prompted the word "biosphere."  In the 1800's, scientists had coined that word to refer to the network of integrated living species, from microscopic to large, that surround the Earth.  In 1926, the Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky published a book about this living "skin" that surrounds our planet. The living beings in the biosphere not only draw upon the chemical elements of the Earth and air;  they also re-create the oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide.

We must marvel at what this Earth-Bubble, our home, can do.  But we might also draw upon the failed bubble-world of Biosphere 2 to ask if there isn't an intangible "bubble' we sometimes live in.  When we live in our high-tech human-made world without an awareness of how it is being sustained by the systems of Nature, are we not living in a mental bubble?  The danger of such a mental bubble is why our faith-traditions have cultivated prayers of gratefulness to use upon awakening, before eating, and when going to sleep, awaiting the sun's next rising.

~ ~ ~

(Do you have a way of remembering Nature in an appreciative way?  What is it?)

(Quotations and details are taken from "The Lost History of One of the World’s Strangest Science Experiments"
 by Carl Zimmer, The New York Times, March 29, 2019.)
(The picture of Biosphere 2 and of the Earth are used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic licenses.
 The picture of the nomad is in the public domain because of its age.)

Myself as the Medium

Using the word "primacy" with its meaning of what is most important, Steven Roger Fischer writes:

" Everyone -- young and old, past and present -- has had to admit its primacy. 
For an ancient Egyptian official it was a "boat on water". 
For an aspiring Nigerian pupil four thousand years later
it is "a touch of light in a deep dark well". 
For most of us it will be the voice of civilization itself ... Reading."

So begins Fischer's 350-page book A History of Reading.

There is something a bit amusing about reading a book about reading.  (In the same way that you are now reading an article about my reading a book about reading.)  It is a bit like one of the Möbius strips we made as kids, learning how to give the strip of paper a half-twist before gluing the two ends together.  When cut down its length, instead of falling apart into two bands, the Möbius strip becomes a single giant band. It thus reveals that it was not actually two-sided before it was cut.  If a fly had crawled along the strip before it was cut, it would have traversed both the seeming "outside" and the "inside" -- because it was all a single surface.

Despite the circular irony of my reading A History of Reading -- becoming a part of that still ongoing history as I read -- Fischer's book provides a wealth of detail, along with a picture opening each chapter.  The picture facing chapter 1 is of a sculpture captioned, "Amenhotep-Son-of-Hapu, an eminent Egyptian scribe, reading a partially opened papyrus scroll. The statue dates from the 14th century BC."  The picture facing the final chapter 7 is of an adolescent woman today reading a message on a cellphone.  It is titled, "the future of reading . . .", with the three dots conveying the open-endedness of the still unfinished story of reading.  Facing that picture, Fischer continues that theme by titling that last chapter, "Reading the Future."

Being myself of an older generation than that young woman who grew up with electronic reading, I still prefer "the printed word" -- ink on nice, rectangular sheets of paper bound together.  Nevertheless, the Corona-virus pandemic of 2020 increased my appreciation of the quick connectivity of portable phones with texting capability.  Psychologists counseled us to guard against depression under the stay-at-home orders by staying in touch with family and friends.  Electronic media came to the rescue, and it included onscreen text-messages and emails to be read -- something that ancient Egyptian scribe could have never imagined!

But what do I put in my electronic messages?  Our modern fascination with the ever-changing forms of media can get ahead of transforming the content of what I write.  And ahead of transforming the content of myself.

Do I immediately re-send what presents itself as a "news" article just because it reinforces my personal gripes?  Do I quickly re-send it to those people who I know share my gripes -- thus creating a never-ending Möbius loop?  Or do I try to remember those friends and acquaintances I have not contacted in awhile, and create new loops of caring and comfort?  What is my primacy?

And for self-care, when I am feeling isolated, I might even pull out one of those rectangular books of paper, and quietly turn its pages as I read.  The story of reading continues . . .

~ ~ ~

(What type of reading do you find to be restorative of your best self?)

(Quotations are from Steven Roger Fischer's
A History of Reading, © 2003, pp. 7, 10, 306, & 307.)
(The photo of the statue is by Olaf Tausch and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.)

Hope during Hard Times

Alexander Pope

When I was growing up, I often heard my mother citing snippets of poetry.  One such snippet was:

"Hope springs eternal in the human breast."

I knew that aphorism by heart long before I learned it was from the 18th-century poet Alexander Pope.

As I grew, finding my own identity, I heard many people expressing ideas that circled around that matter of being hopeful.  Radio and TV hosts frequently ask people, "Are you optimistic about the future?"  But optimism is different from hope (as the wide variety of answers given to that question demonstrates).  Whether or not a person is optimistic depends more upon their individual personality than upon what is actually probable.

Another word that circles around the matter of hope is the word "wish," but it too is different from hope.  The word "wish" often conveys a pie-in-the-sky type of wanting, as in when we speak of "wishful thinking."  Young children, before blowing out the candles on their birthday cakes, are told to "make a wish!"  The adults know, however, that at an early age, a child's wishing can be imagining things that are totally improbable.

The 19th-century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote of a "passion for what is possible."  But what is possible in the future?  The better I can predict and even affect what might possibly come about in the future, the less often my hopes will be dashed, and the more often I will have the encouraging satisfaction of my hopes being fulfilled.  To borrow a metaphor sometimes used in the Taoist faith-tradition:  When woodcarvers create sculptures, their efforts will go better if they work with the natural grain of the wood.  Is there similarly a "grain" in the wood of life -- in the nature of things -- that I would be better off working with rather than resisting?

Certainly, if I wish the sun will rise in the sky tomorrow, my wish will be granted -- even if I am no longer alive to see it myself!  Even before modern science, astronomers had mapped out the movements of the sun, moon, and planets more precisely than any clocks they possessed.  The sun's rising tomorrow is not only possible but virtually assured.  That is not the case, however, with what will happen tomorrow in human societies.  There are too many factors involved in any single society to have an absolute assurance about what will happen.  There are even too many factors involved in one individual human life.

These reflections of mine on hope and the future have concentrated mostly upon thinking about the nature of hope by itself.  But in the Bible -- which so frequently exhorts people not to give up hope -- hope is not usually treated as a quality in and of itself.  Hope in the Christian tradition has been considered to be part of a triad of human spiritual qualities:  The other two qualities of the triad are faith and love.  That triad is rooted most explicitly in a New Testament passage in I Corinthians in which Paul writes:

"And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three;

 and the greatest of these is love."

-- 1 Corinthians 13:13 (NRSV)

Hope can become something even further away from wishing when it is blended with love.  When blended with love, hope can become transformed into something much larger than concern about my individual well-being and whether I can control or predict the future to my own advantage.  Blended with love, hope can become an ennobling way of life.

One of the trickiest questions revolving around hope is:  Can our hoping itself actively affect the future? The theologian Jürgen Moltmann (who wrote a book titled Theology of Hope) tackled that question.  He answered "yes" to it in this way:

"Biblical texts understand hope as a positive, divine power of life.

 It is the expectation of a good future....

  Consequently, hope...does not detach the human spirit from the present through delusions,  but rather the opposite;

 it pulls the promised future into the present."

And as I try to become more loving (and not lose hope), maybe a walk in the early morning sun will help me.  Maybe it will help me feel the constancy of a hidden grain in the nature of things.  Maybe even a grain within our human lives.

~ ~ ~

(What do you hope for?)

(The Pope quotation is from An Essay on Man, l. 95.)
(The Kierkegaard quotation is from Fear and Trembling.)
(The Moltmann quotation is from New & Enlarged Handbook of Christian Theology,
 ed. by Donald W. Musser & Joseph L. Price, © 2003, pp. 249-250.)

Bound Together at the Root

We call them "pages" -- those rectangular sheets that form a book.  At one time, those pages were not infrequently called the "leaves" of a book.  Today, we employ that term less often (although we do still use "loose-leaf" notebooks, even in this digital age).  And occasionally we might say that a person is "leafing through" a magazine as they browse through its pages.

John Donne
(1572-1631)

The employment of the same English word for both the pages of a book and those flat attachments to a tree we call "leaves" proved to be fertile ground for the pen of the early 17th-century poet and essayist John Donne.  His prose could at moments be as rich as poetry.  And he drew upon the "leaf" metaphor in "Meditation XVII" of his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions.  That is the mediation in which he makes his more famous statement that "No man is an island, entire of itself."  But his expansion of the "leaf" metaphor is more intricate.

In his imagery, he turns a book into a living organism that goes through a season of rebirth -- the way a tree is reborn into a new spring of life, even though its leaves had fallen to the ground the autumn before.  In Donne's intricate picture, those "scattered leaves" are parts of our human lives, which can seem piecemeal.  But God is able to give new meaning to them, even though we are all mortals.  As Donne writes:

"When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book,
 but translated into a better language."

One reason God is able to do that work of restoration is because "all mankind is of one author and is one volume."

Donne would doubtlessly have been aware of the long tradition in Christianity of describing the natural world as the "Book of Nature." Similar to the way that Christianity possessed a book -- the Bible -- as one source of revelation, the natural world was also viewed as being able to reveal things about God.  But in his "Meditation XVII," John Donne focuses just on humans and the challenge of our mortality.

"not torn out"

Death was a challenge he knew full well.  His wife Anne, at the age of 33, died after giving birth to a stillborn child.  Also, John Donne had to frequently deal with death as an Anglican pastor: ringing the bell to signal the loss, and then addressing the congregation through a sermon.  In his "leaf" metaphor, he takes advantage of the stitched edge of a book being called its "binding" to emphasize that we are all inescapably bound together.  In a more fascinating way, he describes death as not being removed from the "book" but as being "translated" as God reveals new meaning in each person's existence.  As Donne puts it:

"Some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice;
 but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up
 all our scattered leaves again for that library
 where every book shall lie open to one another."

In the same way that the continuing work of the Creator recycles the minerals of a tree's fallen leaves back into the tree's new spring-life, the values of our human lives are not lost in Donne's vision.  Instead, at death, they are given new, deeper meanings as part of a larger whole.  Indeed, many of us have experienced how the lives of the people we have known but who have died can speak to us in a new way, even though they are physically gone from us.

~ ~ ~ 

(Is there a person no longer living whose life gives you additional understanding for your own life?  Who?  And how?)

(All the quotations are from John Donne's "Meditation XVII" from his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, 1624.)
(The portrait of Donne is in the public domain by virtue of its age beyond the artist's life.)

What is Natural?

What wakes you up in the morning?  An alarm clock?  A clock-radio set to your favorite station?  The sunlight coming through your window?  Your dog?  Your child who wakes up before you do?

The answer depends upon your particular life circumstances.  At one stage in my life, when I worked at a job that began before daybreak, I would often rouse up before the clock-radio, out of my anxiety that I would oversleep.  Now that I am retired from that job, I can enjoy letting my body's own internal "clock" wake me up.

Thinking about what wakes us up in the morning is an easy place to begin reflecting upon a complex question:  Namely, what is natural?  That sunrise certainly is natural, in contrast to that electronic clock that mimics the sun's 12-hour-average day.  Our body's internal "clocks" are also natural -- although they can be thrown off their rhythms by our having stayed up late the night before, using artificially created electricity to run our man-made computers.

There is more at stake in that word "natural" than the matter of how we wake up.  That is because in trying to understand ourselves, we try to discover some aspects of our human nature that have some connection to the world of Nature.  Even as we declare some human actions to be right or wrong, we also describe some of those actions as being "natural" or "unnatural."  We ask, "What is human nature?"

Over the past few decades, a number of scientists have presented depictions of human nature that have drawn upon the biologist Richard Dawkins' idea of "the selfish gene."  As Dawkins now famously wrote:

"We are... robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules
 known as genes."

However, there is something askew about Dawkins' characterization.  He attributes more personality to genes ("selfish molecules") than he does to human beings.  Whereas genes are able to guide outcomes, we are just robots.

One of the conclusions Dawkins puts forward from his depiction of genes is that humans are fundamentally selfish in nature.  As he wrote, "We are born selfish."  It is here that the philosopher Mary Midgley stepped in to critique what she saw as being the crude simplifications resulting from selfish-gene rhetoric.  Midgley admits the valuable point that genes that contribute to the reproductive and survival potential of a species are more likely preserved.  But she points out that part of that process is genes' making us naturally mammals and social creatures.  And so, one of our gene-related potentials is our ability to take care of other individuals.  As Midgley puts it:

"If we ask whether we are indeed... creatures that are naturally just hell-bent egoists, we can see that this cannot be true because ancestral creatures like that would never have gone through all the trouble and sacrifice that are needed to rear human children.
Such people would leave no descendants."

Midgley underscores our natural potential for offering care by spotlighting a parent's love for their child (even if that child does sometimes wake up the parent who wanted to sleep longer).  Even though as an infant our earliest yearning was to be loved, love was built into our mammalian, social nature.

Midgley's worry is that "the crude metaphor" of "selfish gene" has been employed to promote "an ideology of everyday cynicism."  She writes:

"To repeat -- officially, the doctrine of selfish genes does not mean
 that individuals are motivated only by self-interest."

Our human lives and societies are complex integrations of the natural and the man-made.  Valentine's Day is an artificial, societal construction.  And yet, like those natural cycles of the sun, Valentine's Day's annual rhythm can wake us up again to the importance of being loving.  Loving toward partners.  Toward friends.  And even by being courteous to the stranger we meet.

~ ~ ~

(Where do you see love at work?)

(The Dawkins quotations are from The Selfish Gene, © 1976, 1989, pp. 127 & 3.)

(The Midgley quotations are from her article "The Origins of Don Giovanni" in the magazine Philosophy Now, Winter 1999/2000, p. 32.)

Of Campfires and Stars

Even before there was writing, humans gathered around fires.
And even before there was writing, humans told stories.  As those ancient humans sat around fires at night, telling stories, they would have noticed some of the sparks from the fire ascending against the darkness of the night sky.  As their eyes followed those sparks upward, some of those sparks would have seemed to almost merge with their cousins -- the stars.  And as those humans looked upward and told stories, some of those random stars became transformed into constellations. They saw animals and legendary heroes there:  A bear.  A scorpion.  Orion.  And thus, the cosmic dome became part of the narratives about human lives.

Today, the idealized campfire is a symbol of belonging and peace.  It is a place where we hope people will come together to find belonging and a warmth of spirit.

The literary analyst Harold Bloom provided a revealing analysis of the connection between fire and belonging in one narrative in the Bible's book of Luke (22:54-62).  After Jesus is arrested, his disciple Peter flees into the darkness of the night.  Peter is alone and cut off in the coldness of the night.  But then he notices a fire burning in the distance.  On many occasions in the past, Peter's companions and Jesus spent time around such fires at night, sharing stories.  And so, the lonely Peter is drawn towards this new fire, around which people are huddled.  But when Peter draws closer to this fire, his face becomes illuminated, and so he is recognized as being a disciple of Jesus, the identity which he had been trying to conceal.  Peter and the strangers around the fire have not felt their common humanity.  And Peter flees back into the darkness of the cold night.

There is a larger way the sense of belonging can become lost.  Jeffrey Sobosan recounts an incident involving a mentor of his, "an old priest who had .... contributed brilliantly to his own specialty in theology, and now at the close of life had given himself over to what he once described as his first love, the study of the stars."  Sobosan continues:

"I met him in a garden one evening, where he sat by his beloved telescope...
with a look of ineffable sadness in his eyes.... He spoke of the beauty of the universe...
but in striving after this beauty,... his mind had taken a savage turn ...
toward the damning conclusion: the universe is void of meaning."

The vast cosmos had, for him, become alien.

It is not hard to understand why Sobosan's mentor-priest felt himself betrayed by the cosmos, which he had hoped would provide him a comforting beauty with its views though the telescope.  Even though telescopes have revealed much more of this vast universe, the view through a telescope is a narrowing of our immediate field of vision. It is somewhat like trying to view an ocean through a ship's small porthole.  As the philosopher Max Oelschlaeger explains, using Galileo as an example:

"By using the telescope, Galileo’s eyes gathered additional light,
and the telescopic image itself was magnified....
What he lost was the sweeping field of view of the naked eye astronomy....
And perhaps, in his intense concentration, he lost also the sounds and smells of the night
and the awareness of himself as a conscious man beholding
a grand and mysterious stellar spectacle."

A sweeping field of vision can encompass both those stars and ourselves in one grand narrative.  And that narrative can give us a sense of universal belonging -- provided we remember our common humanity as part of that domed narrative.  The story-telling circle must become wider than the ring around our particular campfire.

~ ~ ~

(Do you have any recollection of being around a campfire in a way that increased your sense of belonging?  When was it?  What was it like?)

(The Sobosan quotation is from his Romancing the Universe: Theology, Science, and Cosmology. © 1999. p. 1.)

(The Oelschlaeger quotation if from his The Idea of Wilderness. © 1991. p. 78.)