Getting “the Combo”

You can hardly order an entree at a fast-food restaurant without being asked if you wouldn't prefer "the combo."  Especially in Western faith-traditions, which possess central books of scripture, there once was another type of "combo" that was both appealing and enduring: Namely, the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature. They were viewed as being complementary sources for inspiration and guidance.  As just one example, Christopher Bamford writes regarding Celtic Christianity:  "Though ascetic... the Irish monks were hostile to neither learning nor nature and practiced greatly the contemplation of both of these."

Eglwys Pabo
Sant Llanbabo church

In one Celtic poem, we can readily hear the poet's love of natural sounds, with that loving perception creating its own kind of scripture:

"Over my head the woodland wall

Rises; the ousel sings to me;

Above my booklet lined for words

The woodland birds shake out their glee....

God keep me still!  for here I write

A scripture bright in great woods now."

Sometimes, Nature could be so appealing a "book" that it competed for attention with a book of psalms or other devotional book.  One poem by a monk describes how the sound of a bird calls the monk out of his room (customarily called his "cell"), thus making it impossible to continue reading his printed book indoors:

"Learned in music sings the lark,

I leave my cell to listen;

His open beak spills music, hark!

Where Heaven's bright cloudlets glisten.

And so I'll sing my morning psalm

That God bright Heaven may give me."

I myself think that all classrooms should have windows to make the experience of learning more refreshing.  Sometimes, however, even the view through the window can be a distraction.  I remember one congenial professor of religion being asked by a pupil at the beginning of class if we might move outside under the trees in the warm spring weather.  Although sympathetic, the professor replied (probably wisely) that if we did so, he would not be able to keep our attentions on the day's lesson.  We had to settle for the window.

I know full well how Nature, when it is congenial, can overpower the attraction of a book -- even for a book-lover such as myself. Sometimes in college, when the weather was lightly warm, I would find an isolated spot on a grassy slope behind one of the buildings. Lying on the grass, reading some assigned book, before long I would find myself falling asleep, overtaken by the peacefulness of my surroundings.  Perhaps the "combo" of Nature and a book is just too much to devour both simultaneously.  Perhaps we do better taking each one in turn, alternating between them, being nourished as our hearts and minds metabolize the ingredients of both.

~~~

Have you ever taken a book on a trip to the beach, a park, the woods, or mountains?

(All quotations are from Celtic Christianity:  Ecology and Holiness

by William Parker Marsh and Christopher Bamford, © 1982. [spelling Americanized]  p. 21, p. 22.)

(Photo of church by Alan Fryer used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.)

Healing and Being a Whole

I hate being sick.  One of the best feelings in life is that of getting beyond an illness -- feeling again that solidity of life within oneself, even when not yet fully back to original strength.

Most people hate being sick.  Offhand, the only instances I think of in which illness is preferred are when a person is unconsciously trying to heal a larger psychological pain. Such as a child wanting to stay sick at home out of a fear of school.  Or an invalid wanting the psychological support of a family member.  Most people prefer physical wellness.  Therein lies a wonderful mystery of how organisms have evolved so as to make whole what is broken apart.

One of the most fascinating lessons biology students learn is how the bodies of organisms fight off injury microscopically -- similar to how a colony of individuals might fight off an invading army. One example is the way blood platelets barricade a break in the blood vessel's wall with their bodies and fibers, while white blood cells race to the site of invasive infection, attacking the alien bacteria. Microscopes reveal such cellular processes to be fascinatingly similar to how social insects respond to an invader's damaging the structure of their home. The two processes are so eerily alike that it can lead one to wonder where the line between an organism and a colony should be drawn.  The science-writer Lewis Thomas puts it eloquently:

" [B]ees and termites and social wasps... seem to live two kinds of lives:  they are individuals, going about the day's business without much evidence of thought for tomorrow,
and they are at the same time component parts, cellular elements, in the huge, writhing,
ruminating organism of the Hill, the nest, the hive."

The commonality between healing and rebuilding a whole is also revealed in the origins of certain English words.  The word "whole" is derived from the Middle English hole, meaning "unharmed."  The words "whole" and "heal" both trace back to the "kailo" constellation of Germanic/Old English roots.  These word-origins show how even before microscopes, people could feel within themselves how getting well again was like being made whole.

Despite healing, we humans are mortals, something we also share with other living beings on this planet.  Even as our faith-traditions elevate us toward higher values, they remind us of our commonality with other mortal forms of life.  For example, the Buddhist Jataka stories tell animal-related tales with reminders about compassion for animals, remembering their continuity with the Buddha and humans.  In the Christian Bible (most of which is shared with Judaism), the word "mortals" is used 88 times to emphasize how both humans and animals are mortal beings (a notable contrast to the merely 4 times humans are described as being made "in the image of God").

We are mortals, and so sometimes no cure for an illness can be found. Even without a cure, however, there can still be a kind of healing in the sense of feeling not cut off -- feeling a part of a larger, beloved, sacred whole. Therein lies another word in that root constellation "kalio":  The Old English halig means "holy."

~~~

Have you found a way to be more whole by being a part of a larger whole?  How?

(The Thomas quote is from his essay "On Societies as Organisms"

 in The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas, © 1974.  p. 12.)

Tiny Tanks

Tiny army tanks -- that's what they often look like.  Beetles, that is.  The way these particular insects, often with bulky bodies, plow ahead over rough terrain can easily remind a child of army tanks they've seen on TV.  (One subgroup is even called "soldier beetles.")

One 20th-century evolutionary biologist, J. B. S. Haldane, suggested that a different type of mindset might lie behind this Coleoptera category of insects, and his comment has entered the canon of science-humor stories.  After a distinguished career in biology, a reporter asked Haldane what conclusion about the mind of the Maker he had drawn from his vast, scientific knowledge of Nature.  Haldane replied, "an inordinate fondness for beetles."

Indeed, there are over 400,000 species of these little creatures (almost half of all insect species), identifiable by their pair of hard forewings serving as armor.  Some beetles click; some emit blinking light; some are like whirligigs.  Although the word "beetle" derives from the Old English "bitela," meaning "biting," very few would bite you.

 I know God did not invent beetles just to entertain us.  (They and many other insects were, after all, around for at least 50 million years before hominids came along.) Nevertheless, more than one science-humor story revolves around them.

A frequently repeated anecdote is about the young Charles Darwin when he was alone, collecting beetles (one of his favorite hobbies).  Spotting an unusual beetle, he picked it up, but then spotted one of a different species, which he picked up with his other hand.  But then he spotted a third beetle, and so popped the second beetle into his mouth to quickly free a hand.  As Darwin later recalled, "Alas, [the beetle in my mouth] ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out."  The author of a juvenile-level biography concludes this story with the straight-faced comment, "Bugs don't always do what you want them to, and not all beetles want to be caught."

It would be fun to think that God had invented Darwin's squirting beetle so that writers of biographies for youth would have a funny story to insert into their manuscript.  But I expect God has larger concerns in mind than the entertainment of readers.  (Even if the 19th-century novelist William Makepeace Thackeray was able to wittily turn "beetle" into a verb by saying in Vanity Fair that "Chambermaids... beetled from bedroom to bedroom loaded with... champagne.")

No, my hunch is that the plenitude of beetle species has more to do with the strength of their body type and its adaptability to many different environments.  Hopefully, our human sense of humor will remain just as strong and adaptable.

~~~

Even if you don't know what type they were, have you ever noticed any insects around the entrance to where you live?

(The Haldane quote was in an article by G. Evelyn Hutchinson

 in The American Naturalist in 1959 [93, 870]: 145-159.)

(The Darwin remembrance, originally in Life and Letters, Vol. 1, p. 43, and comment about it

 are from Charles and Emma by Deborah Heiligman, © 2009.  p. 24.)

Unable to Detach from the Past

1872 painting by John Gast

Examine the population and growth patterns of cities in the U.S., and you will find that many of them have grown more heavily toward their west sides than to the east, especially in the post-World War II boom. Although a fair number of cities are now seeing new growth in older, inner areas (often because of the appeal of shorter commute times), suburban sprawl is often greater on U.S. cities' western sides.  This peculiarity developed out of a much larger growth pattern in U.S. history:  The movement of European settlers on this continent has been primarily to the west.  A century-and-a-half ago, Horace Greeley quoted John Soule, commanding, "Go West, young man," and people in the U.S., men and women, young and old, have done just that.  Today's cities echo the nation's past.

This phenomenon is but one case of how we cannot escape our past, even as much as we might want to.  Frequently, our ties to the past remain unconscious.  For example, because of the westward growth of many cities, more people commute by driving into the sun in the morning and into the sun again in the evening -- an inconvenience we would have avoided if it had been the only factor affecting our decisions of where to live and work.

This inconvenience of squinting into the often blinding sun as we commute reveals another way in which we cannot escape the past:  We cannot break away entirely from patterns of Nature that were laid down long before Homo sapiens were around.  The sun is not about to change its course in response to where we build our houses and places of work.  The 20th-century author Maya Angelou cleverly wrote, "Nature has no mercy at all.  Nature says, ' I'm going to snow.  If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that’s tough.  I am going to snow anyway.' "

Given that we are unable to detach ourselves entirely from the past life on this planet,  how might we relate to it?  The answer all of the world's faith-traditions have given is that we should cultivate an appreciation of and a desire to emulate the highest values of the past.  Despite that commonality among traditions, people of one faith-tradition have not always comprehended the methods of another.  For example, Lin Yutang, an early 20th-century Chinese émigré to the U.S., explains how Christian missionaries mistook Chinese shrines honoring ancestors as being idolatry.  Thus the translation of the name for practices at the shrines as "ancestor worship" in English.  Lin Yutang clarifies the practices in this way:  "Only by the wildest stretch of imagination could they be called idolatry..."  Instead, the practice "for the Chinese, is the embodiment of reverence for the past and continuity with the past....  It was the basis of all that was good and honorable and of the desire to go forward."

Maya Angelou also had some succinct words about those who went before:  "They existed. We can be.  Be and be better.  For they existed."  That statement could describe non-humans in our evolutionary past just as much as it describes our human ancestors.

~~~

What have you received from the past that you are particularly grateful for?

(The Greeley/Soule quote [1851] is taken from Familiar Quotations by John Bartlett, © 1968.  p. 678b.)

(The Angelou quote is from "Maya Angelou: An Interview," Oct. 1974, in Conversations with Maya Angelou, ©1989,)

(The Lin Yutang quote is from From Pagan to Christian by Lin Yutang, © 1959.  p. 37.)

(The painting by John Gast [1872] is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.)

Laughing Beneath the Meteors

What was it about the written reminiscence that made it so appealing?  Why could I so easily identify with the firsthand experience that was being described, and with the inner feeling the writer remembered?  It was a recollection by a poet in his twenties, thinking back to an occasion of nighttime camaraderie with peers:

"Some day I must tell how we sang, shouted, whistled, and danced through the dark lanes....  and how we laughed till the meteors showered round us,

 and we fell calm under the winter stars.

 And some of us saw the pathway of the spirits for the first time.

 And seeing it so far above us, and feeling the good road so safe beneath us,

 we praised God with louder whistling...."

As I read this recollection, I almost wished I were there myself.  The cool night air.  The feeling of relaxation among friends.  The happiness and contentment.  The star-filled sky above.  The wonder of a sudden meteor shower.

Even as relaxing and restorative as those things were, there was also a deeper layer that gently emerged.  It seemed to have to do with that experience young people can have when they feel their youthful idealism beginning to be channeled into the paths of their individual identities:

"[S]ome of us saw the pathway of the spirits for the first time."

I felt as if I knew those subjective emotions because I had experienced them myself at that stage of adolescence:  The paradox of joyful freedom despite not knowing what the future will hold. The only thing I had not experienced as such was the meteor shower.  But I still felt as if I could understand the meaning of what the author described.  Today, in our U.S. popular culture, such things as meteors get mentioned mostly in the form of the fear that a massive asteroid might hit the Earth, bringing devastation.  Modern science also tells us that our sun will eventually burn out, bringing death to the Earth.  Terrifying scenarios caused by uncontrollable events in outer space abound (guaranteeing work for screenwriters of disaster movies).  In contrast, the young poet remembers laughing with his companions as the meteors rained down.

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

The reminiscence has a power of its own.  But it is given added poignancy by knowing that it was written by the British poet Wilfred Owen, who died at the age of 25, fighting in World War I.  Owen's war poems have a sensitivity of feeling not unlike that which is revealed in this reminiscence, shared by letter with a friend the year before Owen was killed in battle.

To me, the reminiscence, even as brief as it is, conveys an experience of belonging.  The combination of the companionship of friends and the surrounding realm of Nature convey a sense of ultimate belonging.  Wilfred Owen is now gone.  But nighttime is still cooler than the day. Overhead, there are still stars.  And there is still, I am sure, at least one more shooting star ready to be seen as it pierces the air we breath.

~~~

Have you ever experienced a moment of deep contentment while you were in Nature?

(Owen's reminiscence is quoted in "Memoir (1931)" by Edmund Blunden,

in the Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, © 1963.  p. 172.)

(The photograph of Owen is in the Public Domain because its copyright has expired.)