Being and Becoming

Personally, I've never been hard-nosed about New Year's resolutions.  Although the first of the year does allow me an opportunity to reflect a bit more about my weaknesses and my abilities, I have always had a hard time carrying with me a fixed list of goals throughout an entire year. Even if I could write down a "to-become" list that would remain workable through the course of 12 months, I would probably forget where I put that piece of paper before the year was over.

Part of the difficulty is that it is impossible to predict what circumstances will arise in the months ahead.  True, I can resolve to head into each day with a certain re-fortified spirit toward life, but I cannot always know what challenges I am going to have to respond to.  The late 20th-century poet Wendell Berry wrote about the contingencies of even a single day's outing that...

"The chances change and make a new way."

It can be scary thinking about this unpredictability of life. Fortunately, we have been at this process of becoming since the day we were born.  We have a lot of practice with it because becoming is built into our biological nature.  As the neurobiologist Steven Rose explains, "Every living creature is in constant flux, always at the same time both being and becoming.... [A] newborn infant has a suckling reflex; within a matter of months the developing infant begins to chew her food.... The paradox of development is that a baby has to be at the same time a competent suckler and to transform herself into a competent chewer.  To be, therefore, and to become...."

Faith-traditions place markers along the road of life to support us in our development:  Such as baptism, first Bible, and Bar Mitzvah.  Our faith-traditions also encourage us onward by reminding us that the ultimate Source of Life is also the very Ground of our Being that remains beneath us, supporting us even as we sometimes stumble.

Interestingly, the idea that even God cannot predict exactly what will be and what will be demanded in our engagement with the Divine is expressed in a pivotal story in the Christian Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible). In Exodus 3:12-14, Moses, after being given a challenging long-term assignment by God, is promised by God, "I will be with you."  Nevertheless, Moses tries to gain more control over the situation by requesting to be told God's name.  Moses wants more control over the future than even God can promise.  And so, God provides to Moses the open-ended enigmatic reply, "I AM WHO I AM."  Translators sometimes add a footnote to this verse in order to express that God will be with Moses in both "being" and "becoming" -- just like that baby who both suckles and chews.  Such footnotes explain that what God has said could also be translated as "I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE," or even "I WILL BECOME WHAT I WILL BECOME."

So too can our understanding of the Divine grow with us as we grow -- in both our being and our becoming.

~~~

Has your life ever taken an unpredicted path in a way that turned out to be fulfilling?

(The Berry line is from his poem "Traveling at Home," © 1988.)

(The Rose quote is from his chapter in Alas, Poor Darwin, ed. by Hilary Rose and Steven Rose, © 2000. p. 310.)

Not “Dead to the World”

Sleep.  It's a funny phenomenon -- funny in the sense of peculiar, as well as being an opportunity for levity on sitcoms.  Yet sleep is also an earnest matter.  It even links our lives on the evolutionary tree with other animals.

We humans get introduced quite early in life to sleep's being more than meets the eye.  More than one parent has had to deal with a young child's having nightmares. It is probably clearer to the parent how the disruptive dreams connect with some anxiety in the child's waking life.  In other instances, the child's nightmare can be marked by that strange other-worldly feeling we can be struck by upon remembering a dream on awaking.  One mother I know was told at breakfast by her pre-schooler that he had been chased by a giraffe. Fortunately, the mother, rather than reprimanding the child for lying, explained to her child that he had simply had a scary dream.

The phenomenon of sleep can also be scary to a child viewing it from the outside:  I remember as a child entering my mother's bedroom when she was napping so soundly that my mind almost became overtaken by the fear that she was dead.  The similarity between deep sleep and death adds another layer to the peculiarity of dreams, as well as providing material for literary pens.  In a time before modern medicine's ability to measure brain waves, Edgar Allan Poe took advantage of the frightening thought that a person might be declared dead when the person was just asleep.  Poe's story "The Premature Burial" is a gripping tale.

As we journey through life, learning about the world we live in, we also discover that many other animals sleep, and mammals clearly dream.  Those fishes in my childhood aquarium, sometimes hovering motionless, were probably sleeping (I was told), even though they had no eyelids to close to let me know they were sleeping.  It was easier to recognize that our pet dog was dreaming when, lying on its side, its legs began running, no doubt chasing something rather than being chased.

Contemporary scientists have been able to verify that dreaming can be a means for processing the preceding day's activities, even enhancing learning.  For example, a sleeping rat's brain undergoes the same activity it did when the rat was exploring a new maze the day before.

Despite sleep being essential to many animals' lives (and even to plants, in a way), the wisdom of our faith-traditions has adopted sleep as a symbol of something we should not be doing -- at least when we're awake!  The Buddha's title in Sanskrit indicates that he is for Buddhists the model of "the Awakened One."  As Christmas approaches, many Christians sing hymns containing reminders to stay alert, to "keep watch" like shepherds protecting their sheep.

However, remembering that marvelous ability of babies to sometimes sleep soundly amid hubbub, we can also wish all babies in the world the gift of being able to "sleep in heavenly peace."

~~~

Do you have a wish for the world about sleep or about watchfulness?

(The quoted hymn-line is from John Freeman Young's

 1863 translation of "Stille Nacht" ["Silent Night"], 1818 lyrics by Joseph Mohr.)

(The photograph of the artwork of the deer was made by Joachim Lutz, 

and is used under under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.)

Putting Flesh on the Bones

Is there any child who does not at some point become interested in dinosaurs?  Any of a number of things about them can intrigue children.  Such as the dinosaurs' often large size (compared to being so small oneself).  And the fact that dinosaurs inhabit a world that cannot be seen, but which children can enter using their imagination.

The first dinosaur statues
(at Crystal Palace Park)

Even the adults who in the first half of the 19th century discovered fossils from large dinosaurs had to use their imagination to try to surmise what the living creatures would have looked like.  Monsters was the first guess. And so one of Britain's leading fossil anatomists, Richard Owen, named the category Dinosauria from the Greek words deinos and sauros, i.e. "monstrous lizard."  A 19th-century London sculptor depicted dinosaurs as so obese and close to the ground that the poor animals could have barely moved.

For people who were children a century later, it was the 1940 Walt Disney movie Fantasia that helped imaginations put life into dinosaur bones, even if that movie was cartoon animation. Disney's cartoon artists, in creating the dinosaur-story segment, drew the animals' complex movements more like living reptiles.  (Rather than turning dinosaurs into clown-like stick figures, as have some marketers of dinosaur-shaped breakfast cereal and canned noodles for children.)

Despite that improvement the Disney studio made, it was still to some degree a projection of our own mental monsters upon those ancient skeletons.  That is because even in the 1800's, paleontologists had possessed fossil evidence indicating that some dinosaurs had resemblances to birds rather than being more lumbering reptiles.  During the 20th century, more and more scientific evidence -- such as birdlike hipbones and fossils with signs of feathers -- has led to a strong consensus of the close lineages of birds and dinosaurs.  The earliest bird-branch of evolution is more like an overlap with some dinosaurs, thus making birds today somewhat like dinosaur descendants.  One biologist explains:  "Biologically [dinosaurs] were perhaps more akin to today's birds and mammals, thus possibly explaining their great success."

Even when envisioned as being in a way reptilian, there is something to be said for dinosaurs. Nevertheless, the word "dinosaur" continues to be used sometimes to mean something extinct, a relic.  The science-writer Stephen Jay Gould complains about that usage:

"I cringe every time I read that this failed business, or that defeated team, has become a dinosaur in succumbing to progress.  Dinosaur should be a term of praise, not opprobrium.  Dinosaurs reigned for more than 100 million years and died through no fault of their own; Homo sapiens is nowhere near a million years old, and has limited prospects,

 entirely self-imposed, for extended geological longevity."

That child playing with plastic toys could have told adults that there was something cool about dinosaurs.

~~~

Did you become interested in dinosaurs as a child?  What do you think about them now?

(The biologist's quote is by Gregory M. Erickson in

 Evolution:  The First Four Billion Years, ed. Michael Ruse, et al., © 2009.  p. 518.)

(The Gould quote is from his collection Dinosaurs in a Haystack, © 1995.  p. 50.)

(Both the statues photo by Jes from Melbourne and the sign photo by Jeremy Thompson

 are used under Creative Commons Attribution Generic licenses.)

Scattered Gifts

Have you ever had an old paperback begin to come apart at its spine, with some of the pages falling out?  What a mess!  It is especially a problem if the book is one you like to return to frequently.  (I resorted to putting one of my books in a plastic bag to prevent the loss of any of its loose pages.)

The Italian poet Dante (1265-1321) turns that loose-page nightmare on its head in the climax of his trilogy The Divine Comedy.  He draws upon the classic "book of Nature" metaphor in the Western tradition, which was a way of expressing how the natural world can be an opening into the Divine, a revelation about God.  Dante imaginatively scatters the "pages" of Nature's book.  He does so as an analogy to the way that there are wonders of Nature scattered all about us wherever we go.  He then brings the pages together, providing us this vision:

"In its depth I saw ingathered, bound by love in one single volume,

 that which is dispersed in leaves throughout the universe: 

...as though fused together in such a way

 that what I tell is but a simple light."

That this is no loose-page nightmare but instead a wonderful vision is underscored by this verse being in the part of his trilogy that is entitled Paradiso -- Paradise.

   Dante holding his own book,
The Divine Comedy,
with vision over his shoulder
   

Even though references to the "Book of Nature" are common in Christianity before the Scientific Revolution, the references to that metaphor are usually somewhat prosaic.  In contrast, in this passage, Dante opens up the metaphor with a grand poetic flourish, like the swirl of the brush on an artist's canvas.  The picture he paints of pages "dispersed... throughout the universe" is so evocative that I can easily see myself, as if in a dream, walking about in a world in which there are large, ornate pages scattered about on the ground.  As I slowly walk, I thoughtfully pick up one page after another, eager to read what is written there.  In real life, if the pages of that book I keep in a plastic bag were blown about by the wind, I would be alarmed.  But turning Dante's vision into a beautiful dream allows me to see the imagery of scattered pages in a different light.  And see the world in a different way.

Dante's imagery also resonates with the way children sometimes spontaneously collect objects from Nature.  One of the "leaves" of Dante's "volume" might be actual leaves from a tree, scattered upon the ground.  Or the child might delight in a found feather,, especially if it is colorful.  Even a rock, plain by contrast, might have something interesting in its shape.  So many objects to discover in this world of countless objects!  It is as if the child who gathers those things together, bringing them home, is somehow desiring to integrate diverse experiences into the whole of their growing life.

Dante points to another way in which the countless things we encounter in the natural world are united:  They are "bound by love in one single volume."  With that single poetic stroke, he draws upon what has been a central concept in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.  Namely, that the key to understanding Ultimate Reality is to see the world we live in as if it were full of delightful gifts from One who loves us.

~~~

Are there some threads by which you make sense of your experiences of the world?

(The quote is from Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, 

 [La Divina Commedia, 1321], Paradise, XXXIII, 85-90.)

(The portrait of Dante by Bronzino is  in the public domain because its copyright has expired.)

Friendly Competition by Fahrenheit

The United States is positioned on latitudes that stretch from semitropical climates in the south to winter temperatures in the north that approach those of Russia.  That wide range within a single nation with one main language allows for some friendly competition during winters and summers. When winter extremes hit more northern states, those who live in balmier climates can tweet, email, or phone their northern friends, bragging about relatively comfortable environments.  Of course, the danger is that come next summer, those in the north will get their revenge by communicating long-distance about their refreshingly cool nighttime temperatures while those in the south are baking.  Another way to try to gain advantage in this friendly game is for me to turn my own weather extreme to my advantage by bragging about the hardship I am enduring!

 "Various Meteorological Phenomena" (1856)

Comparing weather notes in some fashion is nothing new.  The 18th-century British lexicographer Samuel Johnson observed:  "When two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather."  Our modern means of communication, however, allow us to share simultaneous but dissimilar experiences of weather, all within our single nation.

Behind the extremes of winter and summer lies a larger truth about life on planet Earth.  Namely, that species on this planet have evolved so as to be able to usually live within such extremes.  Even more broadly, some scientists have put forward the "anthropic principle" as a way of pointing to a kind of "fine-tuning" of certain characteristics of the universe that match the conditions necessary for life.  Such as the forces that make possible certain chemical elements in the universe.  The extremes of weather and the extremes of what various species can tolerate are, however, one place we can observe directly a "fit" between life and its environments.

We humans, with our complex cultures, tool-making, and accumulation of knowledge have stretched our natural limits.  We have found ways to dress ourselves for extreme colds, and invented ways to artificially warm or cool our burrows.

We might ask though: Can we also extend ourselves spiritually to encompass the extremes that press in upon our lives?  The friendly game of contrasting temperatures sometimes needs to be set aside.  When the extremes of weather bring injury, or even death, we need to shift to another mode, remembering the religious leader Paul's reminder to "Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep."

Thus, the extremes we endure can call us to rise above a concern centered just upon ourselves, recognizing that the element of unfortunate chance can strike any life.  Rising above a narrow self-concern can be something like rising above this planet's surface to see all of it as a whole. The Saudi Arabian astronaut Prince Sulatan Bin Salmon Al-Saud described his experience with fellow astronauts this way:

"The first day or so, we all pointed to our countries.

The third or fourth day,
 we were pointing to our continents.

By the fifth day, we were aware of only one Earth."

~~~

How do you deal with the shifting seasons psychologically or spiritually?

(The quote by Samuel Johnson [1709-1784] is taken from

 Bloomsbury Treasury of Quotations, ed. John Dainith, © 1994, p. 763.)

(The quote by Paul is from Christianity's New Testament, Romans 12:15 [NRSV].)

(The Prince Al-Saud quote is from Weather: How It Works and Why It Matters by Arthur Upgren, p. 42.)