Every year in late spring, the local highway department cuts along the edges of our road to kill any trees or bushes that might be trespassing on blacktop space. The former owners of our house planted lilacs along the edge of the property, and lilacs are creepers - every year, they send out shoot towards the road, and every year, they are cut back.
The former owners also planted juniper bushes along the edges of a retaining wall separating the house proper from the lower garage. Some sort of rust got to them, killing many, and a very cold winter last year killed off the rest of them, so I got out the shovel and dug up the lilac shoots and planted them in the place of the dead bushes. They took admirably, and this year are ready to grow like crazy, as long as we don't get a prolonged drought. Overhead grows a broad white birch, and early this spring, I cut back the lower limbs to give the coming lilacs more light and space to grow. Everything is set. I know it. The tree and other shrubbery don't.
This reminded me of how nature may have intelligent design - that is, a prefigured growth pattern, not absolute but probable, built into the entire system. To put it simply, God is the gardener, the plans that we cannot see are made, and given our's and nature's probable actions, the future is already proceeding from the present as part of the great gardener's design.
Pretty good, I thought, and then remembered Sir James Frazier and his famous, but seldom- read 19th century classic, The Golden Bough. The greatest motif, or plot, in this armchair account of primitive civilizations throughout the world, is captured in the phrase often used by pre-industrial people regarding their leaders: "The King is dead, long live the King!" Meaning that with the death of the king, another king would arise. Frazier attributes this attitude to the change of hunting-gathering societies to agriculture societies, whose yearly rounds govern the lives of agricultural people. Yes, the crops die, but the following year, they grow again. To this, in a subtle way, Frazier gives us the underlying myth-metaphor of Western Civilization's most enduring religion, Christianity. Christ was born and will rise again. It is embedded in agriculture, and the culmination of the lifestyle that it imparts. Christ is the outgrowth of our former way of life, not a Truth of all reality but a truth of an agricultural people. Thus, for example, Isaac's eldest son, Esau the hunter, was tricked by his brother Jacob, the agriculturalist, to give up his birthright for a meal. The hunter lives for the day, while the agriculturalist prepares for renewal. The agriculturalist won the day, and won the myth of Western civilization.
On one level, this is a reductionist explanation that leaves out the claim of immortal truth. On another, though, it does nothing of the sort. Agriculture, apart from it being brought about by conquest, quickly became a part of nearly all the people of the world's lives after the last glacier receded about 10 thousand years ago. It secured food for larger populations, and so was simply bound to succeed. As far as we know, agriculture did not exist before the last ice age, even though fully modern humans have been around for at least 40,000 years. Could it be that agriculture fulfilled the template of intelligent design? Could it be that the world as it is, not in story but in actuality, is better understood as another form of myth for a greater, more comprehensive reality? Are we then really more like the plants, cultivated and planned by a greater power to fulfill a destiny, or at least a probability, one that we are, like the plants, simply unable to understand?
More and more this is my view, as the world as I thought it to be is becoming, in my mind, more a cosmic play on a mythical stage. There is meaning in nature, and meaning in everything we do. But what, beyond the logic of a Frazier, is the meaning behind the meaning? That is, why are the laws of nature, and the trajectory of humans, the way they are, for they both show a pattern. And if we can now discern this pattern, can we not begin to understand it in a greater context?
Not in it its fullness, for that would be as impossible as the plants understanding our own design for them, but at least in the perception that a garden - our world - has been arranged by some intelligent source for a particular reason. I cannot prove it, but it does go further than our current forms of empirical thought allow. And, if we think about it at all, what our current thought allows simply does not and cannot give us the answers to the biggest questions of all.
Myth - circles and circles of meaning that expand our understanding. Now, the myth tells us that the King shall rise again. What greater realizations has our gardener planned for us? What is our next and more encompassing myth? FK
The former owners also planted juniper bushes along the edges of a retaining wall separating the house proper from the lower garage. Some sort of rust got to them, killing many, and a very cold winter last year killed off the rest of them, so I got out the shovel and dug up the lilac shoots and planted them in the place of the dead bushes. They took admirably, and this year are ready to grow like crazy, as long as we don't get a prolonged drought. Overhead grows a broad white birch, and early this spring, I cut back the lower limbs to give the coming lilacs more light and space to grow. Everything is set. I know it. The tree and other shrubbery don't.
This reminded me of how nature may have intelligent design - that is, a prefigured growth pattern, not absolute but probable, built into the entire system. To put it simply, God is the gardener, the plans that we cannot see are made, and given our's and nature's probable actions, the future is already proceeding from the present as part of the great gardener's design.
Pretty good, I thought, and then remembered Sir James Frazier and his famous, but seldom- read 19th century classic, The Golden Bough. The greatest motif, or plot, in this armchair account of primitive civilizations throughout the world, is captured in the phrase often used by pre-industrial people regarding their leaders: "The King is dead, long live the King!" Meaning that with the death of the king, another king would arise. Frazier attributes this attitude to the change of hunting-gathering societies to agriculture societies, whose yearly rounds govern the lives of agricultural people. Yes, the crops die, but the following year, they grow again. To this, in a subtle way, Frazier gives us the underlying myth-metaphor of Western Civilization's most enduring religion, Christianity. Christ was born and will rise again. It is embedded in agriculture, and the culmination of the lifestyle that it imparts. Christ is the outgrowth of our former way of life, not a Truth of all reality but a truth of an agricultural people. Thus, for example, Isaac's eldest son, Esau the hunter, was tricked by his brother Jacob, the agriculturalist, to give up his birthright for a meal. The hunter lives for the day, while the agriculturalist prepares for renewal. The agriculturalist won the day, and won the myth of Western civilization.
On one level, this is a reductionist explanation that leaves out the claim of immortal truth. On another, though, it does nothing of the sort. Agriculture, apart from it being brought about by conquest, quickly became a part of nearly all the people of the world's lives after the last glacier receded about 10 thousand years ago. It secured food for larger populations, and so was simply bound to succeed. As far as we know, agriculture did not exist before the last ice age, even though fully modern humans have been around for at least 40,000 years. Could it be that agriculture fulfilled the template of intelligent design? Could it be that the world as it is, not in story but in actuality, is better understood as another form of myth for a greater, more comprehensive reality? Are we then really more like the plants, cultivated and planned by a greater power to fulfill a destiny, or at least a probability, one that we are, like the plants, simply unable to understand?
More and more this is my view, as the world as I thought it to be is becoming, in my mind, more a cosmic play on a mythical stage. There is meaning in nature, and meaning in everything we do. But what, beyond the logic of a Frazier, is the meaning behind the meaning? That is, why are the laws of nature, and the trajectory of humans, the way they are, for they both show a pattern. And if we can now discern this pattern, can we not begin to understand it in a greater context?
Not in it its fullness, for that would be as impossible as the plants understanding our own design for them, but at least in the perception that a garden - our world - has been arranged by some intelligent source for a particular reason. I cannot prove it, but it does go further than our current forms of empirical thought allow. And, if we think about it at all, what our current thought allows simply does not and cannot give us the answers to the biggest questions of all.
Myth - circles and circles of meaning that expand our understanding. Now, the myth tells us that the King shall rise again. What greater realizations has our gardener planned for us? What is our next and more encompassing myth? FK
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