What a morning. Waking up at 4 AM to worry about my son, who is not exactly fitting well at college. Then to find that a cord of wood carefully stacked fell down in the wind the night before; and then to have the polyurethane-filled can slip from my hands just as the finishing touches were being put on some outdoor furniture, creating a sizable mess to add to the day's joy.
What can I say? Life is unpredictable, although I suppose a little more care could have prevented the mishaps. Still - why would a boy born to obsessive college types be more suited to plumbing than to philosophy? Wouldn't it have been better if he had avoided our expectations with another birth site? On the other hand, anthropology came to me as a calling. When no funding seemed possible, it suddenly arrived, and on went the show - to end in absolutely nothing. Why that, too?
Very small things to cry about, I know, but the question remains: if this is a purposeful universe, why the apparent missteps? Why, we could also add, must we have an end to all those lives in terrible wars, why childhood hereditary diseases, why the death of the regular guy going our for milk who gets shot in a robbery at the local Mom and Pop? All hopes and dreams gone, some from man-made disasters, true - but others from sheer whims of fate. Yes, we learn from our trials more than from our successes, but what a learning curve! Logically, we might conclude as many do that there IS no order to our lives other than the physical laws that happened to fall into place. There certainly is plenty of evidence for that.
But, all fancy new physics aside, it does seem more reasonable that a universe that is indeed ordered also carries the seeds for the order and meaning of our own lives as well. More, many have experienced this in full-blow revelation, and given everything else about the universe, these were probably not hallucinations or delusions.
There are many ways to look at this problem, but two aspects of the Ground of Being come first this morning to mind. One - this Ground is more commonly referred to as God, but this word has a lot of faulty baggage. It assumes that God is an object, much as we see in ourselves, and acts and interacts as such. This is clearly not the case, as even the more primitive notions of God in the Old Testament confirm: "God's thoughts are not the thoughts of men." That is, our logic and the Ground's are on different planes, to put it mildly. A logic that stretches out through all space and time and everything else is certainly coming at our lives from a different angle than our own immediate concerns. We simply don't know. We are told that it comes from the good, the ultimate good, but we don't know what that is, either. We can get a sense of it and sometimes an outright revelation, but we can never understand. "Not the thoughts of men."
The Ground is ultimate creativity as well. As one author put it, each moment is a new creative act, each moment a shimmering burst of cosmic genius. We thus cannot know this future; we can plan and we can assume, but we cannot know, despite the physical laws that make up our universe. As each moment is created anew, so this universe is not the clockwork envisioned by earlier science. Instead, it is an evolving thing, whose destiny cannot ever be known.
And yet: in hindsight, we often see the order. Some may say that this is only our own order imposed on a disordered world, and in part this must be true, but not in the whole. In the whole, we can see traces of the great Genius, from nature to our own lives, as Paul saw truth through the dark glass. It is almost, but never quite touchable, this design. It appears, for those who care to look, just enough to keep us going, to remind us that this, we, this moment and every moment is meant to be. It is meant to be lived. The spilt can, the fallen wood, the different child, the shadow career, all somehow together in the thoughts of a "mind" that thinks not as men and that creates in pure, limitless glory. And it is we who are left to mop up and rebuild while we see the sun rise and seasons change, each time different, each time with us as the center, but each with a periphery that goes where we cannot quite follow. FK
What can I say? Life is unpredictable, although I suppose a little more care could have prevented the mishaps. Still - why would a boy born to obsessive college types be more suited to plumbing than to philosophy? Wouldn't it have been better if he had avoided our expectations with another birth site? On the other hand, anthropology came to me as a calling. When no funding seemed possible, it suddenly arrived, and on went the show - to end in absolutely nothing. Why that, too?
Very small things to cry about, I know, but the question remains: if this is a purposeful universe, why the apparent missteps? Why, we could also add, must we have an end to all those lives in terrible wars, why childhood hereditary diseases, why the death of the regular guy going our for milk who gets shot in a robbery at the local Mom and Pop? All hopes and dreams gone, some from man-made disasters, true - but others from sheer whims of fate. Yes, we learn from our trials more than from our successes, but what a learning curve! Logically, we might conclude as many do that there IS no order to our lives other than the physical laws that happened to fall into place. There certainly is plenty of evidence for that.
But, all fancy new physics aside, it does seem more reasonable that a universe that is indeed ordered also carries the seeds for the order and meaning of our own lives as well. More, many have experienced this in full-blow revelation, and given everything else about the universe, these were probably not hallucinations or delusions.
There are many ways to look at this problem, but two aspects of the Ground of Being come first this morning to mind. One - this Ground is more commonly referred to as God, but this word has a lot of faulty baggage. It assumes that God is an object, much as we see in ourselves, and acts and interacts as such. This is clearly not the case, as even the more primitive notions of God in the Old Testament confirm: "God's thoughts are not the thoughts of men." That is, our logic and the Ground's are on different planes, to put it mildly. A logic that stretches out through all space and time and everything else is certainly coming at our lives from a different angle than our own immediate concerns. We simply don't know. We are told that it comes from the good, the ultimate good, but we don't know what that is, either. We can get a sense of it and sometimes an outright revelation, but we can never understand. "Not the thoughts of men."
The Ground is ultimate creativity as well. As one author put it, each moment is a new creative act, each moment a shimmering burst of cosmic genius. We thus cannot know this future; we can plan and we can assume, but we cannot know, despite the physical laws that make up our universe. As each moment is created anew, so this universe is not the clockwork envisioned by earlier science. Instead, it is an evolving thing, whose destiny cannot ever be known.
And yet: in hindsight, we often see the order. Some may say that this is only our own order imposed on a disordered world, and in part this must be true, but not in the whole. In the whole, we can see traces of the great Genius, from nature to our own lives, as Paul saw truth through the dark glass. It is almost, but never quite touchable, this design. It appears, for those who care to look, just enough to keep us going, to remind us that this, we, this moment and every moment is meant to be. It is meant to be lived. The spilt can, the fallen wood, the different child, the shadow career, all somehow together in the thoughts of a "mind" that thinks not as men and that creates in pure, limitless glory. And it is we who are left to mop up and rebuild while we see the sun rise and seasons change, each time different, each time with us as the center, but each with a periphery that goes where we cannot quite follow. FK
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