CHAOS!!
Everywhere you look, it's just chaos. You hear this from people every day. You hear yourself screaming, Chaos!
Just an ordinary day it's chaos. Run to the post office, you're cut off on East Allendale Avenue by a stupid moron talking on her cell. The post office has lost grandma's quilt you thought you had sent to California. The drug store cashier is talking to her daughter about her crappy husband, and you've got to get the prescription and meet the guy coming to spray for ticks. Those X%#& deer. That little girl in total meltdown because she can't have a pack of gum. Smack her on the butt! More traffic. Where are these people going?!
Then there is the weather, airport delays, stockmarket, snowflakes, disease, relationships, heart rhythm, brain activity, earth's surface. Chaos everywhere you look.
Have you watched Spielberg's movie starring Tom Cruise, he War of the Worlds? Terrible movie, but that Aliens' view high over the land of cars swirling below on highways, and people in cities looking like ants crazily running around was almost worth watching that movie. What in the world is the meaning of it all? God! Chaos!
If you are of the Shit-Happens mindset, scenes like that don't register. Or if you are of the I-Do-This, and Then-I-Do-That category, more power to you. Enjoy life as it comes. I'm serious; enjoy the moment! Ski, sked, bike, swim, drive fast, eat. Enjoy. It's a Facebook playground. We all have to play and play hard at some point in life. But once you enter the murky waters of meaning you're going deep, in over your head, to creep like a crab forward and back forward and back, claws held high, ready to fight. You will take that icy plunge sometime in your life if you are human. And God! I say that having absolutely hated it when someone said similar to me when I was young. But it's true: the 'Why' will bite down, hard, and chew.
Job's outrage is ours, yours and mine:
"Why is life given to a man whose way is hidden, whom God has hedged in? ... My groans pour out like water. What I feared has come upon me, what I dreaded has happened to me. I have no peace, no quietness, but only turmoil." (Job 3:23-26)
WHO AM I? WHAT AM I DOING HERE? WHERE AM I GOING?
Life is a mystery. We know that. Tsunami meaning upon meaning upon meaning. Whatcha gonna do when they come for you? There are all sorts of things out there with which one can attempt to gain understanding. Rosary, Tarot, Ouija. Freemasonry maybe. Wicca. Whatever -ism. Yoga. The healthy choice! There are thousands and thousands of things to choose. You won't lack for choice.
I, for instance, have been very fond of philosophy for interesting answers. Augustine and Boethius assured us that God perceives all at once in a timeless act of knowing, there has always existed a Unity; we see only in part. The Greeks said magnificent things about First Cause, the Monad. Socrates, Plato in Republic, Pythagoras.
The scientists are working on our problem of the utter randomness of life which we take, wrongly it happens, as having no order and thus no meaning. Science is a 'safe' faith. Don't you love scientists? They operate on the assumption that they can prove order and a unified theory out of the chaos; they have faith that they can figure it all out. Hawking predicts a marriage of Quantum theory and Chaos theory. Werner Heisenberg finds with his Uncertainty Theory that, Einstein's pronouncement notwithstanding, God may indeed play dice. Polkinghorne posits that Chaos Theory demonstrates a subtle and supple physical reality. Chaos. Benoit Mandlebrot used a formula:
(zn+1 = zn2 + c), and mapped it:
It's all in that dusty Bible on your shelf. Best not to be too smug about it. We are yet in Lenten lands. In the Bible we find more layers of meaning that seem not to make sense. God who is feared is God who wept and raised Lazarus stinking from the dead. We are Lazarus, walking out of our tombs, body wraps flapping in the breeze. Aren't we? Still crying, What is going on here?!
2 Samuel 22:17
But me he caught—reached all the way from sky to sea; he pulled me out of that ocean of hate, that enemy chaos, the void in which I was drowning. They hit me when I was down, but God stuck by me. He stood me up on a wide-open field; I I stood there saved—surprised to be loved!
A new heaven and a new earth. Revelation 21:1. That sounds like science, come to think of it.
The Bible is best story ever told of humankind's search for meaning. That story is the only story that holds a unified theory, the best answer for how the world works. The first sentences in the Gospel of John are a simply stunning summary of the answer to what we thought was chaotic, meaningless mess.
I'm warning you the Bible is a landmine, a dangerous book, filled with dangerous ideas. It is best studied in community mediated by the ageless experience of Churchmen and Churchwomen or run the risk of going completely off the rails. This isn't a Catholic/Protestant body of savants I'm talking about. I mean the whole experience of Logos from Genesis to Revelation - study mediated through church men and woman all who have a shared experience, who have walked the path to order, to unity, to God. You'll go down a lot of dead ends if not for that.
Back to Job: Job lost everything he thought was good in what looks like God's chaotic and meaningless plan. Worse, is that God has used Satan to carry out His plan. Satan, the very name of chaos. Job has learned firsthand that all is vanity. Job cries, I hate my life!
Strange thing: Like Lazarus, Job is raised. Job in all of his vulnerable humanness is met by God. God says that Job's friends were wrong about their neat sin=punishment rules that have been used for centuries as explanation for why stuff happens. Job finally understands that chaos is part of God's creation. That God will be what God will be. And in his acceptance, all is restored and then some.
While we, the meaning challenged, are really shocked, if not furious that the story has such a slappy-happy ending. This is not life. Is it?! You can't be serious!
So, we continue to try to make sense of life's mysteries. If we keep at it, sharing the journey with fellow sojourners, meanings bubble up and sometimes show us what's going on underneath. And there is much going on underneath: turns out to our surprise that creativity arises out of the chaos. As Hopkins the poet said, life is Pied Beauty. Beauty. We live in the ambiguity, all the while reaching for the Light. It was planned from the Beginning.
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More later on what the mystics term The Unitive Life.
And St. Paul assumed some people/beings were nothing but vessels meant for destruction from the beginning, demonstrating, to me anyway, that even the best churchmen don't always have good answers.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite philosophy is still MASH philosophy--"Ladies and gentlemen, take my advice: Pull down your pants, and slide on the ice."
Nice post Ann. I take it, it's been a bad day though. :-)
No. Not a bad day at all. Just a Lenten Study.
ReplyDeleteThings to consider when it does look very bad. Or when one thinks the world revolves around oneself. When one thinks everything has to be figured out. Those Dark nights of the soul. Actually I wrote most of this last year.
Easter is just around the corner!
Where is the passage about vessels meant for destruction?
ReplyDeleteOh, I've had issues with Paul, dit Saint Paul.
Studying, I see Paul of Tarsus a legalist, behviorist, culturalist, theologian, and keeper of the faith. Paul's messages to different churches are contradictory sometimes, written for a time and a place. There are writings that are for all times and all places to the present- most especially his faith in Christ the Savior of the world. There is in Paul's letters things of Cosmic importance. My study group, the tradition I am fortuanate to have had, is the VIA MEDIA.
From Albany Via Media:"A Via Media approach to the interpretation of Holy Scripture will hold that faithful Christians everywhere will interpret identical passages differently, with respect to place, history, culture, experience, education and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit."
PS: Don't just slide on the ice; dance on it!
Romans 9:22
ReplyDeleteI wish I had more time to read your blog tonight Ann, but we had severe storms and tornado wanrings, so I had to shut my computer down for a quite a while, and now it's bedtime.
I'm working a post about Cabell's book.
Yes, Romans 9:22 and on to 9:30. He is the potter; we the clay.
ReplyDelete