Abiding in Space-time

        I’ve been thinking about stability and belonging this week, because it’s something that has come up in discussion and in my reading at the moment. An image that’s a little haunting, for me, comes from a nurse friend of mine. She described residents of an old people’s home she worked in who wouldn’t be able to remember their families due to dementia, but would treasure a picture of Jesus and would still makes their daily observances. Another image that comes from a book suggested to me by my new vicar where the author relates the following about his time spent in Johannesburg: 

“In the townships, I found myself giving sick communion regularly to a woman who was 100 years old, and lay all day on a bed in the corner of a tiny sitting room with her family running in and out around her. One day, she described her memories of being a girl of about 10 and taking food to British soldiers who were hanging out in caves. I suddenly realised she was remembering the Boer War. Her Eucharistic communion in the Church had been the accompaniment to a life of – to me – unimaginable length in which the world had undergone two World Wars, the splitting of the atom, the moon landings, not to mention the beginning and now the end of apartheid. A sort of ‘Eucharistic heartbeat’ had been the accompaniment to this long life. It was the fruit of a stability that the Church had maintained for her, as it does for many others.” 

-          Pp 37 – 38, Abiding by Ben Quash    

To me, these images speak of the power of belonging and the sense of stability that comes of placing oneself squarely in thrall to something larger, bigger than oneself. They got me thinking if I had something equivalent – something to measure out the moments of my life and to bracket my whole contribution to existence. If I’m something of scientist-in-training, I don’t see much of myself in the poor caricature of the scientist who is in LOVE with SCIENCE and is kind of a withered, autistic version of Spock. I think the scientific method is the best tool we have for evaluating answers to certain kinds of questions, but a canon of facts accepted at a given time is not something to have allegiance to or to align oneself with on principle.

   

         There are, however,  a couple of ideas that are a-religious - if not non-religious -  that do, for me, provide a sense of place in a larger phenomenon and go some way toward undoing that painful existential knot in my upper back that goes unnoticed until something has abated it. Once upon a time, I made my way once a week to talk to someone supposedly in the know about Buddhism. We were discussing antidotes to ‘conditional thinking’, the sense of concrete, black-and-white reality we give to distinction and divisions that we make in relation to our experience of the world. I was asked to contemplate a leaf outside the window, not as the simple ‘leaf’ construct I instinctively perceived, but to try and see, simultaneously, all the previous temporary associations that its materials had taken part in previously. All the streams and clouds and bladders, and winds and lungs and words that the water and the air sustaining the foliage had been part of. From my lowly plane of existence, I can only experience a cross-section of the wider phenomena. 

         I imagine a higher perspective, where the fleeting construct before my eyes is but a cross-section of a larger pattern, and I find this reassuring for some reason. I’m aware this a way of imagining His point of view used by some writers (I want to say C.S. Lewis in Miracles but I don’t have a chapter and page to point to). I don’t believe that the comfort is necessarily tied to the question of whether there is or is not a being to which this perspective belongs, or to it being a true or actual description of the way the universe is. 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nathanheeney/8161412920/

      The image, where my time and my doings in the world form but a facet in a great 4D crystal made up of space and time, that has - and will - always exist, is enough. For me. How about you? 

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