Behavior Modification

Behavior Modification CXXXVIII

I've had Mary taking photos of Spenser, the proud father, surrounded by a few of his puppies.  Being the last person to get up in the morning, I make the bed, put up the decorative pillows, then arrange Spenser and the puppies (3 labs, 1 dachshund, and 1 Dalmatian, for the moment).  There are still more puppies in the closet and on the nightstand.  Puppy mania.  Of course, having to put them out each morning and remove them each evening may prove just too exhausting to continue.  Besides, Spenser bores easily, and Simon and Schuster have been giving me odd looks lately.

Two days since I posted the Spenser notice, and this morning I am almost out of energy.  The coffee is made; the dishes are done; God's in his Heaven, and all's right with the world!  Browning knew that wasn't true then; we know it is not true now.   

Besides the fundamental question that I have set my grandson (13) thinking about (why is there something rather than nothing), the other poser, as Huck would call it, is the problem of our identity.   We are tossed into the world so quickly, in a sense, that we never really stop to reflect on the oddity of our situation.  

In the first place we all know that something cannot come from nothing, and space is something too, a fairly terrifying something.  Imagine being with Beagle 2 on the surface of Mars (Ha!).  What stands between you and Earth?  Fairly empty space!  I get claustrophobic and have panic attacks just thinking about it.  So.  Once there was nothing?  Absolutely nothing.  Then matter and space just came into existence?  Try to imagine that.  We are living on a logical impossibility.

Of course, as the angel told Abraham and Gabriel told Mary, and Jesus told the disciples, with God all things are possible.   God in that case cannot be a being, like the Greek and Roman and Norse gods; he would have to be the source of being, quite a different pot of beans.  David Bentley Hart is quite good on the nature of God,  The Doors of the Sea, for example, or The Experience of God,  which I may have mentioned before.  Or, just never mind, eh?

Closer to home though, there is the problem of identity; there are just so many of us ("I did not know Death had undone so many!" said Dante in Hell, looking out over what I have forgotten).  Think how many are alive now, think how many have died even before we were born, and yet here we are, blithely teetering toward our own demise, pedestrians, sidestepping oncoming autos, staying out of Malasian airplanes, avoiding Islamic terrorists, rabid skunks, rabbits and bats, falling objects, and oncoming autos driving on the wrong side of the road.  

However we became who we are,  we are connected all the way back to the beginning.  There are no gaps in the chain of contingency, or being.  My mother's mother and father died within days of her birth, and yet, no surprise, she had them, and they had them, and so on all the way back.  

Of all the "insides" there are in the world or ever were or will be in this world, this is the only "inside" I will ever get to know intimately, from birth to death, with only one grandparent, my father's mother who died when I was six years old, Grandma Startzman.  Our minds depend on our brains, our flesh and blood.  So.  How did I land in this physical reality, born to these parents, at this time and day, 8 June 1940?  How? How did this happen that I am me and not some other?  I have no idea!  Having such an identity is uncanny, might lead one to think there is Someone behind it!

And, if this mind and soul depend on this flesh and blood, how can we "go to Heaven" when we die?  As I understand the Gospels and Acts, Jesus disappeared and then reappeared in a somewhat different body, same wounds, recognizable but also different, if I have gotten that right.  "Touch my hand and side, Thomas!" "Peter, a piece of fish, please."  Flesh dies, we are gone.  Buried, we decay, mostly.  Cremated, we disappear, mostly.  Resurrection?  For that to be, God must remember us, intimately know us, in order to resurrect us.  

If you think about that idea in the context of the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist, you might understand my hope; you know, these three, faith, love, hope. 

Well, it is now 5 a.m.  I am off to bed regardless.  You might also now understand why I sleep with my arm around Simon, sometimes, or Spenser.  Just snuggling against the dark, and against my ignorance.  I suspect I know only one thing worth knowing: "Jesus Christ is Lord."  Philippians 2: 5-11, especially.