Change never hurt anyone, unless it was for the worse. So much for trite old sayings.
Watching the world, sort of. Otherwise, new observations:
A postcard advertising the latest performance of the Berea Arena Theater arrived today, bearing a 34 cent stamp with a blue hummingbird hovering over the edge of the stamp. The hummingbird seemed to be the color of an Indigo Bunting, a lovely bird I have not seen here for several years. We encountered a flock of Indigo Buntings at the front end of Fairway once. What a spectacular color!
Observation: that's the thing, the very thing that puzzles me about the consequences of evolution, especially regarding sparrows, for example: similar yet distinct. House sparrows, song sparrows, white throated sparrows, the list goes on. They don't cross breed, each species is distinct. I probably mentioned this before, but the differences and the distinctness are part of the mystery of things, the evidence that our abundance of knowledge doesn't really mean that much.
That reminds me of Eliot's The Hollow Men: "We are the hollow men/we are the stuffed men/leaning together/headpiece filled with straw, alas./Our dried voices/when we whisper together/are like wind over dried grass/or rats' feet over broken glass in our dried cellar." Well, I couldn't remember the exact lines anymore. Alas! The point is that the Hollow Men are contemporary intellectuals who believe life is empty and meaningless. They know a great deal about many things, but the things they know have no vital and spiritual meaning. Thus their heads are filled with factual information about the universe, but the information has no spiritual and redeeming meaning, it's all straw. They are like Oz's scarecrow: hollow and stuffed, an oxymoron. (I think, like Milton's wonderful "darkness visible.").
Their reason tells them there is no meaning; yet, their desire is still fixed toward a possible hope of fulfillment, which is why they seem to be in a church, I think, why Dante's images of Heaven are still in their heads, and why the poem ends with them trying to pray the Lord's Prayer. "For thine is...Life is very long [when there seems to be no end to the condition of spiritual emptiness]....For thine is the..." [a little progress] Then the realization: "This is the way the world ends....Not with a bang but a whimper." We all know the last quote, even Snoopy knows it. The best critical question is, what does the "this" refer to? What is its referent? Glad you asked. Surely it refers to what has just come before, the broken Lord's Prayer. They have gotten out another word of it, "the," but they can't finish it. For the Hollow Men to finish the Lord's Prayer would require the real presence of the Third Person of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit, as they well know. And that hasn't happened for them yet, but, my God, read Eliot's Ash Wednesday! A real conversion requires the real presence of the Holy Spirit.
That also reminds me: I was reading our diocesen newspaper this morning and found this quotable paragraph from a writer quoting C.S. Lewis: "God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things...to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not....He likes matter. He invented it." (Mike Allen, Crossroads, February 22, 2015, pg. 10).
Consider then the two figures: the newly created Adam in the garden, flesh and blood and mind and spirit; still God-centered; then the contempory hollow man, seemingly flesh and blood and definitely mind without spirit: the scarecrow, a fairly pitiful figure, a condition no one would willingly choose for him or her self, and yet...