Skip to main content

Why?

Why is a bit of me corroding away?

"When a man's folly brings his way to ruin, his heart rages against the Lord." - Proverbs 19:3. This verse was part of my daily readings this morning. Now I'm a theologically sophisticated man but still, with my guard down, this verse did surface a naive question that's always there, bubbling away under the just under the surface, out of sight. Why me, God? Is all this my fault? Has my folly brought my way to ruin?

Well, naive or not, the short answer is, I guess, "yes" although the long answer is a bit more complicated.

Prostate cancer is a very common affliction, but the rates at which men acquire it and the rates they die from it differ significantly from country to country. The percentage of men diagnosed with the disease in Britain has trebled over the past 30 years, and this is typical of developed, Western countries. The increased rates are partly because men are living longer and thus giving dormant cancers more time to show up; but partly also they are because there is a link between the lifestyles we lead and the diseases we get afflicted with.

Certainly animal fats and possibly also pollutants, smoking, chemical additives and some industrial processes are linked to the cancer. Stress, diet and sedentary living don't help either. The lifestyle I have co-operated in acquiring for myself is the one that is strangling the life out of the planet and it is the same one that is, partially at least, causing me to rust away from the inside. My folly has brought me to ruin. It's no use asking the really silly theological question:
"why me?" The answer is
"well, why not?" Praise God he's preserved me from the effects of my folly for all these years 'til now.
"Is God punishing me?" No. I'm managing the whole business of actions and consequences quite nicely for myself without having to drag God into it.

There is a theological problem here though, that I am still hoping to work on despite the distractions that have appeared over the past few days. As well as the lifestyle thing, there is the simple point that I am a man living in a body designed to last about 70 years. Bodies, like all things in the Universe follow a common pattern. They come into existence, they increase in strength and in their presence in the world, they reach full expression and stay there a while, then they decline in energy and presence and finally they go out of existence altogether. If you trace it on a graph it's a pattern like a bell curve. Everything does this - atoms, gophers, continents, solar systems, microbes, governments, civilisations, relationships, ideas - and I am doing it.

I have never seen it explained quite so well as by Francisco Varela in "The Embodied Mind". But here's the problem. His explanation of the pattern and the dynamics of existence behind it, which all makes so much sense to me is Buddhist. While I can't deny the truth of Varela's explanation, neither can I deny the reality of all I have experienced over 35 years of the living presence of God in our Lord Jesus Christ. Can both of these perspectives, Christian and Buddhist, be true? Where is the link between them?

I suspect I have an answer, but only at an instinctive level and not in a fully formed way which I could explain satisfactorily to anyone else. The link is Meister Eckhart, the Catholic Christian mystic whose writings resonate so closely with the Dharma and yet are completely Christian. Eckhart, the exponent of the mysticism of Being, has greatly influenced the later German philosophers of Being, Hegel, Heidegger and Husserl. His influence is mediated through them to Levinas and the contemporary Phenomenological Existentialists. There's a bridge hidden in here, between Christian experience and the insight of those who wrestle with the great questions of Being. I hope to find it, despite my body needing a bit of rust work before it can pass its W.O.F. Or maybe not despite. Maybe because.
Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
It occurs to me that at a time like this most people i know would hide within a structure that had supported,comforted and nurtured them for most of their lives. You are looking for truth and asking questions. - I would believe someone like you! - you would be one of the bravest truest people i know . gk
10 May 2008 at 22:22
Anonymous said…
Kelvin, it is typical of you that, struggling as we are to find something comforting - even logical - to say, you say it all for us. You, in fact, comfort us by incorporating this experience honestly and without self-pity, into your on-going search for truth, and you greatly enrich others by sharing it. dc
11 May 2008 at 21:08
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon...
Post a Comment
Read more

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and...
3 comments
Read more

Why I Hold the Views I Do

St. Hilda's Collegiate School, taken with my phone after a recent meeting. This picture has nothing whatsoever to do with what follows, but I like the interplay of shapes and particularly the shadow on the wall. My mother is a Methodist, liberal in her theological and social opinions. My father was a socialist, just slightly to the left, in his politics, of Karl Marx. My siblings -there are 5 of us- are all bright, eloquent and omnivorous in their consumption of books and other intellectual fodder.  One of my most cherished childhood memories is of mealtimes in our little state house. The food was ingested with copious amounts of spirited, opinionated, clever and sometimes informed debate on whatever subject happened to catch the attention of one of the family that day. Or whatever one of us thought might get a rise out of someone else. So, sex, politics and religion it was then - oh and motorbikes, economics, international relations, demographics, cricket, company ownersh...
47 comments
Read more

Living the lies

In 1969, when I was 16 I left school and got a job as a labourer. My wages weren't high but to me they were a fortune and within a few months  I bought my first car, a 1938 Morris 8 sports, this one here. It had a minuscule 4 cylinder engine and a wood framed body which meant it was slow and it flexed so much when going around corners that the doors would sometimes fly open. Nevertheless I thought it was pretty damned cool, especially with the modifications I made to the muffler for performance and advertising purposes, ie, removing it.  Back then, the most popular TV program was The Avengers, in which the suave and resourceful hero, John Steed drove a 1928 3 Litre Bentley. Which looked kinda like my car, right? Yeah, right. Anyway, John Steed usually entered his car by leaping nimbly over the door, so I emulated him whenever possible. Now all this is preamble. I want to tell you about something that happened to me one day in Papanui Road, Christchurch. My car ...
1 comment
Read more

2 More Years

An autumn leaf, the evidence of the death whereby the grapevine lives and bears fruit There are 31,102 verses in the Bible, or at least in the Protestant version of it which the conservative section of our church recognises. Of these, there are 6 verses which explicitly condemn homosexual practice. The best scholars in the Christian world have pointed out the ambiguity of even these scraps of scripture, but this does not prevent their becoming the basis of an antipathy to contemporary same gender sexuality which I was repeatedly told, during General Synod, was "First Order". I'm not sure what "First Order" means exactly, but I was told that this is a "Salvation Matter". So, presumably, holding a proper view on homosexuality is right up there in importance with belief in the doctrines I would consider foundational for the Christian faith: namely the Holy Trinity, Incarnation and Resurrection. In any event, antipathy to homosexuality has already ...
25 comments
Read more