In a film series I’ve been viewing, an evocative narrator
quotes Aristotle as a father and child climb aboard a carousel and ride round
and round to nowhere but the mutual delight of each. The child becomes
overjoyed at the colors and sounds and lights and rhythm, and the father
becomes overwhelmed at the rapturous expression of his child.
Aristotle once said, in effect, “ The best activities are
useless, the ones which have no gain but to the soul. “ The narrator expanded
on the thought, offering the theory, for example, watching baseball has more
value that getting a haircut, because the haircut has a purpose and the
game-watching simple delight.
This viewpoint flies directly in the face of our American
work ethic of constantly working to gain success – “early to bed, early to rise,
makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise” and our Puritan heritage of “idle hands
are the Devil’s playground”.
Aristotle has a point, his statement easily built upon into
our ‘stop and smell the roses’ – but useless isn’t quite the correct translation
for that meaning -- something along the
lines of “invisible results” or “unseen return”.
Relationships have no visible
results. They produce nothing tangible, but are as vital as the work that we
must do to sustain physical life.
It’s all a matter of appearance and reality. Fr. Robert Barron,
the narrator of the film series, reminded us that when we look at the stars,
they aren’t actually there. We are looking at history. Those stars burnt out
eons ago and the light is still traveling to us across the annals of time. We
see the sun move across the sky – when in fact we are turning away from it only
to come back to the vantage point where it is seen again, daily.
What we carry in our memories mimics our perspective of the
stars and the sun, and the little one on the merry-go-round. We think we are
taking the past with us in a forward motion, but actually we are ever-circling
in our own orbit. True, we change seats or even carousels, but we pretty keep
in our own patterns. We may add different décor to the carousel, change the
music, fit less comfortably on the painted horses, but in our memories we
remain firmly affixed to the early days in the saddle, riding along with the
fellow members of the family. Expressions we learned as a child stay with us,
whether we want them to or not. We may consciously accept or reject them, but
they are there nonetheless. We hear our family member’s voices in our own
speech patterns, and others do, as well. “You sound just like your sister/mother/father!” often
echoes across phone lines -- even after one has lived in a different place, gaining
a distinctly regional dialect for years.
Some of us attempt to keep those connections with family,
and some of us develop extraneous family in the sharing. Patricia Hempl writes,
“Memoirists. . .want
to tell it all---the all of personal experience, of consciousness itself. That
includes a story, but also the whole expanding universe of sensation and
thought that flows beyond the confines of narrative and proves every life to be
not only an isolated story line but a bit of the cosmos, spinning and streaming
into the great ungraspable pattern of existence.”
In my faith
explorations of late I believe that God is a memoirist. He knows all the facts
and chronology, since all of history emanates from Him. God is a gatherer, so
He uses human connection to bond is with one another. He created the world,
gave us free will, then realized that we needed a more human touch, and walked
among us in the form of Jesus. People saw and heard and touched and felt Jesus…and
the Gospels are memoirist’s account of that Incarnation, that drawing unto God
through human commonality...
…and just as the
father took joy in the delight of the child on the carousel, so does the Father
Creator take delight in our joy. He does not want us to suffer, but when we do, through the life and death of Jesus, He’s been there – and He balances out our lives with days on the carousel, memory-making
days with loved ones with the banal chores of mortality. That's what the Resurrection means. Life, death, life beyond death. We are not alone. He’s been there, too.
We are a ‘bit of the
cosmos’. The sun does not move across the sky, but in fact we pass by it, again
and again, on this carousel we call Earth. The stars bring the past rushing
into our evenings over and over again, for millennia on end.
God allows the past
to be the present in our lives, in a physical, celestial way, and through the
life of Christ and the Church. Just because all of that is history makes it no
less vital to today.
