The Calliope

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.

We could all do the same, and gaze at wonder at where we’ve been, seeking to lovingly remember the bright points of light instead of closing the blinds to the night skies. If we all weave starry sparkles into the tapestry of our lives, drawing each other close in wonder, we’d have more to talk about than just the day’s events… and the Father would take more joy in seeing ours.